tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post309099889229213979..comments2024-03-29T03:25:59.091-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: American Pastoral by Philip Rothjohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-72005095925009355482011-06-29T07:14:07.083-04:002011-06-29T07:14:07.083-04:00Must be an enjoyable read American Pastoral by Phi...Must be an enjoyable read <a href="http://www.bookchums.com/book-detail.php?b=NjY0Ng==" rel="nofollow">American Pastoral</a> by <a href="http://www.bookchums.com/authors-details.php?author_id=MTM4" rel="nofollow">Philip Roth</a>. loved the way you wrote it. I find your review very genuine and orignal, this book is going in by "to read" list.rohithttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15384882703827370630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-83322606763142221322010-08-29T08:41:21.662-04:002010-08-29T08:41:21.662-04:00So perhaps this is an answer- impossible even for ...So perhaps this is an answer- impossible even for he (the 'seminal modernist') who proposed it- to the question Roth poses in the final paragraph of “American Pastoral”?<br /><br />“Yes, the breach had pounded their fortification, even out here in security Old Rimrock, and now that it was opened it would not be closed again, They'll never recover. Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life! And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible that the life of the Levov's?”<br /><br />Listen to and arrange the voices within, compose your own life, love fate?..the unexpected, the unseen, the counter-pastoral circumstance, the shadowing menace, the emergence of the indigenous American berserk; the confrontation with the transitory and mysterious- the messy, the dark, the hideous...these are the indispensable windows to eternity e.g. 'fullness of being', 'self-mastery'.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-5025831885819907532010-08-27T20:36:49.199-04:002010-08-27T20:36:49.199-04:00What Zarathustra outlines in Part II is the concep...What Zarathustra outlines in Part II is the concept of salvation: what one would have to do to 'redeem' one's life and -that life is lived, inextricably, in the world – the history of the world as a whole. This, however, does not mean that he ( or Nietzsche) is capable of carrying out the task of redemption. And in fact the final two speeches of Part II make clear that, as yet, he cannot. For what they reveal is his disgust at even the 'highest and best 'of those with whom he is compelled to share his world, his inability to 'redeem' them. This inability expresses itself as his inability to will, or even utter, the thought of the eternal return. What this shows is that the eternal return is just a dramatic expression of redemption. Redemption, salvation, finding the world perfect, amor fati, embracing the eternal return, are one and all simply different expressions of the same thing.”johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-2751867644545356602010-08-27T20:36:20.945-04:002010-08-27T20:36:20.945-04:00I walk among men...over a battlefield or butcher-f...I walk among men...over a battlefield or butcher-field (Here, surely, Nietzsche is experiencing one of his post traumatic flashbacks to the stinking body-parts on the battlefield of Worth). Everywhere I see only 'fragments, limbs and terrible accidents- but no human being. We must 'compose into one', 'poeticize into a unity, all that is 'fragment, riddle and terrible accident. We must learn to 'will backwards' so as to recreate all 'It was' as 'Thus I will it.'<br /><br />The “Gay Science” has already told us what it is to 'will backwards': it is to narrate one's life so that 'everything that happens turns out for the best, turns out to be something that 'must not be missing' from the Bildungsroman of one's life: the story of one's spiritual development towards becoming who, according to one's ideal,one is, giving it unity, 'composing into one all that was previously meaningless 'accident'. Apparent accidents become parts of 'personal providence'. To authentic selves accidents never happen. For the rest, everything is an accident.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-44982626413374095862010-08-26T12:41:13.265-04:002010-08-26T12:41:13.265-04:00“Both in traditional Christianity and in Schopenha...“Both in traditional Christianity and in Schopenhauer's mystical synthesis of Christianity and Buddhism, salvation consists in ascent from the mundane world of pain to a supernatural realm of bliss. Friedrich Nietzsche, we have seen, from his pious youth onwards, yearns for salvation, for a world made, not simply tolerable, but, like the ultimate world of Christianity, perfect. In 'The Antichrist' he says that the 'most spiritual' human beings are those who can affirm that 'the world is perfect', and in Part IV of 'Zarathustra, in a state of 'strange drunkenness' cause by fumes from a grapevine, Zarathustra does, for a moment, experience the world as perfect. Zarathustra rejects, of course, the supernatural. His task, therefore, is to show how salvation, perfection, bliss, can be discovered within the confines of naturalism, how the 'kingdom of heaven' can be discovered in the heart.<br /><br />'A hunchback tells Zarathustra he must cure the cripples if he is to convince the people of his teaching. 'Not so', Zarathustra replies. 'If one takes away the hunchback one takes away his spirit.' This reveals Nietzsche's basic strategy: theodicy – showing that problematic phenomena are really blessings in disguise, showing that, as the notebooks put it, 'Furies – that is just a bad word for the graces'. The rest of the speech shows us how to perform the theodicy.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-87860173203524667942010-08-26T12:39:24.355-04:002010-08-26T12:39:24.355-04:00Roth provides a symptomatology of 'the Americ...Roth provides a symptomatology of 'the American Pastoral under stress, of narcissism not in the sense of a simple ('Time” magazine inspired ) 'self-indulgent lack of civic engagement' but as outlined by Christopher Lasch, based upon the evidence provided by several studies of business corporations, to the effect that professional advancement had come to depend less on craftsmanship or loyalty to the firm than on "visibility", "momentum", personal charm, and impression management [Public Relations]: <br /><br />“..an anxious concern with the impression made on others, a tendency to treat others as a mirror of the self.... a certain protective shallowness, a fear of binding commitments, a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose, a desire to keep one's options open, a dislike of depending on anyone, an incapacity for loyalty or gratitude.”( http://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2010/04/culture-of-narcissism-revisted-by.html).<br /><br />Roth does not provide a prognosis. It would be presumptuous of me to infer what he might have in mind, especially since I have read no other work by this amazing novelist. One avenue of adventure in this respect, however, offers a plausible conjecture.johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com