Sam's Quest, Emmett's Wound: Grail Motifs in Bobbie Ann Mason's Portrait of America after Vietnam
1991; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoFew writers have made better use of resources from popular culture to structure their narratives or give body to their characters than Bobbie Ann Mason. And few writers have shown greater sympathy for popular culture. She lists contemporary brand names in her writing with evident delight, she alludes happily to low-brow movies and television shows, she counts great rock and stars among her heroes, and in article in The New York Times Magazine (May 15, 1988) Mervyn Rothstein reports that Mason calls her writing my version of rock and roll (101). At same time, her work, without being self-consciously post-modern, addresses fundamental problems of post-modernity and generates its vision of contemporary American life as much through appeals to perennial motifs as through its obvious and effective appeals to rock music, fast-food chains, consumer products, and television. In Country, for example, is at once a timely period piece (a coming-of-age novel set in context of country's traumatic post-Vietnam self-doubt) and a book about enduring problems: how men and women may structure lives of joy and meaning after collapse of traditional bearers of joy and meaning (like God and Country); how men and their culture may find absolution and return to productive lives after war; how women and men in such times may find love that is spiritually and physically generative. The events in In Country that permit attention to these problems take place for most part in rural Kentucky, though actual geographical setting is secondary: action really occurs in a universal American geography of fast-foods, malls, television serials, HBO, MTV, and pop music radio. The narrative development of book is accomplished through continual, specific allusions to details of these as heroine, Sam Hughes, and her people encounter them. Their lives take their shape from material of popular culture: they make characters from M*A*S*H prototypes for their own characters; lyrics of rock songs provide them with text for their own dialogues and ready-made interpretations of events of their lives. Yet there is another universal geography evident here, and this is part of what I want to examine in this essay. Besides geography of popular American consumer culture, action of In Country occurs in geography of a together with symbols, motifs, and narrative structures of grail legend that communicate that geography. The grail legend has been a routine resource for modern literature ever since Jessie Weston's rich and influential 1920 book, From to Romance, linked many versions of legend with what she called an ancient Ritual seeking the secret of Life, physical and spiritual (203). According to Weston, grail legend, in ensemble of its elements, expresses a recurrent pattern of beliefs and ritual actions associated with Nature cults throughout history. Weston found that pattern in diverse cultures and claimed a kind of family resemblance between, for example, ritual passages in Rig-Veda, Syro-Phoenician nature cults, Greek nature cults, and grail legend in its many forms in Germanic, Scandinavian, and English literatures. Inspired partly by Weston's book, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land assimilated English culture and society in early twentieth century to drought-stricken land of grail legends but transposed drought from meteorological to moral domain. Cut off from its literary, spiritual, and moral roots, England portrayed in poem was to Eliot as barren as any waste land of legend. And like legendary waste land, England of Eliot's poem awaits some healing diagnosis by a questing hero. The wait continues, evidently: western civilization since time of Eliot's diagnosis has enjoyed no dramatic renaissance. Instead it has undergone incalculable (and, in Eliot's day, unforeseeable) shocks: holocaust, bomb, proxy wars, napalm, and agent orange--then, too, sitcom and shopping mall. …
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