Auerbach's take on Adams

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Yep -

I didn't understand Auerbach's concept of the idyll as a reformulation of
the Virgin (it's very possible that I didn't read the essay carefully...).

I perceived it more as a dynamo-resisting "alternative realm", or even
"pastoral" in some post-Empsonian sense.


On Fri, 25 Oct 2013, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:

>
> The problem I have with this is his understanding of "Virgin" as
> "idyll". I just reread chapter XXV of "The Education Of Henry Adams" and
> I don't think that Adams would accept "idyll" as a reformulation.
> "Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force in the
> Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself more
> strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done
> (...)". Sounds not like "idyll", does it? Sure, Auerbach is writing
> about Pynchon, but he reformulates Adams' distinction as if there was no
> problem, as if his "idyll" was not just some decaffeinated version of
> Adams' "Virgin". Also not sure that "idyll" is what Pynchon's
> counternarratives are about.
>
> >> However, I'm thinking of the dynamo/idyll motifs introduced by Auerbach in
> his savvy review of BE. According to Auerbach, Deseret/hashslingrz make
> the dynamo and DeepArcher the idyll in BE. Compared to BE, the preterite
> are much more involved in the tension between the corresponding dynamo and
> idyll motifs in, say, TCoL49 or GR, IMO. Auerbach does not explicate them
> but I'd say that in TCol49, these motifs are Inverarity's will/W.A.S.T.E.,
> and in GR, the Rocket/the Zone.<<
>
>
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