from Puritansm to Postmodernism (Pynchon's Parodic Romance)

[alice wellintown]

Here is Twain. Tom is a Romantic and Huck is more pragmatic or
realistic. What side is P on? Is he closer to Tom Sawyer or
Huckleberry? The notion that P's works are anti-Romances is absurd.
Sorry, Mark. You are simply dead wrong on this one.



We played robber now and then about a month, and then I resigned. All
the boys did. We hadn't robbed nobody, hadn't killed any people, but
only just pretended. We used to hop out of the woods and go charging
down on hog-drivers and women in carts taking garden stuff to market,
but we never hived any of them. Tom Sawyer called the hogs "ingots,"
and he called the turnips and stuff "julery," and we would go to the
cave and powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had
killed and marked. But I couldn't see no profit in it. One time Tom
sent a boy to run about town with a blazing stick, which he called a
slogan (which was the sign for the Gang to get together), and then he
said he had got secret news by his spies that next day a whole parcel
of Spanish merchants and rich A-rabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow
with two hundred elephants, and six hundred camels, and over a
thousand "sumter" mules, all loaded down with di'monds, and they
didn't have only a guard of four hundred soldiers, and so we would lay
in ambuscade, as he called it, and kill the lot and scoop the things.
He said we must slick up our swords and guns, and get ready. He never
could go after even a turnip-cart but he must have the swords and guns
all scoured up for it,  though they was only lath and broomsticks, and
you might scour at them till you rotted, and then they warn't worth a
mouthful of ashes more than what they was before. I didn't believe we
could lick such a crowd of Spaniards and A-rabs, but I wanted to see
the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the
ambuscade; and when we got the word we rushed out of the woods and
down the hill. But there warn't no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there
warn't no camels nor no elephants. It warn't anything but a
Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We busted it
up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything
but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo
Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; and then the teacher charged in,
and made us drop everything and cut. I didn't see no di'monds, and I
told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and
he said there was A-rabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said,
why couldn't we see them, then? He said if I warn't so ignorant, but
had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He
said it was all done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of
soldiers there, and elephants and treasure, and so on, but we had
enemies which he called magicians; and they had turned the whole thing
into an infant Sunday-school, just out of spite. I said, all right;
then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer
said I was a numskull.

   "Why," says he, "a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they
would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson.
They are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church."

   "Well," I says, "s'pose we got some genies to help us -- can't we
lick the other crowd then?"

   "How you going to get them?"

   "I don't know. How do they get them?"

   "Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies
come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and
the smoke a-rolling, and everything they're told to do they up and do
it. They don't think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots,
and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head with it -- or
any other man."

   "Who makes them tear around so?"

   "Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever
rubs the lamp or the ring, and they've got to do whatever he says. If
he tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of di'monds, and
fill it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and fetch an
emperor's daughter from China for you to marry, they've got to do it
-- and they've got to do it before sun-up next morning, too. And more:
they've got to waltz that palace around over the country wherever you
want it, you understand."

   "Well," says I, "I think they are a pack of flat-heads for not
keeping the palace themselves 'stead of fooling them away like that.
And what's more -- if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho
before I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an
old tin lamp."

   "How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you'd have to come when he rubbed
it, whether you wanted to or not."

   "What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right,
then; I would come; but I lay I'd make that man climb the highest tree
there was in the country."

   "Shucks, it ain't no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don't seem
to know anything, somehow -- perfect saphead."

   I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned
I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an
iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I
sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it
warn't no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that
stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I reckoned he believed
in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It
had all the marks of a Sunday-school.