Fiedler & Grace they fly from "guilt, the guilt of that very flight"

[ish mailian]

It is Fielder's paragraph. The book, as I noted here, though published
in 1960, is great reading for those interested in Pynchon's detective
fictions and in how P fits into the American novel tradition.

I read Coover's book. Not my favorite Coover, but I recommend it too;
it is, in Coover's singular way, an amazing accomplishment

On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 1:07 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> Is this Fiedler or your own paragraph. Cuz wow. I do mean wow. Seriously profound question here, beautifullly and succinctly posed.
>
>  I highly recommend Robert Coover’s Huck Out West. He actually explores these themes with Huck going through a deeper transformation of expanded sympathy and self understanding while Tom Sawyer enters the story about a 3rd of the way along and continues to con people and truth and law and laugh off all violence to play the boy pirate.  In my estimate, an unpretentious masterpiece of accessible post-modernism.
>> On Aug 16, 2017, at 6:30 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The enemy of society on the run toward "freedom" is also the pariah in
>> flight from his guilt, the guilt of that very flight; and new phantoms
>> arise to haunt him at every step. American literature likes to
>> pretend, of course, that its bugaboos are all finally jokes: the
>> headless horseman a hoax, every manifestation of the supernatural
>> capable of rational explanation on the last page—but we are never
>> quite convinced. Huckleberry Finn, that euphoric boys' book, begins
>> with its protagonist holding off at gun point his father driven half
>> mad by the D.T.'s and ends (after a lynching, a disinterment, and a
>> series of violent deaths relieved by such humorous incidents as
>> soaking a dog in kerosene and setting him on fire) with the revelation
>> of that father's sordid death. Nothing is spared; Pap, horrible enough
>> in life, is found murdered brutally, abandoned to float down the river
>> in a decaying house scrawled with obscenities. But it is all "humor,"
>> of course, a last desperate attempt to convince us of the innocence of
>> violence, the good clean fun of horror. Our literature as a whole at
>> times seems a chamber of horrors disguised as an amusement park "fun
>> house," where we pay to play at terror and are confronted in the
>> innermost chamber with a series of inter-reflecting mirrors which
>> present us with a thousand versions of our own face.
>> -
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