from Puritansm to Postmodernism (Pynchon's Parodic Romance)

[alice wellintown]

But AGTD is a Romance. HF is not. We might put Crane in here, say "To
Build a Fire" just to have a Naturalist tale that also centers on the
lack of imagination but anyway ...One could argue that Tom's
imagination, like Quixote's is too powerful or active or that Tom uses
his to exploit the other lads or to control their Play. Certainly
these are all themes of Huckleberry Finn, an anti-Romantic view, a
Humorist's Realism that does, of course, because it is an American
story, use most of the elements of American Romance (the Gothic
elements) but is not a Romance. Although P too explores the limits and
faults of the Romance, he embraces it. He states as much in several
essays.

The Romance is far from a male dominated genre or form.  Your
wonderful synopsis of AGTD's travels seems to miss the point that the
author has taken a side by writing Romances; that the text veers away
from the fantastic or romantic and toward what seems real is also an
element of Romance.

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
>