Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[Joseph Tracy]

I agree that there is no avid fanship of terrorism in ATD, but have a  
much harder time with the premise that it is an epic of the sins of  
the Fathers.

The imagery is closer to a religious epic in which an apocolyptic   
local and family event (the crucifixion of Webb Traverse, religious  
revolutionary ala Tom Paine) takes on  a range of spiritual and  
natural consequences .  The image is a cross with 4 children going in  
4 directions. In the violence of their times the Traverses are no  
more cursed than others of the period.  Pynchon casts strong light on  
the negative consequences of violence but it is a shaded and nuanced  
look, where the relatively small scale of  violent of resistance to  
empire and the violent  response to injustice is differentiated from  
from the violence of colonialism and imperial wars,.  What he really  
seems to explore is the lack of expected satisfaction to be found in  
revenge, and how male female  and all human relationships are as  
fully transformative as political affiliations. He also points toward  
the sense that this male female balance is the omnipresent yet easily  
subverted foundation of an alternative to war as the dominant  
paradigm of the human enterprise.



On Feb 14, 2010, at 10:34 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> 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.
>>
>
>
>