IV Blithedale Romance (Chase & Tanner)

[alice wellintown]

You are correct; it is certainly akin to the discussion of the
picaresque and the M-satire and the readings of the works by critics
like Wood and Tanner and Chase and McHale & the Postmodernists and on
and on. The key word in your complaint is "akin" as in family
resemblances (Ludwig Wittgenstein) since that is where a Gargantua or
a Hunchback or a Crime and Punishment or a Don Quixote or even a
Gulliver and not what would seem closer English Kin, Stearn, Dickens,
Fielding, even James, Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald --the lost ex-pats
generation, but that high watermark, often called the American
Renaissance, of Romance that, while it is rooted in Wigglesworth's day
of doom and the poetry of Anne Bradstreet and on up through the
Captivity Narrative into the penny and dime fictions, finds its great
practitioners during the declaration of American Independence, Brown,
Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville.

We don't say that Picasso was great and that's that. We need the
critical readings to provide a criteria to support such a claim. That
criteria, while it is always rooted in something traditional must
account for the individual talent (Eliot) or what is novel or new.
It's a very deeeeeeep sea this Romance notion. It takes a deep diver
like Monroe to even attempt it. I see him now, his eyes bloodshot, not
from doper's reflections, but from diving with great Leviathan.

OK, back to my park bench and the snot running down my nose.



On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 2:36 PM, David Morris<fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as I'm concerned, all this discussion re. whether IV, or any
> other Pynchon novel, is Romance is akin to those who want to discuss a
> novel's merits because its picaresque.  Whether a novel fits into some
> one's definition of a genre or a tradition is of little value in
> assessing the merits of the specific novel.  It obviously has to stand
> on its own separate from any genre or tradition, even if it is
> consciously a commentary on any such tradition.  Postmodernism was
> barely a concept, let alone a movement when V or GR were published.
> Both were ground-breaking and stand today because they are great unto
> themselves.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:25 PM, alice
> wellintown<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The Tanner Oxford Introduction to Hawthorne's BR, available on-line,
>> is a great Introduction to IV. Just re-read it, thanks. An excellent
>> "response" to Chase's less than flattering view of Hawthorne's
>> Romance, and of Hawthorne and Romance generally. Although Chase claims
>> his study is descriptive, he begins with a contrast (American Romance
>> vs. the novel and the British novel) and provides all manner of
>> critical assessments, common a the time---Henry James is the Greatest
>> ... Wuthering Heights is just Sport ...and so on.  But, Chase also
>> celebrates the Tradition that Pynchon writes in and, and this is very
>> important because so much of the groping in the night where spotted
>> cows and dappled dogs are shagging ...the autobiographical readings
>> and the mis-readings of the Romantic characterizations and such, can
>> do with a bit of grounding in the tradition here represented.
>>
>> That said, as a dappled dude of freckled face
>> and orange Afro super saturated with rain
>> I salute all the brothas who dropped pebbles in the toilet bowl
>> and luv a blemish on a Brazilian lady, a little mole,
>> a beauty mark that marks the spot and makes her hot hot hot.
>>
>> Turn the leaf now, Miles Coverdale.
>>
>>
>> GLORY be to God for dappled things—
>>  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
>>    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
>> Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
>>  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
>>    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
>>
>> All things counter, original, spare, strange;
>>  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
>>    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
>> He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
>>                  Praise him.
>>
>>
>> Margaret, are you grieving
>> Over Goldengrove unleaving?
>> Leaves, like the things of man, you
>> With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
>> Ah! as the heart grows older
>> It will come to such sights colder
>> By & by, nor spare a sigh
>> Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
>> And yet you wíll weep & know why.
>> Now no matter, child, the name:
>> Sorrow's springs are the same.
>> Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
>> What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
>> It is the blight man was born for,
>> It is Margaret you mourn for.
>>
>>
>