The Street 101 I had to get out of bed to take some notes. Yesterday I made the unusual discovery that novelist Ann Petry was an Oragean Modernist. I saw one comment that she was the only woman in the Richard Wright school of protest. A book published in 2007 examines her role in the political left and the civil rights movement. I have taught Petry’s novel, The Street, many times. Each time I went away shaking my head at the whole thing. It makes no sense at all. Of course, most of the Oragean Modernist texts are self-destroying and make no sense, but it takes time to put these things together. I happened to come across a mention of Petry yesterday, and suddenly I realized that all of the things that I had in the back of my mind about The Street pointed to its being an esoteric novel. Now I have to get this critical book, Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left, to see how these leftist critics fix up Petry so that they can deal with her. I mean the only person in The Street with any sense is David the Prophet. He saves a woman, Min, from the rapist maniac that she lives with. David the Prophet is not the local leader of a communist cell, and he is not as someone said, a hoodoo man. He is a psychologist. So, I had to write down who the characters really are: both Mrs, Hedges and Junto are Gurdjieff. As I show in Oragean Modernism, a lot of the novels of this group treat Gurdjieff as a villain, and they portray him as a woman. Here he is both a man and a woman and both are villains. Boots smith is Jean Toomer, another figure treated as a villain in several texts. At the core of the novel there is a spiritual allegory. It’s often said that the novel is gothic and a sort of horror story, but then that is glossed over with a heavy coating of Michel Foucault and the panopticon, or by connecting the old left to the Black Power movement, so the whole allegorical-spiritual character of the novel is not dealt with. Early on in the Anatomy of Criticism Frye points out that criticism is not plugging in your particular brand of truth so that you conclude what you started out with.
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 09:54:58 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015