from Puritansm to Postmodernism (Pynchon's Parodic Romance)

[Mark Kohut]

alice,

I only said that Against the Day is, containing almost everything, also aimed at, yes, even Literary Romance as a genre..............

That is, TRP also attacks Romance, literary romance from so and so to so and so, in this Romance..NB

Not that unusual a practice for our neither this nor that writer, but  in AtD, he does deals with the Romance question head-on.

Imho.

--- On Sun, 2/21/10, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: from Puritansm to Postmodernism (Pynchon's Parodic Romance)
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, February 21, 2010, 1:56 PM
> 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.
>