Kermode in Reykjavik

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

As many of us know, Frank Kermode, one of the leading (and most
sympathetic) British literary scholars among the older generation,
has said of _Lot 49_: "The best American novel I have read since
the war". In fact, he has persistently defended the novel's
superiority to Pynchon's other novels.

The latest _London Review of Books_ (Dec 14) might shed new light 
to the issue. Kermode writes about his time in Iceland in 1941:

"It was on the quay at Reykjavik that I first heard, with astonishment
and even shock, the language in which American soldiers habitually
expressed, with a kind of mechanised misery, their apparent loathing
for the Army, for women, for the world they found themselves in. The
words they used are now quite commonly heard on the lips of the polite 
and gently nurtured, but in those simpler times they seemed very 
startling: cocksucker, motherfucker, cunt and asshole used as insults.
These exiled Americans seemed obsessed with shit, and had developed
an idiom that has persisted in colloquial American to this day: it
depended on a sort of of partitioning or disorganising of the human
body, as if to give offence by refusing to treat a person as entire,
so that you shouted, 'Get your ass over here,' or kicked ass, or chased
tail. The synecdoche of insult, we rhetoricians might call it. Of course
it served merely as everyday linguistic currency and nobody took offence 
or was entitled to. But it seems I was still not fully hardened to the
life and speech of men among men and found it darkened my mood or my mind."
"My Mad Captains", London Review of Books 17(24): 24.

One could thrash out the relation of this to Pynchon's two longest
novels, esp. _GR_, for which I don't have time now, but one thing is 
sure: there are no such mind-darkening American soldiers/marines
in _Lot 49_.


I wish you all a relaxing leave!

Heikki