Playing in the Dark

[Paul Mackin]

Morrison emphasizes the hope for freedom and human dignity in the new
world.  Pynchon's hopes seem a bit more materialistic--fountain of
youth, earthly paradise. Pynchon comes closest to Morrison in his
mention of the hope for "Chirst's Kingdom," which Morrison (I believe)
would equate with human dignity and freedom though P might be more
cynical about such a proposition. Morrison has a latter day American
idealism than is more emphatic than anything P gets at in his passage.
However elsewhere in the book Pynchon gives voice (rather
anachronistically) to what lattter became American idealism. "America
should have been the one place where . . . ."
:
Just my reactions to the comparison. The P passaage is beautiful and
touching. Didn't almost all the reviewers of the book quote it?

P.



> >From Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and
> the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993
> [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992]), Ch. 2, "Romancing
> the Shadow," pp. 31-59 ...
>
>    "Young America distinguished itself by, and
> understood itself to be, pressing toward a future of
> freedom, a kind of human dignity believed
> unprecedented in the world.  A whole tradition of
> 'universal' yearnings collapsed into that well-fondled
> phrase, 'the American Dream.' [...] it is just as
> important to know what these people were rushing from
> as it is to know what they were hastening to.  If the
> New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality
> that whetted the appetite for them?  And how did that
> reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?
>    "The flight from the Old World to the New is
> generally seen to be a flight from oppression and
> limitation to freedom and possibility.  Although, in
> fact, the escape was sometimes an escape from
> license--from a society perceived to be unacceptably
> permissive, ungodly, and undisciplined--for those
> fleeing for reasons other than religious ones,
> constraint and limitation impelled this journey.  All
> the Old World offered these immigrants was poverty,
> prison, social ostracism, and, not infrequently,
> death.  There was of course a clerical, scholarly
> group of immigrants who came seeking the adventure
> possible in founding a colony for, rather than
> against, one or another mother country or fatherland.
> And of course there were the merchants, who came for
> cash.
>    "Whatever the reasons, the attraction was of the
> 'clean slate' variety, a once-in-a-lifetime
> opportunity not only to be born again but to be born
> in new clothes, as it were.  This new setting would
> provide new rainments of self.[...]  In the New World
> there was the vision of a limitless future, made more
> gleaming by the constraint, dissatisfaction, and
> turmoil left behind.  It was a promise genuinely
> promising.  With luck and endurance once could
> discover freedom; find a way to make God's law
> manifest; or end up rich as a prince.  The desire for
> freedom is preceeded by oppression; a yearning for
> God's law is born of the detestation of human license
> and corruption; the glamor of riches is in thrall to
> poverty, hunger, and debt.
>    "There was very much more in the late seventeenth
> and eighteenth centuries to make the trip worth the
> risk.  The habit of genuflection would be replaced by
> the thrill of command.  Power--control of one's own
> destiny--would replace the powerlessness felt before
> the gates of class, caste, and cunning persecution.
> One could move from discipline and punishment to
> disciplining and punishing [...].  One could be
> released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into
> a kind of history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be
> inscribed.  Much was to be written there: noble
> impulses were made into law and appropriated for a
> national tradition; base ones, learned and elaborated
> in the rejected and rejecting homeland, were also made
> into law and appropriated for tradition.
>    "The body of literature produced by the young
> nation is one way it inscribed its transactions with
> these fears, forces, and hopes.  And it is difficult
> to read the literature of young America without being
> struck by how antithetical it is to our modern
> rendition of the American Dream.[...]  For a people
> who made much of their 'newness'--their potential,
> freedom, and innocence--it is striking how dour, how
> troubled, how frightened and haunted our early
> founding literature truly is." (pp. 33-5)
>
> Cf. ...
>
>    "Does Britannia, when it sleeps, dream? Is America
> her dream? -- in which all that cannot pass in the
> metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in
> the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on
> West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written
> down, nor ever, by the majority of mankind, seen, --
> serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes,
> for all that may yet be true, -- Earthly Paradise,
> Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ's
> Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next
> Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur'd
> and tied back in, back to the Net-Work of Points
> already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into
> the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to
> declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities
> that serve the ends of Governments, -- winning away
> from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by
> one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that
> is our home, and our Despair." (M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345)
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html
>
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