IV (10) page 154

[Michael Bailey]

Ok, I'm sold.  I am starting to read _House of the Seven Gables_
and then will give another try to _The Scarlet Letter_ which I bogged
down in last year, not because I didn't like it but I had this urge to play
Grand Theft Auto - just kidding, bogged down in it just like I did in
Vollman's _Europe Central_, not because it wasn't good, just didn't have
the steam at that point...

alice wellintown wrote:
> What P does is this respect is really quite traditional, conservative
> even. That is, he does what American authors of the Romance tradition
> such as Hawthorne and Melville do, he historicizes or makes historical
> or makes use of historical material. The term “Historicize” was used
> by Hawthorne and his contemporaries to describe this element in
> American Romance. Any reader of Hawthorne and Melville will recognize
> the debt P owes to these two and other less known authors such as
> Charles Brockden Brown. I’ve know of his debt to Melville for a long
> time; V. and GR are attempts to write, with all the ridiculous
> meanings of the phrase included “The Great American Novel.” The
> Whiteness of The Rocket, the peregrinations of  the pair, Stencil and
> Benny, these are sooooo Melville. But recently I’ve been diving deep
> in Hawthorne and, although I always admired and respected his genius,
> have improved my reading of his works and come to see the literary
> theft by P. It makes sense really. We know that one of P’s methods is
> to  read the histories of his family and make these into his fictions.
> When he discovered that his ancestors were the Pyncheon’s of
> Hawhtorne’s Romance, The House of the Seven Gables, it must have moved
> him. That Hawthorne too writes from his biography—expiating the sins
> of the forefathers visited upon posterity must have struck a chord.
> That Slothrop he sure does remind us of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.
> Now, I’m not saying that P didn’t look to Joyce and all the other
> influences he notes in the SL Introduction; he does, but the “anxiety
> of influence” is strongest with Hawthorne, perhaps stronger than with
> any other author of American Romance.
>
>



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