V-2nd - Chap 8 / I have really never read this book this closely before
Kai Frederik Lorentzen
lorentzen at hotmail.de
Thu Sep 30 05:38:21 CDT 2010
> wouldn't two or one Traverse brother have worked just as well?
Perhaps even better.
To me the brothers appear like the nephews of Donald Duck:
I never can tell them apart!
Kai
On 29.09.2010 16:58, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> No, I think it was less successful in ATD. V. gives us Stencil and Profane to follow, to sympathize with, to rest on (as a crutch? Maybe, but fiction's supposed to make us care, isn't it?). I feel Profane's apathy in the face of forces he's afraid of; I feel Stencil's urgency to solve a riddle that's a metaphor for all that ails the 20th century.
>
> The vast list of poorly-realized, often redundant characters (wouldn't two or one Traverse brother have worked just as well?)in ATD gives us no such crutch, no empathy, no viewpoint with which to view the vast historical currents portrayed in the book. P might have been attempting to illustrate quantum theory (his characters are only discreet parcels of energy that are likely to be present at a given place and time), leaving us pretty much on our own. The book is part poetry, part parody and part documentary, with fictional narrative absent. So no, V. does it better: it makes me care.
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
>> From: Robin Landseadel<robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
>>
>
>> On Sep 29, 2010, at 7:35 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:
>>
>>
>>> But doesn't the human interest part of the story show that, like
>>> Tolstoy said, the infinitesimal movements of individuals are actually
>>> the components of these historical currents and there really is
>>> something else going on that's worth paying attention to and deriving
>>> a counter-moral?
>>>
>> And isn't that sooooooooooo much more successfully realized in
>> "Against the Day," using more or less the same basic mis-en-scene as
>> the Stencilization inside 'V."?
>>
>>
>
>
>
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