Hemming In The Great White Ways

[jd]

I dunno... whenever people start talking about racism in authors,
unless it's Mein Kampf I'm highly skeptical... I'm certainly white,
but when that cop pulled me over up in New Hampshire to hand out a
$250 speeding ticket, I certainly don't think I got any priviledge
because of my skin (unless I'm harshly under-estimating what happens
when someone of the opposite color speeds)...  I suppose it was
certainly different back in the V-era but still, I don't blame a white
writer for writing only white characters any more than I blame a black
writer for writing only black...  Or a man for only writing men, women
only women...  you can't deny what you are and its natural to think of
people in relation to yourself...  now, I think Hemingway was
certainly a bit intentionally stereotypical of Jewish people there in
his first book, but generally I'd say that a white man only mentioning
white men, or a man only mentioning men, or a woman women, in their
respective books, is not some ingrained and intentional racism /
sexism...  if anything, judging from what I've read of Morrison and
the interviews I've had shown to me in class... she's somewhat, uh,
tapped, and can find racism anywheres so long as it crosses her
conscious radar for period long enough...  not to say it doesn't
happen but whenever Morrison talks it feels like I'm supposed to be
sorry that I'm white...  all I'm sorry for is that what happened in
the past did, in fact, happen... I find that she generalizes about
white people quite a bit and I'm of the opinion that generalization
towards any race, gender, etc is part of the problem.

Hemingway may have been guilty of not being able to see past the times
to the humanity itself but I don't particularly find Pynchon guilty of
the same...

On 8/11/06, terrance fitzgerald <fitzgerald_terrance at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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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