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[Joseph Tracy]

I accidentally sent this to Mark K instead of list
On Apr 22, 2009, at 10:27 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:


>
> As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the  
> other ideals — or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A  
> group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a  
> convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the  
> reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious  
> idea?
>  — Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), British novelist
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This quote seems rather naive.  Family is not principally an ideal.  
It is principally a biological and social instinct which she  
describes aptly.. It has never been able to be made consistent or  
ideal, but people reproduce and seek transcendence/ endurance/  
continued life/  through reproduction.  The accretions of meaning are  
not "almost religious". They are religious.  And they are  exalted   
both as cultural  and religious ideals, but  family persists without  
regard to cultural practices or religious endorsement. The form of  
family persists even in the extreme fragmentation of western  
civilization regardless of family ideals or betrayal of  family  
ideals..  Very few have experimented with truly alternative social  
forms and none with great success. Cities, and industrial  
civilizations have created large populations where family is very  
weak and these become cultural disaster zones, drugs, theft,  
prostitution, wage slavery, exploitation. War does the same thing.

In a lot of ways all TRP and  early TRP particularly explores peoples  
lives who are cut off in various degrees from  family, but they  
usually seek and form new communities.  Slothrop appears to be the  
product of an anti-or-post-family medical experiment.  While this  
powerfully reproduces the estrangement  of the 20th century, there is  
something false about it also, at least to most reader's persona  
experience.  His later work is much more real about showing the role  
of families, both negative and positive.

One  area that is perhaps the supreme unspoken discord and hypocrisy   
in Christian culture stems from the critical attitude of Jesus toward  
family and parental or religious  authority. He really did confront  
patriarchy, but the gospels leave no clear alternative model for  
family or marriage. Perhaps as a result of being a member of a family  
accused of heresy, TRP has taken up this unresolved question of  
family .  He definitely does not idealize families, but is  
increasingly  over the years sympathetic and interested in their  
roles. Many of his characters are cut off from and looking for the  
comforts of family or community.