Similar to TRP's take on Eliot, do we think?

[Mark Kohut]

yeah, no soup for me, no linking....but here's my question again.
TRP very influenced by Eliot. The conservatism--called reactionary by Obama
and others-- in Eliot's vision
coated Pynchon (how?), seen as such a paranoid anti-Statist Leftist
'radical'
of the sixties and on.

"Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless
mechanistic order"--Obama
on Eliot ..& Obama on Oedipa's choice?

Discuss the 'deep fatalism' in Pynchon and compare and contrast it to the
"deep fatalism" of Eliot.



On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 7:23 PM, Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com> wrote:

> I had trouble following what Mark was quoting, but he prompted me to find
> this article, which I thought was kinda fascinating:
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/04/obama-as-literary-critic/
>
> Thanks, Mark.
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 1:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Barack Obama (in a letter published in The New York Review of Books
>> <https://www.facebook.com/nybooks/>): I haven’t read “The Waste Land”
>> for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will
>> hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs
>> from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social
>> reality/order of his time.
>>
>> Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless
>> mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual
>> purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this.
>> Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four
>> Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch
>> a sense of what I speak.
>>
>> Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I
>> respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course,
>> the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism,
>> not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same
>> milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)
>>
>> And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and
>> death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A
>> fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at
>> Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence
>> yourself, Alex?
>>
>
>
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