SLSL "TSR" swamp

[jbor]

on 5/12/02 8:48 AM, Prudencio Aguilar at prudencio_aguilar at yahoo.com wrote:

> Also, jbor, I think you underestimate the "literary
> theft" from Hemingway.

It's a long time since I read it, so I'd have to go back and check, but I'm
sure you're right.


on 5/12/02 10:39 AM, David Morris at fqmorris at yahoo.com wrote:

> Pynchon can write anything he wants, true to life, poetic, or plodding.  His
> choice.  As for Southern Louisiana, especially a bayou-land ever resembling a
> desert, that would take a LOT of imagination.  One has to fight nature in
> order
> to keep it from growing into every crack of the sidewalk and mortar joint on
> the side of your house.  This is a land of decay and growth, and they are
> really the same thing here (everywhere?).

It's the association of Levine, "afraid to let down roots ... the seed who
casts himself on stony places, with no deepness of earth", and Fort Roach,
all "sand" and "concrete" - "[t]hey don't come no stonier than Fort Roach,
Louisiana" sez Baxter (p. 39) - which is where the imagery and literary
allusions become overblown and begin to work at cross purposes to the
story's realism.
 
And I agree about the irony. There's irony in the fact that even though
Levine "likes" the intellectual and emotional (and physical) aridity of Fort
Roach he's the one reading the swamp novel. When he finally gets to the
swamp, for all the rain and regeneration there - all its fecundity, as Dave
Meury noted - it is very much a place of death as well. It's not a simple
dichotomy (and Eliot and Hemingway are likewise left evenly poised at
story's end.)

best