Never the Twain

[alice wellintown]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 4:09 AM, Carvill, John <john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:
>>sufferes from some surreal experiements
>
> Hmmmm does it really 'suffer' from them?

The author, TRP-the elder reflecting on the tale in his Introduction
to the Slow Learning collection sez so; I agree with him.


>
>>and his still paternailistic
>>and latent racist views
>
> Arguable, surely?

Again, the author sez so, same Introduction, I agree. The Black man in
the tale, a Jazz man, exposes P's paternalistic and latent racism. So
does that famous Watts essay. The irony is palpable; young P is a
tourist. This is also a part of his romanticism, same with his buddy
Farina, Dylan, others...of the hobo and down and out in NY town and
LA. It's not a bad thing, really, but it is what it is and the elder-P
is not shy about admitting how much older he was then. Walking in the
footsteps of Orwell, who, of course, was a rich kid from India who
went slumming about for material, or those wondering scholars, was a
good thing, but here was no Crane writing Maggy of the Streets.


>
>> and his misreading of Twain
>
> This I *love* - once again Pynchon could have learnt a lot from T'Alice eh?

Not the point. The point is, the young reader misread Twain. Strong
misreadings make strong young authors. The Secret Integration, from
the wart to the tree climbing and schemes, is a response to Twain. In
Twain, the conflict of realism (Huck) and romanticism (Tom) in HF
begins with fairly harmless teasing of Jim and the Don Quixote attack
on a picnic, but later, when Tom risks Jim's life with his romantic
prison break, after Jim has risked his freedom to save Tom, the
conflict is pushed to a dangerous level, but Huck doesn't learn a
thing about being a Black man. Huck isn't changed. He sez, he always
knew Jim was white on the inside. Pynchon's parody assumes that Huck
is changed; some romantic lesson has been learned by Huck. P's TSI is
a parody of this this "romantic" theme, how one learns from nature and
from Native Americans and African Americans or the Other, but the
parody doesn't work because Twain's novel is not romantic; Huck, like
the boys in the tale, Grover & Co., don't learn or grow by meeting the
Black man. Like Benny, they don't learn a thing. So P misreads Twain,
writes a parody of the romantic coming of age novel.

Yeah, young P could have learned a lot more but he was a slow learner.
And, he was very smart, but still quite young. Also, I'm sure I've
read his books and Twains more than he has. ;--)
>
> I guess everybody knows, that Twain's autobiography is about to come out. The current Granta has an exclusive extract, and you can see some hand-written pages here:
>
> http://www.granta.com/Twain-manuscript
>
> Also available at Granta online, and only related to P via his interest in genocide, you can read Janine Di Giovanni's great piece on returning to Bosnia:
>
> http://www.granta.com/Magazine/111/The-Book-of-the-Dead/1
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