Against the Day: Chums and reality in Light Across the Ranges.

[barbie gaze]

Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a
chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a time
and a state of protected "innocence," but not immune to the fallen world
and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself,
and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being
marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social
and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State,
and the ruling classes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience



On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 5:52 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

>     The Chums are fictional, we know from the beginning. Made of
> authorial air, like
> their 'patriotic' airship (at the Fair). Author is omniscient and defines
> their stories, their
> 'work'.
>
> Chums interact with the 'real world' on their assignments, and by taking
> some humans
> aboard. As we can see and as we said during the online read, they are
> do-gooders, Bodhisatva-types.
> Full of innocence and ideals. Their adventure stories are essentially
> Romances, in the sense of irreal elements
> and 'happy' endings; [happy endings are why we call it Fiction---O. Wilde]
>
> Romance had surfaced as adventure stories in the time period of early AtD;
> heroes
> and themes of honor and loyalty predominated, it is written.  Conrad wrote
> a novel called Romance.
>
> The world they interact with and much of what they see is the dark side of
> Romance--anti-Romance. Reality. Simple
> presentation of the stockyards is a summary of The Jungle, so to speak,
> yet also raised to a major
> metaphor about the West: Weber's rationalization that narrows and kills,
> the slaughterhouse(s)
>  that were the 20th Century and that still go on. Etc.
>
>
>
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