TRTR Part I, Chapter V, Pages 179-181 CLASS SONG

[Paul Mackin]

On 5/18/2011 5:41 PM, Erik T. Burns wrote:
> Meet the Bildows, another futile coupling:
>
> "--He's impotent with anybody but her."
>
> Then about Arny Munk: "--He's probably a homosexual" because he wants
> a boy baby. "--It's psychologically obvious, that's the only reason
> queer men want boy children, to perpetuate their own kind"
>
> Not to stretch a metaphor beyond the breaking point, but this version
> of "the queer" is another version of mechanical reproduction of the
> human, another counterfeit -- the production by controversial means of
> copies. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," that
> is.

Then,  assuming Arny is incorrect, as enlightened readers will tend to 
think she is,  the author's use of a  metaphor based on a falsity to the 
point of injustice in order to build his argument can be an effective 
literary device.

I'm not saying it IS effective in this particular instance, but there is 
nothing that necessarily keeps it from being effective.  Literary 
effectiveness is not based on justice.

P






> _The Trees of Home_ is mentioned, a bestseller. Said to be a made up
> title. It's another funny, prescient joke, a book vetted by a focus
> group, the ending changed to please the public. That's true fraud for
> Gaddis, I would guess, making art for someone other than yourself.
>
> It's a longshot, I know, but the phrase "the trees of home" appears in
> a poem by the minor American poet Edward Rowland Sill:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Rowland_Sill
> It's in the first quatrain of a poem called CLASS SONG from 1864:
>
> "As through the noon the reapers rest,
> Till sinks the sun adown the west,
> > From morning toil an hour we come
> To dream beneath the trees of home."
>
> The whole poem is here: http://bit.ly/ktXI0S
>
> Like George W Bush and unlike William Gaddis, Sill went to Yale and
> was a member of Skull&  Bones.
>
> Then we have a reviewer of the novel, who hasn't read it but knows
> "the son of a bitch who wrote it." Fire the Bastard!
>
> Then, of a sudden, the first suicide joke, that of a psychoanalyst,
> ironically enough.  Sosumi, but I think it's funny:
>
> "--He didn't kill himself, it was an accident.
> "--An accident! He ties a rope around his neck and climbs out a
> window, but the rope breaks and he falls forty-six stories, so it's an
> accident?"
>
> More queer: "--I'd say he was a latent heterosexual"
> One of those moments Otto says something inspired and funny, to no
> apparent effect, but picked up and repeated later in the novel.
>
> The next suicide attempt is _Gravity's Rainbow_ related, an army man
> "in a plane that dropped an atom bomb" and suffers from guilt. Of
> course, he's not discharged for the suicide attempts, but for being
> thought to be ... queer. And just for wearing some of Hannah's
> underwear to stay warm.
>