Johnny Quest

[Diana York Blaine]

Thanks to Joseph and to Don for the interesting comments on questing.
I've not seen Lancelot du Lac, but hubby has and described it as
"existential."  He also said he'd love to see it again;  I'll rent it.
Thanks for the tip.  Since we're developing this "post-quest era" idea, I
wanted to ask Don what about Tennyson's "Ulysses" seems so. To clarify, I
don't mean the idea that his hero days are over and the bureaucrats are
running the show--that's clearly what's going on--but do you think it
radically undermines his subjectivity and/or an epistemological ability to
ground meaning?  After all, Telemachus is doing well and there is order,
U. grudgingly admits.  And in fact as dramatic monologue it seems to
guarantee the possibility of finding "truth"--just look to the opposite of
what the speaker works so hard to assert.  By the same token I'm unsure if
Don Quixote's "irony" makes it the equivalent of something even as
quasi-unconventional as Heart of Darkness, which offers a glimpse of
the global nature of the horror as well as the potential emptiness at
the core of subjectivity. The bottom line for me, basically, is that
"post-industrial late capitalism" or whatever Jameson calls it, and World
Wars one and two, along with the notorious Freud and Darwin and Nietzsche
and others, make for one huge hairball of uncertainty that earlier
centuries simply can't touch--at least as recorded in their literature.
Ulysses' nostalgia for the good fight validates the idea that there still
was such a thing. GR, for example, does not, unless I read it wrong....
Way out of line?
Diana