1984 Foreword (Whitman) Tom wanted to be a poet

[Michael Joseph]

On Thu, 15 May 2003, Terrance wrote:


> Certainly a contradiction of some sort ... isn't it? [Whitman's 1855
> preface saturated with the idealism of a previous decade] Although, I'm
> not sure what in heaven's name happened to Walt I'm not satisfied with
> the Emersonian reading of the contradiction.


but look at the 1860 preface; W eventually gets it; as does Emerson,
right? The Knickerbocker embrace? Entropy sets in, the bombast begins to
fade ...

One interesting wrinkle is the change in attitude toward technology and
science. The bitterness felt toward the industrial revolution originates
in a euphoria about technology, the Technological Sublime Leo Marx
describes (see for example http://www.cis.vt.edu/hst/3105/leomarx.pdf). I
think we should regard P's aversion to the internet more as a resonance of
a post I.R. humanitarianism than simple cranky Ludditism.


> I guess what I was trying to say, was not that P could have been
> Ginsburg or something, but that it's possible that this Foreword is a
> bit, well, dusty. I don't get the impression that it was, all of it,
> written recently. Just speculating you know,  but I kinda agree with
> Paul M. (Paul was speculating as well) that P may have had a longer
> essay on _1984_ sitting is a shoe box and just pulled it down and dusted
> it off. The dust, like the dust (that Dickensian "dust") in the creases
> of the elder Tom's face....is there....in the novel too.

The indeterminacy of the foreword is what it is. The shoe box laden with
dust Sounds like Tom Eliot, a prelude, maybe?

You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
...

You had such a vision of the text
As the text hardly understands;


Michael