Atdtda38: Our own little republic, 1076-1077 #1

[Mark Kohut]

It occurs to me, that this 'companionable silence' is, among other
meanings, a way
of 'answering' Turner's Frontier Thesis (previously embedded in the
narrative) given the
rest of this paragraph....A..and, is that thesis linked with
imperialism?, even self-imperialism
(so to speak)---the conquering of nature wince it is in reference to
'army movements' that there
is now nowhere to go but into the sea or sky. (Sky, of course, looking
toward the last lines
of ATD and the first lines of GR?

On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 6:57 AM, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
> On 1075 Reef and Jesse have established a 'companionable silence, which both
> would come to admit was more than either had hoped for'. In the new section,
> progress westwards - 'the last corner of the US map, and after this it would
> have to be Alaska or BC' (1076) - perhaps echoes the earlier description of
> army movements, 'noplace to go but into the sea' or 'into the sky' (1072);
> it also confirms the development of the father/son relationship as they
> discuss the school essay.
>
> The section splits into two parts, one masculine, the other feminine.
> Initially, stasis is indicated by Jesse's attendance at school. Reef invokes
> his own father and 'dynamite-related activities'; Jesse's teacher provides a
> link to labour history and 'the olden days' - cf Reef's 'old faith in the
> westward vector' on 1075.
>
> Reference to 'the Cour d'Alene back in the olden days' (1076) returns the
> narrative to 333, when Scarsdale Vibe speaks of 'no end in sight' to class
> war; to 362 and the paragraph on 'Reef's dead'; and then to 463 and Frank in
> Fickle Creek, when social/technological change might encourage the view that
> 'bayonets in the bullpens of the Coeur d'Alène' belong to the distant past.
> This school assignment, then, returns the narrative to two moments that
> feature class war (the Traverse/Vibe conflict); and then to a moment when
> 'peach-fuzz desperadoes' (463) are repackaging labour history as
> entertainment (and cf scenes at the Chicago World Fair in Ch3). This is not
> only class/labour history but a masculine history.
>
>
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