Answering the Quest-ion

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Diana comments:
"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?"


On "Ulysses"--Well, I'm no Tennyson expert, but consider the speaker's
assertion, "I am become a name."  The desire to search without a Grail or
goal at the end can certainly be defined as an example of bourgeois
capitalism's eternal restlessness.  To run off and search is the flip side
of Arnold's guy at Dover Beach seeking refuge with his love.  I can see
U. as Kurtz speaking to his Intended before Africa.  But then that *is* a
PoMo take on the work--and I see that I've conflated it with the poem where
the protagonist talks about taking a "bride of dusky hue."  Does anyone
know what I'm confusing that with?

Perhaps HOD would not need to have been written if all the other questors,
Kurtz included, had read DON QUIXOTE with the right ironic touch.  In some
respects, Kurtz stands as the bad result of every quest ever undertaken,
but if he, like Cervantes, had known the futility of what he was about,
he might have stayed home.

Then, again, Kurtz is specifically a type, deliberately representative of
the New Europe--all which contributed to his making.  What Conrad cannot
afford is the kind of indignant social expose that a figure of the Englighten-
ment, even one as sour as Swift, might have undertaken.  Instead, he allegorizes
the actual situation of Leopold's Congo to try to make a larger statement
about modernity--a tactic with both its advantages and drawbacks.

But then the PoMo questor--as defined by TRP, Barth, et al.--comes along and
we
're back to stories about stories.  For TRP, though, as for many PoMoers,
irony is not enough.

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)