Heikki's bridges

[meikle at mail.utexas.edu]

Heikki writes about Charles Olson's interpretation of Melville, and about
the American obsession with bridging space, with fulfilling a trajectory
over the land.  This reminds me of a parallel to GR that I don't recall
seeing discussed on the list--that is, Hart Crane's 1920s flawed but
wonderful epic poem to America, "The Bridge."  Crane was clearly steeped in
Whitman and Melville and attempted, like those authors before him and
Pynchon after, to expand his writing to encompass "all of America"
(paraphrasing Lot 49).  Heikki's "guys like Slothrop who are under the
bridge" (and Lot 49's disinherited wandering mad under the freeways) are
Crane's hobos, "born pioneers in time's despite," who are ceaselessly and
aimlessly crisscrossing a continent (yoyoing) that has left them behind.
Crane's poem begins with a paean to the female fertility of the land and
native American culture (also partaken of by Slothrop's pig-herding
ancestor back at that "place where America took the wrong fork in the
road," paraphrasing GR).  It ends with a nervous, spine-jamming,
pop-jingle-infested chaotic evocation of New York and a hellish descent of
a ghostly E. A. Poe into the inferno of the New York subway system (a seedy
Melville appears there too, as I recall; also prefiguring the Mittelwerke),
and then with the high trajectory of a gleaming airplane, representing all
the brave expansiveness of American optimism, progress, and technology,
arcing as a bridge in almost immaterial, spiritual (parabolic?) flight,
only to come crashing tragically to earth and ruin at the end.  Like
Driblette, Crane ended his life a few weeks after the poem was published by
walking into the ocean (in this case off a ship into the Caribbean).  I may
have some of the details wrong, but "The Bridge" is well worth the
attention of TRP fans and anyone with a love-hate feeling for American
landscape, history, identity.  (There's a lot of prefiguring of Kerouac's
romantic lyricism in it as well, which TRP has also been inspired by--as
well as by the pop-culture mania of something like Kerouac's "Doctor Sax.)

Jeff