The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

[Michael Bailey]

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.
>

if he's trying to microcosmically describe the gyrations - you say
this takes place in the 30s - as the Spanish Civil War was going on?
so Camilla could represent the anti-fascist innocence lost in
America's failure to come out in force against the bad guys...and
Wyatt's part of the Lost Generation?

of course, it wasn't absolutely cut-and-dried, there were bad guys on
both sides, and apparently a lot of Catholics (not to slag on
Catholicism, Paul...) resented the anti-clericalism of the
Republicans, though of course the clergy were enmeshed in the State
and its abuses and the Republic could have considered its holdings a
form of odious debt incurred by previous dictatorships...

which the Republic might have overreached in its attempts to correct,
but Gaddis might be detailing - by describing what the monks and
priests did on a normal day in Otra Vez - some of the reasons why
sympathy for the church's position could reasonably be withheld or at
least limited to humanitarian levels (ie, terrible thing that some
priests got murdered and so forth, but let's not fall in line with the
Nationalists violently taking back education from laicists, murdering
Protestants, etc)

of course, none of this is in the text...