Not even close to Pynchon

[ish mailian]

This attachment to innocence and youth, is ubiquitous in american art,
and with few exceptions (Henry James comes to mind) is at the heart of
American prose fiction, in the so-called novel, and is not something
america can grow up and out of  on this side of paradise. Zoyd, of
course, is Slothroplike, childish and innocent,  but is, because it's
1984, though no Big Brother totalitarianism but rather Neoliberal
torments him, a working class male trying to raise a daughter in his
hippie hair and dress. Like Jim and Huck, naked on the raft, he floats
past the flotsam of what is left in Gatsby's wake, avoiding the shore
as the trees cleared for Gatsby's mansion are clear cut on the other
side of Vinland the Good, Zoyd, a member of the Multitude (Spinozian),
can only partake in the picnic of old lefties and young mutants.


On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 9:11 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That's a different point. One I agree with too. As Pynchon notes in
> his Introduction to Slow Learner, the American male is a foreveryoung,
> a boy who won't grow up, who won't even try, a Peter in Panland,
> because, like Huck, like Ishmael, like countless others in American
> culture, he rejects the adult world and all its corruption.
>
> from Death of Adulthood in American Culture
>
> By A.O. Scott
>
> NYT   Sept. 11, 2014
>
>
> We Americans have never been all that comfortable with patriarchy in
> the strict sense of the word. The men who established our political
> independence — guys who, for the most part, would be considered late
> adolescents by today’s standards (including Benjamin Franklin (fig.
> 3), in some ways the most boyish of the bunch) — did so partly in
> revolt against the authority of King George III, a corrupt,
> unreasonable and abusive father figure. It was not until more than a
> century later that those rebellious sons became paternal symbols in
> their own right. They weren’t widely referred to as Founding Fathers
> until Warren Harding, then a senator, used the phrase around the time
> of World War I.
>
> Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love
> and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more
> than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of
> American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of
> the library.” Musing on the legacy of Rip Van Winkle and Huckleberry
> Finn (fig. 4), he broadened this observation into a sweeping (and
> still very much relevant) diagnosis of the national personality: “The
> typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run,
> harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat
> — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation
> of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and
> responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in
> our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature
> and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and
> infuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”
>
> Huck Finn is for Fiedler the greatest archetype of this impulse, and
> he concludes “Love and Death” with a tour de force reading of Twain’s
> masterpiece. What Fiedler notes, and what most readers of “Huckleberry
> Finn” will recognize, is Twain’s continual juxtaposition of Huck’s
> innocence and instinctual decency with the corruption and hypocrisy of
> the adult world.
>
> On Thu, Apr 9, 2020 at 8:49 AM Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I was with you, ish, up to the part about america being old. This is a very young nation, run by kids that never grew up for kids who will never grow up. It is a children's den of self-centered babies who want either to be the biggest bully on the block, or to escape to a place where there are no parents who insist they behave like sapient humans.