from Puritansm to Postmodernism (Pynchon's Parodic Romance)

[Joseph Tracy]

Excellent Twain quote. It seems to me that you have not particularly  
weakened the idea that Pynchon, like Twain,  counters romanticism  
with anti-romanticism, particularly in ATD. Classical romanticism was  
largely an all male club and The Chums start out in that club and  
seeing the world through classic romance colored glasses- the  
mountaineers, indian fighters, explorers, prophets of the dirigible  
set.  They go through a post modern examination of who they are  
working for, what are the motives, what is the nature and motive of  
those they have opposed, what are proper decision making processes  
and they  also connect to their feminine other. In short ,  
considering that they float around the planet interacting with both  
the real and imagined and sail through the middle of the earth on hot  
air( artists, missionaries, agents of the imagination), their overall  
tendency is to  get real. They still represent an above the world  
view, but is that a romantic view or just the nature of being human ,  
of inhabiting a narrative or spiritual vessel of being neither  
hopeless nor delusional? I don't see P taking sides in this question  
but showing the beauties, strengths, delusions, and failures of both  
sides. Kit in his dive bombing  phase is a kind of Tom Sawyer gone  
bad and Lake  or Frank in his  train bombing phase is  a kind of Huck  
gone bad.

On Feb 21, 2010, at 1:56 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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.