Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[Mark Kohut]

Amother fine post, imho, BUT that last paragraph is more than fine----it
is superb, again in my increasingly opinionated, sometimes faux-humble, opinion. 

--- On Sun, 2/14/10, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, February 14, 2010, 8:50 AM
> 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.
>