AtD and morbid, diseased conditions #2

[David Morris]

Wow!

This is really great stuff.  We know from GR Slothrup's roots back in
Puritan New England where Pynchon focuses on the preterite/elite
dichotomy.  If the New World is the place for the "pure" religion to
flourish, mixing that idea with (manifest) destiny places, as you
note, "The Western" becomes the fiction of righteous conquest, and one
of its heroes the pumpkinroller, or naive tenderfoot, who will
prevail...

But with Pynchon, the preterite will have an other than place in the drama.

It's an interesting succession of ideas.

David

On 8/17/06, Paul Nightingale <isread at btopenworld.com> wrote:
> More on the Western, from Deborah L Madsen (1998) American Exceptionalism,
> Edinburgh UP ...
>
> Madsen begins by describing exceptionalism in terms of the "spiritual and
> political destiny" of New England Puritans: "In this view the New World is
> the last and best chance offered by God to a fallen humanity" (1-2).
>
> So recall Medoro's reference to Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad: "... the
> jeremiads, or political sermons, rhetorically transformed America into the
> second site of Eden and placed it under the prospect of God's punishing
> wrath" (The Bleeding of America, 2), anxiety framed in terms of a new
> beginning, death and rebirth, "the cyclical idea of shedding the past and
> starting over [that] conjures up the imagery or language surrounding
> menstruation" (7).
>
> From Madsen's Ch5, "the so-called Turner Thesis" in which Frederick Jackson
> Turner "defines the West not as a geographical place or region but as a
> process, a process that arises from and defines a unique American
> character". The frontier as such no longer existed ... and "Turner's thesis
> offers historical justification for a concept of the West that is informed
> by the imperialist assumptions of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
>
> "This ideology and Turner's conception of the frontier as a meeting of
> savagery and civilisation find expression in the ever-popular
> twentieth-century form: the Western."
>
> Having noted that the Wild West was already disappearing as it became
> mythologised, Madsen concludes here: "The controlling irony of the Western
> is rooted in the nostalgic, elegiac conditions of its creation. The Western
> is a product of the twentieth century - the first Western was Owen Wister's
> The Virginian (1902) - and this century's desire to construct for itself a
> noble if doomed past." (122-123)
>
> Madsen has left out the C19th 'dime novel' (and others) in beginning with
> Wister, precisely because Wister is looking back to "a vanished world" (the
> novelist's own definition (cited, 125).
>
> On Wister's own experiences as a young man gone west, see: G. White Edward
> (1989) The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of
> Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister, Yale UP / UT Press.
> Wister's hero, it seems, is invariably a 'tenderfoot' (or indeed 'pumpkin
> roller').
>
> More later from: Richard Slotkin (1993) "Buffalo Bill's 'Wild West' and the
> Mythologization of the American Empire" in Amy Kaplan & Donald E. Pease eds,
> Cultures of United States Imperialism, Duke UP.
>
> And in spite of the censorship she describes, Geller notes that the
> "controversial new genre, the western" might be accepted as "harmless
> adventure" (Forbidden Books, 87), which indicates a conscious downplaying of
> the ideology of exceptionalism.
>
> And yes, coming back to this stuff in the light of P's title ...
>
>
>
>