The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

[Paul Mackin]

On 4/18/2011 9:02 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> Chap 1 introduces many key characters and also provides a
> kind of stakes-raising very ambitious metaphor as backstory, as history: America
> is/was
> a guilt-ridden Puritanical House of Seven Gables kind of country.
>
> Which Rev Gwyon sees anthropologically and the narrator sees in the whole
> revelatory tradition of such that The Golden Bough intorduced.
>
> It all goes way back is repeated.
>
> Young Wyatt almost dies but becomes an artist; an artist who gives up doing
> original
> works in order to make a living doing near-perfect forgeries--imitations of
> earlier great artists.

God, I can't help myself.  Promise I won't mention Wallace again (after 
this).  But in Pale there is a mock introduction in which W describes 
his college term paper service (for rich frat boys at his Ivy league 
school) which was a little redolent of Wyatt's experiences.

P
>
> America is a country that lives fraudulently, perhaps the metaphor goes?
>
> Time, living in real time, is a positive herein, perhaps echoing Eliot's
> returning "recognizing
> the place for the first time".......
>