Medieval in LA: A Fiction by Jim Paul
1998; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wal.1998.0068
ISSN1948-7142
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoReviews 415 silos and loneliness, errant television signals and benign craziness, long-distance telephone lines and old-tim e religion, plus a low-tech tale of the first two chim panzees in W yoming Territory. Western E lectric calls to mind the best elements of two vastly different sin gle-author story collections. One is Lambing Out by Montana realist Mary Clearman (Blew ), published in 1977 by the University of M issouri Press. The other is Wyoming Sun by science fiction writer Ed Bryant, published in 1980 by Laramie’s Jelm Mountain Press. Zancanella finds him self in good company. J a m e s B. H e m e s a t h C o l o r a d o S p r in g s , C o l o r a d o U"' M edieval in LA: A Fiction. By Jim Paul. (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1996. 224 pages, $20.00.) Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, never one to fear generalizing, says, “Gentlemen, the desire and the pursuit o f the whole ends at Santa M onica!” In Jim Paul’s quirky, fragmented, dialectical meditation on “the w hole,” the unnamed narrator, who came in young adulthood from Illinois into “the enor mous w est” to settle in San Francisco, uses a weekend trip to Los A ngeles as a self-defining quest: In a place that defines itself as the cutting edge of moderni ty, what does it mean to be modern? How many of us, in fact, really are? Beyond an affection for surfing, Paul does not let place intrude much. This is a cerebral journey wherein living characters are likely to receive less descrip tion than what they order for dinner, and wherein historical characters com e to life in an apparent dialectic between medieval and scientific: Aquinas versus Ockham; Johnson versus Berkeley; Hume, Locke, and Cage versus the narrator. The medieval mind, the narrator tells us, is the finder of meaning: seeing the world from a fixed position, as if consciousness were inherently pre-Galilean, we “press the case for fate, for an order conceived in retrospect and raised toward the future.” The irony in this and other examples, however, cuts into his authority, and in general the most com pelling rhetoric describes the so-called skeptics like Hume (“reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions”) and Cage (“art was a verb, the action o f paying attention”). The dialectic yields no synthesis: the coldly objective mind and the one entranced by “parking karma” seem equally remote. The narrator, like most of us, entertains daily the irreconcilable coincidences of metaphorical thought, marveling at “the LA landscape, block after block of minimarts . . . enough people coming forth from their homes each day on some pilgrimage that held the world together for a second. . . . It seemed a miracle just then, like the loaves and fishes.” K e r r y A h e a r n O r e g o n S ta te Un iv e r s it y ...
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