ATDTDA (5): The American Corporation

[Dave Monroe]

--- mikebailey at speakeasy.net wrote:

> ok, so I finally picked up a copy of Harrington's
> the Other America ...

Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her Errand
into the Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying of Lot
49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell (New York: Cambridge UP,
1991), pp. 127-70 ...

   "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the
Tristero, which has been looming up all along, comes
dangerously close to losing the teasing
epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far
in the novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad
track ... she  remembers things she would have seen
'if only she had looked' (179) ....

[...]
 
   "The Tristero underground has so far been implied
to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolates' having
'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap,
the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of
American history....  By the end of the novel the
Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a
ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic)
but a real, 'embattled' underground about to come out
of the shadows.  No longer hovering on the edge as a
cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus
far represented is almost revealed as a version of
'the other America' that Michael Harrington described
....  This America is 'the America of poverty,'
'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
'internal exiles.'" (pp. 149-50)

> and there's a remarkable passage in there to the
> effect that 'these people's story deserves a great
> novelist, but I [Michael Harrington] am not
> that novelist' and I was thinking what if that
> stirred Pynchon...

>From Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in
the United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993
[1962]), Ch. 1, "The Invisible Land," pp. 1-18 ...

   "There is in short a language of the poor, a
psychology of the poor, a world view of the poor.  To
be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up
in a culture that is radically different from the one
that dominates the society.  The poor can be described
statistically; they can be analyzed as a group.   But
they need a novelist as well as a sociologist if we
are to see them. They need an American Dickens to
record the smell and texture and quality of their
lives. The cycles and trends, the massive forces, must
be seen as affecting persons who talk and think
differently.
   "I am not that novelist...." (p. 17)

Thank you, "Search Inside" @ amazon.com ...


 
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