Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[alice wellintown]

Mark Kohut  wrote:
> I'm afraid I must comment......there is no avid fanship of terrorism in Against the Day. None. The book is, in fact, one of the longest worked-out
> family epics of the sins of the fathers, the fountainhead terrorist beginnings shown to lead to death down the generations. Violence, as well as other things, kills in Against the Day. Up close or over time.

An important theme in P's works: sin of the father and loss of the
mother. This makes the American an orphan, a renegade, a castaway (see
C.L.R James on Moby-Dick). We can view these two cardinal sins that,
with Gothic and Puritan strain, haunt, the American Romance. First,
the extermination of the Indians and the destruction of the Vineland
the Good. This retards the capacity to dream or wonder even as it
haunts the dreams of American Romantic characters like Ishamel and
Mason of M&D.

"I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch
sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished
trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once
pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for
a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation
he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in
history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."


This very famous Fitzgerald passage can be traced, as much in
Fitzgerald can, to Keats's famous poem (famous for its historical
error), on Chapman.s Homer and then to Melville's Moby-Dick, Chapter
111, The Pacific.

Second, the enslavement and extermination of Africans and the
exploitation of workers and Others by the indusctiral-then military
industrial complex culminatiung in the holocaust fropped on Japan.


Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose,
at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this
particular, the author has provided himself with a moral,—the truth,
namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the
successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage,
becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a
singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince
mankind—or, indeed, any one man—of the folly of tumbling down an
avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an
unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the
accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In
good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter
himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really
teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually
through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author
has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to
impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod,—or, rather, as by
sticking a pin through a butterfly,—thus at once depriving it of life,
and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A
high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out,
brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a
work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer,
and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.