If you want the true beginnings of US Lit, see Poe, not
Twain. (& read William Carlos Williams' IN THE AMERICAN
GRAIN, which will provide some background). Hemingway? Pfui.
"Eyes more interested than interesting," says Stein, & I
won't argue.
----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Robison <
miker_zspider@yahoo.com> To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, October 17,
2007 9:17:46 PM Subject: RARA-AVIS: Before 1920
Over
the past couple years I've been delving back into
older literature looking for the origins and
variations on the themes I see in the hardboiled and
noir genre. I started chronologically by reading
Gilgamesh and Beowulf, The Iliad and Odyssey, several
books of the Bible, and a buttload of other great
stuff.Some of it was just dazzling. Hell, most of it
was. After having White's Once and Future King as my
major source of the Arthurian legend, The Death Arthur
was great. They are almost all bastards and back
stabbers, and the blameless ones are the most screwed.
Then there were the two tales of Faust, each with
their own special twist on the story. I read a few
Shakespeare plays I hadn't got around to yet. As
usual, the stories were great but I could have done
without some of the lofty speeches. I finally worked
my way up to American literature. I have already
posted here about Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, with
the first great American fictional hero. I despised
James's Turn of the Screw and I couldn't conjure up a
bit of respect for his instruction booklet on how to
write fiction. I loved Hawthorne's House of the Seven
Gables. That's some dark-assed shit. I read
Melville's magnificent Moby Dick, Ahab for sure one of
the most famous screwed protagonists in American
literature. I read some more of his stuff but it
didn't measure up to Moby Dick. I reread Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin and was a lot more impressed than
the first time. Uncle Tom is true to that old
deordorant commercial. He might die at the end, but
you never see him sweat. Can't really be noir, can
it? Death without defeat. Twain's Huckleberry Finn
was a lot darker than I remembered, and rereading it
confirmed Hemingway's opinion that American writing
began with Twain. I finished The Virginian a few
weeks back. I commented heavily in the margins as I
was reading it and meant to get around to putting
together some thoughts on it but it hasn't happened.
The main thing I wanted to comment on was the
variations I saw in the Virginian as compared to
Cooper's Natty Bumppo, and how that related to the
first hardboiled heroes of Daly and Hammett and later
Hemingway's code hero. I'll have to get around to
that one of these days.
I think a great topic worthy of discussion would be
literature that led up to the noir and hardboiled
genre.
miker
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