Caterina.net: Sophisticated, Insane, Morbid Joy

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{ Sunday, November 23, 2003 }

Sophisticated, Insane, Morbid Joy

Walt Whitman, in Democratic Vistas (1871) writes that in the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy after the Civil War, commerce in American cities had produced an epidemic of unnaturalness and the insincerity of the business class, in which the confidence man, the trickster, and the seductress would thrive. ... Why? ... The exchange of large sums of money often defeats sincerity. Wealth puts people on their guard, behind fences and masks, facial neutrality or unreadability. The result is that America breeds its own fakery, with fake aristocrats, false smiles, and phony art; art, in this environment, Whitman says is "sophisticated, insane, and its very joy is morbid."

This is from an article in the latest issue of The Believer by Charles Baxter, Loss of Face.

LINK | 12:59 AM | TB

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{ COMMENTS }

I found it a very eerie piece. They seem content to run at least one off-the-grid piece each issue. Whitman's ode here has, imho, its ultimate 19th century literary riposte in Melville's Confidence Man.

Jeff | November 23, 2003 6:20 PM

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Crap, I've never read that. But Moby Dick is one of my three favorite books.

Recommended?

Caterina | November 23, 2003 10:42 PM

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Democratic Vistas ain't no 'ode'.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/Whitman/vistas/vistas.html

Baloney | November 24, 2003 8:39 AM

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It's a freaky, uneven, jarring book. Not sure if I read it or it me. A very allegorical narrative, and perhaps the first social satire calling out the con man as echt American (though Wieland's ventriloquist was up to something of the same). Imagine a Twain novel as written by Tom Waits--or the Bob Dylan of late.

Jeff | November 25, 2003 2:59 AM

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"Alexis de Tocqueville observed how democracy would shape life on this continent... "The relations that exist between the social and political condition of a people and the genius of its authors are always numerous, whoever knows the one is never completely ignorant of the other...Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, and regularity...The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste." Tocqueville saw this desire "to stir the passions" as a natural outgrowth of democracy. " http://www.xchicago.com/main/article.php?articleID=279

tim | November 25, 2003 1:05 PM

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