CH 15 Turkey Host

[alice wellintown]

JT sez, But is it satire or comic book farce or is it is really a
serious attempt to expose the key corporate and political players in
an historic fascist coup.   I could go on here about the parallel
worlds of the collective unconscious and  the coming flood, but my
question is whether the oft used "pastiche", or "post-modern" may
obscure as much as they reveal. It is a pastiche but it is also
fundamentally unlike other examples of that mode of work.
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What kind of satire is IV? I'm not sure if I agree with Weisenburger's
thesis (Fables of Subversion is available online), but even if I do
agree that a new degenerative satirical writing surfaced and dominated
the genre or form from 1940 -1980, I'm not certain that IV, or VL for
that matter, fits Weisenburger's definition. I know that the current
P-List crew doesn't like having to plow through the jargon and French
name droppings that readers like Weisenburger find indispensible to
their recondite prose, but if one skips the post-this-that-chit-chat
in the Introduction and reads the truly insightful reading of GR's
"most disagreeable" scene, once can not fail to see that Weisenburger,
who wrote that famous GR Companion, is definitely on to something.

For those willing to plow through that Introduction, where
Weisenburger provides a brief history of the development of American
post-war satire, the problems inherent in reading or writing the kind
of political satire that was produced before the War is clearly
explained. Howard Hughes and JFK are propaganda subjects.

I suspect that Weisenburger, and others who have read some of P's
letters and followed the development of the postmodern novel (McHale,
for example), would find most of our conversations about IV ... a ..
., well .....Waste, but while we don't have much critical know how
around here, we do dig into a text. And if that doesn't quite make up
for our lack of knowledge about how fiction works or how the estate P
inherited got broken or any of those other critical ideas and the
names dropped here there and everywhere we make up for it with our
total ignorance of history.

I'm just glad I've been here to get a history lesson or two.

That said, If we would only focus on one text at a time we might, if
not solve the genre puzzle  and even come up with a name for it that
is far more playful than Fables of Subversion, we might even learn how
to read the next P book or even the last great one.

But, who am I to talk history or turkey, hell I would have voted with
Ben Franklin on the National Bird issue.

"Or, had we but found savages on this island, the bird's appearance
might have seemed to us no stranger than that of the
wild turkey of North America. Alas..."  GR

Ben Franklin's choice for our national bird, the wild turkey
(Meleagris Gallopavo) has not always had an easy time
finding a place in its homeland. Native to only North America, the
wild turkey became popular game for early
colonists, who found easy targets with the abundance of animals and
birds in the New World. As the colonists began
to stake territory and set up farms, villages and eventually cities,
they destroyed the turkey's crucial food and nesting
sites in forests and waterways. Eventually, the industrial revolution
polluted many of the country's rivers, further
reducing endangered flocks. Turkey populations  declined because of
wide-scale logging, illegal poaching and hunting,
poor habitats and even the devastation of the Civil War and Great
Depression, when food quality was sparse and the
turkey was considered an easy catch and good eating.

"That was it right there. No language meant no chance of co-opting
them to what their round and flaxen invaders were calling Salvation."
GR.Penguin.110

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the
shackled form of a conquered
monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and
free. It was unearthly, and the
men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the
worst of it -- this
suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one.
They howled and leaped, and
spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity -- like
yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and
passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it
was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to
yourself that there was in you
just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of
that noise, a dim suspicion of there
being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the night of
first ages -- could
comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything --
because everything is in it,
all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy,
fear, sorrow, devotion,
valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but truth -- truth stripped of its
cloak of time. Let the fool gape
and shudder -- the man knows, and can look on without a  wink. But he
must at least be as much of
a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true
stuff -- with his own inborn
strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty  rags --
rags that would fly off at the
first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in
this fiendish row -- is
there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too,  and for
good or evil mine is the speech
that cannot be silenced.
                        --Conrad HOD