Hemming In The Great White Ways

[terrance fitzgerald]

Been reading a bunch of stuff about whiteness in american fiction 
   
   
  In Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark she (talk about anxiety and influence, Morrison has attempted, and failed as far as I'm concerned, to distance herself from Faulkner) she goes after Hemmingway. A strong misreading of Hemmingway's story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber tells us more about Morrison than the Old Fisherman, Hunter, and Lady's Man. It reminds me of Achebe's strong misreading of Conrad's HoD. 
   
  In any event, I wonder how much all this "He's fascist, He's a Racist, He's an Uncle Tom (Baldwin on Wright's Native Son), He a repressed Homosexual with a violent, mysogonistic yellow streak .... has affect Mr. Pynchon. 
   
  In his Introduction to Slow Learner Mr. Pynchon admits that he was a typical gold-coast white boy, when he was, really just a boy writer. He met Farina & Co. and was blinded by the white. That is, he discovered his invisible white back pack of privlidge. But one can never quite take that back pack off and it is carried into, what is clearly the best story in the Slow Learner collection, The Secret Integration (a post-V. apprentice effort). V. has it's own problems with race and gender. The Watts article is noble but foolish too. It seems to me that one of reasons why GR is a great american novel is that P has gone to school on Black American authors and hemmed in his white ways.  
     
   
  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/MORPLA.html

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