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

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/29/2012 7:41 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>> 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?

I kind of think it might.  For example Proust and Joyce weren't big 
drinkers, and both  In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses ended quite 
affirmatively.

I wonder if Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights) and Samuel Richardson 
(Clarissa) might not have taken a drop or two to get them into a darker 
view of things.  They were quite the exceptions to their respective eras.

On a personal note I've observed that watching the  PBS nightly news in 
a semi alcoholic haze makes the very serious discussions  appear 
slightly  absurd.

P


>