Is The Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?
alice wellintown
alicewellintown at gmail.com
Sat May 4 08:12:53 CDT 2013
And you will here-hear it!
Is it theater or theatre?
Rat Tea Ate Her,
Raid E Aids Her.
Aids in Spades Skeletons Coming in and out of the Water Closets in the
Ram Rod Pub and Grub.
On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 9:08 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:
> and hear. Read with your ears boyz and galz. Read wit duh EEYAH!
>
>
> On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 9:05 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Now, mixing in the mix here, that chapter in AGTD that begins in the hard
>> cover on p 418, with the crew and that Invisible Trespass of narrative that
>> did not define, the passage of the day, where Pynchon writes like a manic
>> Hamlet, punning away on to the thin ice of the day ay ay ay ay...dare I say
>> Shakespeare, so soon or later, and with P it was quite young that he
>> started, ambitiously and foolishly playing with Shakespeare's Magic,
>> Shakespeare pressing in on the aging ceiling wax, as with Melville's
>> greatest speeches and narrative digressions, when Ahab, for example, morphs
>> into Lear and Milton's Satan, a captain of Capitalism on the iron rails of
>> Robber Barron Business and forges the chains that Marley holds up to
>> Scrooge, the chains of the Cross, the gallows...so too our Mighty P now, an
>> old man with drying voice, has Eliot buries where the Dogs dig, and turns
>> to Shakesepeare, but turn us back now to the New York Warf and Woof, there,
>> p397, is New York's central park, a Strret Arab with a stiff hat and
>> tattoos. Notice that EAR! The lad has tongue that puts in fricatives at the
>> end of the swah so common to the Gilander like P, so listen to his sonding
>> like Art Carney, but here, his boy is a live, and contrasted with the
>> stilted phoney theater boyz in balloon & Co.
>>
>> So we here NYC here. Don't we? And what NYC do we here?
>>
>>
>> On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 8:51 AM, alice wellintown <
>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The idea of a "Great American Novel" or "the Great American Novel" is
>>> useful, even if it serves an argument that no such novel exists or has ever
>>> existed or can ever exist, that is, a Platonic Ideal or,
>>> anti-Platonic...anti-Cannonical...etc...argument. To dispense with it is to
>>> acknowledge that it needs dispensing with and this might follow the common
>>> approach of tracing its origins to an essay by De Forest, and then
>>> examining how the Americans, writing in a language that was around long
>>> before they were, one that is named after their Mother oppressor, and so
>>> on...so American novel and the Spirit of forming a novel, American voice
>>> and theme and character and plot and so on, distinct from and equal to, if
>>> not, as with all other things, greater than the fading Empire's
>>> productions, past present and future. The novel that holds in its womb and
>>> loins the Zeitgeist, as surely GG does more than any other great work
>>> of the period, is yet another way of defining the phrase, and on this and
>>> on many other counts, one can certainly argue convincingly, given academic
>>> generosity, that Fitzgerald's little book is a Great American Novel or,
>>> novella, at least.
>>>
>>> It has been argued that GR or M&D are Great American novels, but I would
>>> have to go with AGTD, were I too argue that P has written one. Though V.
>>> and GR are, in many respects, more like Moby-Dick, and Confidence Man, two
>>> candidates for the accolade, AGTD has Twain in the mix, and all manner of
>>> other things that make it a far better Graet American Novel than GR or M&D.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 1:56 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I thought it was How to Make Love like a Porn Star
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> >>
>>>> >> >
>>>> >> >
>>>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/may/01/is-great-gatsby-great-american-novel
>>>> >>
>>>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby#Reception
>>>> >>
>>>> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Novel
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130504/5c475373/attachment.html>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list