Fitzgerald's TN

[Markekohut]

Is your wonderful desire for "wonder as a state of being" just the passive way of
Referring to " wonder as a way of seeing" ??

don't we, unless we cynically speak with forked tongue---more Iceland Spar resonance? That symbol I love inordinately, I'm sure---see from the state of our Being? 



Sent from my iPad

On Oct 8, 2012, at 2:24 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Gatsby" and the Imagination of Wonder
> Author: Giles Gunn
> Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 41, No. 2,
> (Jun., 1973), pp. 171- 183
> 
> 
> Yet when morning finally comes and the shadows of disaster lift at least
> high enough for us to see the landscape about us, all we are still
> likely to perceive
> is what we have put there ourselves, something which in the daylight looks
> more like a metropolis than a mushroom cloud, but which, as Thomas Pynchon
> has suggested in The Crying of Lot 49, is less identifiable as a city
> "than a grouping
> of concepts-census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping
> nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway."
> To be sure, even in a world whose most discernible and meaningful patterns
> suggest nothing so much as the printed circuitry of a transistor radio, one may
> still, like Oedipa Maas, discover what appears to be "a heiroglyphic sense of
> concealed meaning, ... an intent to communicate." The problem is that when
> the environment has become but an extension of man himself, there is no way
> of telling the difference between what Robert Frost calls
> "counter-loveo, riginal
> response" and "our own voice back in copy speech." Thus one is left yearning,
> as Americans have always been, for "a world elsewhere"5 beyond the self, yet
> suspicious that whatever traces of it are left constitute evidence of
> nothing but
> our own paranoia. In such circumstances as these, wonder gives way all too
> easily to cynicism, yearning to submission, and hope to the madness of boredom.
> This is a prospect of which F. Scott Fitzgerald was acutely conscious.
> 
> ..
> notes:
> 
> In this there is, to be sure, a marked parallel between Gatsby and all
> those other devotees
> and avatars of something like an American religion of wonder-Emerson, Thoreau,
> Whitman, Twain, a certain side of James, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood
> Anderson, Hemingway,
> Salinger, and Walker Percy-whose idealization of an unencumbered simplicity of
> response Tony Tanner discusses in his The Reign of Wonder: Naivete and
> Reality in
> American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). But
> where Tanner
> is interested in wonder chiefly as a way of seeing, as "the
> cultivation of a naive eye," I am
> more interested, as I think Fitzgerald was as well, in wonder as a
> mode of being, as something
> intrinsic to the very nature of life itself.
> 
> http://mmagsig11.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/gatsby-narrative-strategies1.pdf
> 
> Review of Tanner:
> 
> http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk/tanner.htm
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:48 AM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Sorry, but I can't help but toss books into this Schiller Theater.
>> Remember the hand in opening of Chiller Theater? Was it a Thing or an
>> Idea or better, an Ideal? Thing was a Hand on The Adams Family, and
>> Thing One and Thing Two upset the innocense, the naive view of
>> children, their play....well, anyway, if we must Hem our Way in to
>> Schiller Theater with naive and sentimental pathos, we can examine a
>> poetic use of Nature, in the Rain that Pynchon, when a Slow Learner,
>> as writer, though at this point a Strong Reader (Bloom), perhaps too
>> self-consciously aware of his anxiety of influences, tags onto "The
>> Small Rain" in the allusions to Hemingway and Eliot. There is is, like
>> a bubbling breakout on the nose or a teenage boy at the prom, a
>> blemish so boneheaded and naive, an attempt to make it literary with
>> rain imgages from TWL and FWA, and ToC  (SL.4-6). . But is that all it
>> is? Pynchon says that the character may have carried the day, that,
>> and the theme, the chiller theater's very own Death, of course, but
>> then looking back P decides the only thing he can admire is the class
>> struggle, and how the lower ranks are heroic while the officers are
>> assholes. The language, and the other weaknesses, the critical noises
>> fro this of that camo that was giving mixed signals are all quite
>> interesting, but the Rain Images are the rub. The sun, the dry bones
>> whitening under the sun, or down at the bottom of the sea where the
>> sailor had eyes of pearl.
>> 
>> Looking into WL would take us on digressions that could be fun, but
>> Heming in our way with that Farewll to Arms may be worth more than
>> Schiller. For Hemingway, so the character at the end of "A Small Rain"
>> claims, hates the rain. But maybe Pynchon, Slow Learner, though Strong
>> Reader, has it wrong. The Rain is just water from the sky. No love or
>> touching respect merely because it is Nature. But isn't hate, like
>> love and touching respect, naive and sentimental as well?
>> 
>> That first passage of FWA is striking. Call it plain style
>> reestablished, it is as American as apple pie in style, and yes, the
>> men are pregnant with arms, walking in the killing rain. That late in
>> the novel a soldier's lover and child. will die from the gas, not the
>> rain, is sentimental, our hero, cool under pressure, naive. The
>> iceberg, hidden in the images beneath the surface, sink his illusions,
>> the war is his mother and They may not make the rain, but They can
>> make a muddy, bloody,  mess of Nature.