MDDM Ch. 26 Summary, Notes

[jbor]

> Wicks's
> and Euphrenia's distinctions between west-bound and east-bound tales (263)
> seems to me to be marking a distinction between picaresque narratives (such
> as the story of Mason and Dixon's adventure, and the "true" playing out of
> lives and histories) and a more artificial type of story-telling, morality
> tales perhaps - narratives in the Aristotleian/Platonic mode, born of a vain
> utopianism - which seek to present and solidify the illusion that "reality"
> has a beginning, middle and end.

Cf. 

      Not to try to make any case for Barthelme as any heavy-duty
    metaphysician. Heaven forfend. He was too connected to calendar dates
    and named streets, too engaged with the quotidian -- like Garcia
    Márquez's magician Melquíades in _One Hundred Years of Solitude_. "in
    spite of his immense wisdom and mysterious breadth, he had a human
    burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small
    problems of daily life." Because his verifiable miracles are all
    literary in nature, Barthelme is not about to make saint any time soon,
    either. But along with his published work his other great gift to us is
    precisely his melancholy, presented, if we will but look, as praxis and
    example, a way to get us through, trading off time for spectacle, now
    and then even providing, as they used to sing at the end of _Hee Haw_,
    "a smile and a laugh or two." If this is not exactly a guide for the
    perplexed, it is still a good honest push back against the forces that
    favor tragedy, and who of us wouldn't like to have left something like
    that behind us! (Pynchon's 'Introduction' to _The Teachings of Don B._,
    1992, pp. xx-xxi)

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