V--2nd, Prolegomena to an Epilogue

[alice wellintown]

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

We can do without a Freytagian or Aristotlean plot; we've too many
V-shapes to take the measure of the Frays and Frags in this work by
Pynchon the younger, and Aristotle's extant works don't deal with this
kind of satire or comedy;  though we hear narcisssistic reflections of
Melvellian ungraspable phantoms of life anarchonistically Echos of
Eco's rose windows illuminated by Baconian methods discursively
derided snidely. So, Clemens's clemancy or like Jim we was free all
the while.

When we turn to motive, we are caught betwixt Adams and the Void. That
is, Henry Stencil Adams and V.-history. This gives Stencil a name, he
who searches for V., but it never, other than the propensity for
siege, defines V. satisfactorily, as anthing other than the Void where
Adams (his Education) are accumulation of the inert. Though one might
argue that the motive is to push the contents on the margins of
history into the events and current of unfolding time thereby exposing
the follies of reflection and history making as a mirrored time
decadence, this is a missionary project that makes the author
complicit in the crimes he exposes. So, Clemens's clemency is
withdrawn. Clemens would probably fling Copper's Bad Ear at him to
boot.

But are we to be banished. A free man who lives in a slave state is a
slave. So says Frederick Douglass. Who ain't a slave? So says one
Ishmael.

If Huck learns more than Benny or Henry Adams, I've not been able to
figure out what it is. He learns the Jim is white on the inside. That,
as Frederick Douglass would explain, much adventured and nothing
gained.    Had Huck learned anything he would either need to be
banished or remain a slave. Jim is free only when he is in a free
state. The same is true of Huck. But unlike Frederick Douglass, who
learns a great deal from his adventures, Huck, like Adams and Benny,
doesn't learn a damne thing.

In 1841, Herman Melville boarded the whaleship Acushnet and sailed out
of New Bedford, the whaling capital of the world. As he later wrote
about his character Ishmael, that ship would be "my Yale College and
my Harvard." After five years at sea, Melville returned to Boston and
began writing novels about his adventures:

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real
repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be
unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon
the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if,
at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any
precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the
honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College
and my Harvard (Ch. 24, M-D, "The Advocate").