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October 17, 2005
Literary Capital
Just stumbled upon this doing some research for my thesis. Thought it was interesting, though cannot determine if it is consequential or not. Lousy excuse for an update? Perhaps.
This city, so gorgeous from a distance, so unlovely up close, remains a foreign land in American literature. The novelist Ward Just works the terrain in near-solitude.
''The first Washington novel was Mark Twain's 'The Gilded Age,' '' Mr. Just noted recently. ''Four years later comes Henry Adams's 'Democracy.' '' And that was more than 100 years ago.
''Those were the last two writers in the canon who have ever visited Washington, D.C.,'' Mr. Just said. ''Not Melville. Not Fitzgerald. Not Hemingway. Not Faulkner. Not James. Not Wharton. It's peculiar. ''Compare that to Berlin, London, Paris. All of the great French, British, German writers dealt with their capital and its politics. We have no equivalent in the United States. There have been more novels of consequence written about southern Mississippi than Washington, and that's not counting Faulkner.''
Maybe this is because Washington is more like Brasilia or Canberra than London or Rome: an artificial capital conjured from the swamp. Or maybe it is because Washington itself has a tin ear. Its most famous writers are reporters, people who struggle to compose simple declarative sentences summing up Byzantine complexities.
Posted by houch at October 17, 2005 05:17 AM
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Comments
unsure as of what to do with that one. i went to washington. i wish i had gone to disney world.
Posted by: jimmy j at November 1, 2005 04:31 PM