The Feminization of American Culture: Ann Douglas: 9780374525583: Amazon.com: Books

[alice wellintown]

> The big three of the 30s and 40s, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were
> all heavy alcohol users.  Was this mainly to fight inner demons, or was it
> integral to their creative powers?  Their writing was so different. What
> were the common elements? Where was the "family resemblance"?
> (Wittgenstein)

Looking back, from Wittgenstein, we might say that the idea, a family
resemblance, is one that, if only when we look back, peep in the
public record, open the old photo albums, watch those old home movies,
 generates memories and defeated desires, so Nihilism...

and, like the phrase about family resemblance, American Nihilism,
while not fathered by Nietzsche, looks a lot like the mustached
European madman.

We might also photoshop into the portrait, Mr Eliot, who is, after
all, as much a part of this American generation of nihilists as the
others, though he does find a dead tradition to bury his individual
talents in.

And there are lotz of others, though not as famous as these members of
the family.

But what kind of nihilism? There are so many in American fiction.

And, we might say that  Pynchon, with his early works, V., and Lot49,
is much in the family; no conclusion or final illumination, no Joycean
epiphany. The heart is darkness, the bomb is pushed from its precipice
by the boys, the island burns, the beasty is in us and we are
metaphysically and aesthetically lost; sometimes in the pun house,
sometimes in the labyrinth, sometimes in the mundane stranger's
murdering meaninglessness under the indifferent sun , sometimes in the
grip of Them.

Does Booze make this nihilism more intense, release the aesthetic from
the metaphysical sickness unto death? Camus talked of suicide and
rolling a stone; perhaps this is what the booze soaked nihilism
afforded?