Re: M&D: Learnédness (vs. Bornness//as reason for hope?)

[Joseph Tracy]

Interesting that you see M&D that way and see it as such a celebration of America. I see lots of comedy and in fairly equal doses the same dark underbelly, that same whelming momentum of colonial control that runs through all of Ps work. Freedom is  a powerful idea and a powerful force but as we see throughout M&D some always build their 'freedom' on others' backs. The westward movement was annihilating some; this was not just ambiguity or the minor taint of humanness. It was murdereously  essential to the project. The connection between this dark thing that will play out to be a fatal flaw in a tragedy or the minor character flaws in a comedy is still with us and profoundly undecided. 
 I agree with David Morris that P sets these dark tendencies against  transcendent reversals. Hope is part of the mix. But for me there is an overly religious and unrealistic  faith in any euchatastrophic mindset. 
    




> On Jan 2, 2018, at 7:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> We can't forget that Mason & Dixon is a sustained full-length comedy in most of the major senses. Anyway, I can't. 
> 
> Check wikipedia on Comedy for the usual trot-through of everything important and more. 
> 
> George Meredith said that "One excellent test of the civilization of a country ... I take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.
> 
> American literary theorist Kenneth Burke writes that the "comic frame" in rhetoric is "neither wholly euphemistic, nor wholly debunking--[that balance beam of ambiguity which makes TRP a great mental gymnast of ideas, imho]—hence it provides the charitable attitude towards people that is required for purposes of persuasion and co-operation, but at the same time maintains our shrewdness concerning the simplicities of ‘cashing in.’" (Burke 166).  Critical to the comic frame is an understanding that humanity is good, but flawed.
> 
> The simplicities of 'cashing in' are what I try to avoid. 
> 
> Here's one answer to Ugly: 
> "However, the characters portrayed in comedies were not worse than average in every way, only insofar as they are Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly."
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 5:23 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Speaking of satire, as we were. 
> 
> Sometimes, as some say about today's America, as Roth said about it in 1963; sometimes it is very funny just by "imitating" reality. 
> 
> On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 5:20 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.classicsandclass.info/product/169/
> 
> On Sun, Dec 31, 2017 at 11:25 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Third time through this book, and I am struck (again) by just how early in the text the LED comes--as if there should be no question about how many questions there will be about the world of the book.
> 
> But the learnedness is interesting to me. The LED is the most civilized member of most every group of talking mammals he encounters. The LED's learnedness is the most foregrounded part of his identity. His civility is acquired. 
> 
> And this, some time later, p. 92, amid the rainstorms, the young and learning Seductrices Vroom, pursuing their "malicious fun," trying to trigger what we might assume are at least somewhat born-in sexual responses from our Astronomers (mostly M, though even he may be a more acceptable substitute for the African boys ("Babies, rather," as Austra reminds and admonishes the V sisters) they might otherwise be exploiting) as they await the Transit ... 
> 
> "[Austra's] blond Procuresses all begin to expostulate at once, and Mason understands that the vocal assaults of the Vrom Poultry are not inborn, but rather learn'd in this World from their Owners." 
> 
> Does ugliness, just like civility or refinement, descend through great hierarchical chains of ownership? 
> 
> I think some version of this question underlays the book just like so much of the political philosophy that background the novel, the Hobbeses and Lockes and Hamiltons of what is, we are told, the Age of Reason. Isn't it? 
> 
> 
> 

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