Pynchon & Swift or no Confederacy but a Union of Dunces

[alice wellintown]

We might get more out of a contrast than out of a comparison of these
authors. While both write about the battle of the books in the market
place, Pynchon's Slothful mad man in Attica is a Modern or a Dunce in
Swift's satires, an author deserving of the punishment meted out to
Deadly Sinners, authors who, in Swift's day, spread like clap on a
college campus during the promiscuous days when a liberating vitality
comprable to the movement Pynchon describes in his SL Introduction,
threatened the civilized virtues of the publishers of those we now
call classical authors. Pynchon, in Swift's estimation, would be a
Modern or Dunce. I've decided not to make of the Beats and the
Post-modernists a Confederacy but a Union of Dunces because the hard
labor, not only of Beats but of all the children of Whitman who, even
if they never gave a minute of thought to Blake's Satanic Mills, were
ever aware that the voices crying out in the American wilderness, were
those of workers hamming, stitching, weaving, and digging democracy
out the stuff that dreams were made on in the new world, where the
secuctive appeal of the novel, the work of modern dunces needed no
excuse or apology and no moral correctness to placate old political
patrons.