markhelmsing's JumboTweets
- A reference Greg Dimitriadis makes in an essay to Leslie Fiedler's notorious (misunderstood?) essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” (1948) compelled me to read it. So glad I did. Myth criticism par excellence, especially in these tragic times nearly 70 years later:
"Behind the white American’s nightmare that someday, no longer tourist, inheritor, or liberator, he will be rejected, refused, he dreams of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended. It is a dream so sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate, that it redeems our concept of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy. In each generation we play out the impossible mythos, and we live to see our children play it: the white boy and the black we can discover wrestling affectionately on any American sidewalk, along which they will walk in adulthood, eyes averted from each other, unwilling to touch even by accident. The dream recedes; the immaculate passion and the astonishing reconciliation become a memory, and less, a regret, at last the unrecognized motifs of a child’s book. “It’s too good to be true, Honey,” Jim says to Huck. “It’s too good to be true.”