anyone see a Mason & Dixon resonance here?

Wed Feb 3 23:52:43 CST 2010

And don't forget the Baghavad-Gita, Huck and Nigger Jim, Batman and
Robin, Friday and Gannon....

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:01 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I know two guys doing stuff in a novel, any fiction, must go further
> back than I have ever read. (Iliad? NOT Genesis, but yes Gilgamesh, right?)
>
> Up thru many we can name BUT, to set de Tocqueville off with another character as they travel America sure seems to suggest Carey has read M & D, I'd say.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> OFF THEY GO
>> Jan 28th 2010
>>
>>
>> PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA. By Peter Carey. KNOPF; 452
>> PAGES;
>> $26.95. FABER AND FABER; GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com[1],
>> Amazon.co.uk[2]
>>
>> UNIVERSALLY celebrated as a classic when it was first
>> published in
>> 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"
>> nevertheless
>> suffered from long years in the shadows. The centenary of
>> the author's
>> birth in 1905 went uncelebrated. No new edition of the book
>> appeared
>> between 1913 and 1945. The best that Tocqueville got was
>> the occasional
>> reference in a learned footnote.
>>
>> Today Tocqueville is revered as never before. The
>> bicentennial of his
>> birth was the occasion for academic bacchanalias on both
>> sides of the
>> Atlantic. No fewer than four new editions of "Democracy"
>> have appeared
>> in the past decade. Books on the great man pour from the
>> printing
>> presses, ranging in quality from ponderous academic tomes
>> to Hugh
>> Brogan's delightful biography.
>>
>> Now we have an unexpected addition to the Tocqueville
>> renaissance: a
>> fictional account of his visit to the United States by a
>> much garlanded
>> novelist. "Parrot and Olivier" has all the quirky qualities
>> that we
>> have come to expect from Peter Carey: a winding narrative,
>> a mass of
>> vivid historical detail, and some very lively writing.
>>
>> The story of Tocqueville's visit was an extraordinary one
>> in its own
>> right. He was only 25 when he crossed the Atlantic,
>> dispatched by the
>> French government to study America's penal system. But as
>> he travelled
>> around the new country Tocqueville became obsessed with the
>> idea that
>> he was witnessing the future in the making, the rise of a
>> new
>> democratic world. A treatise on prisons became a meditation
>> on the new
>> world order.
>>
>> This extraordinary tale is rendered even more extraordinary
>> in Mr
>> Carey's retelling. The author tells his story through the
>> eyes of two
>> characters. Olivier is his version of Tocqueville--a French
>> aristocrat
>> haunted by the horrors of the revolution and the glories of
>> the world
>> it destroyed ("the fine powder on the men's wigs, the
>> lovely perfumes
>> on the ladies breasts, the extraordinary palette of the
>> ancient regime,
>> such pinks and greens, gorgeous silks and satins whose
>> colours rose and
>> fell among the folds and melted into the candlelight").
>> Parrot is an
>> itinerant English printer who--thanks to an
>> over-complicated plot--ends
>> up as Olivier's servant-cum-minder. The narrative shifts
>> constantly
>> between the perspectives of the travelling duo.
>>
>> The leading characters are beautifully drawn. Olivier is a
>> fastidious
>> prig and congenital hypochondriac. Parrot is an English
>> radical--he
>> reads Tom Paine and spits on the ancient regime--who is
>> obsessed by
>> art. Olivier is initially repulsed by America but falls in
>> love with a
>> saucy American woman, and hence with the country. Parrot
>> finds a home
>> and a business in America.
>>
>> Mr Carey's parallel storytelling provides him with more
>> than just a way
>> of exploring two idiosyncratic heroes. It allows him to
>> offer shifting
>> perspectives on the third character in this book--America
>> itself.
>> Olivier moves in what boorish Americans regard as civilised
>> society.
>> Parrot is at home in the artistic demimonde. The result is
>> a gripping
>> portrait of Jacksonian America in all its wild variety,
>> from its model
>> farms to its grungy boarding-houses, from its Fourth of
>> July parades to
>> its filthy streets full of copulating pigs.
>>
>> "Parrot and Olivier" is a wonderful tribute to
>> Tocqueville's great
>> book. But it is more than that: it is also a counterblast.
>> One of
>> Tocqueville's greatest fears was that democracy would kill
>> great art.
>> Everything would be reduced to the dismal level of
>> democratic man.
>> Parrot dismisses this fear as a phantom. "There are no sans
>> culottes,
>> nor will there ever be again. There is no tyranny in
>> America, nor ever
>> could be," he says to his master. "Your bleak certainty
>> that there can
>> be no art in a democracy is unsupported by truth." Which
>> points to a
>> wonderful paradox: the very fact that we now revere
>> Tocqueville to the
>> point of writing novels about him is proof that one of his
>> guiding
>> ideas about the evils of democracy was bunkum, if
>> magnificent bunkum.
>>
>> -----
>> [1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307592626/theeconomists-20
>> [2]
>> http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571253296/economistshop-21
>>
>>
>>
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