The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1980 (21. évfolyam, 80. szám)

THE BUDAPEST AMERICAN STUDIES CONFERENCE - Moses, Wilson J.: Literary Myth and Ethnic Assimilation

THE BUDAPEST AMERICAN STUDIES CONFERENCE I3I fellow human beings with the same coolness and directness of purpose with which they solved problems in mathematics, made trans­lations of hieroglyphics, or carried through chemical analyses in the test-tubes of their laboratories.” As American political, military, eco­nomic and cultural power has increased since 1945, so has the number of texts—fiction, film, social studies—investigating and pro­posing dangers and securities from semi­­visible systems. In fact, invasion fear is a main subject, a major source of media income, a dominant source of the state’s use of national income called “defence.” Within this fear is a main lingering belief, a complex postulation of some total mean­ing, concealed and revealed, which must be understood for survival—in the words of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate,” “a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the official govern­ment delivery system... a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the heart of everybody American you know.” In Gravity’s Rainbow, this becomes “the terrible politics of the Grail,” as a response to panic “images of Uncertainty.” Then in 1975 appeared Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, a three-volume parodistic summary of every conceivable version of this cultural history —and moving out from exactly that Bava­rian organization which scared Americans two hundred years earlier at the beginning of their state. Shea and Wilson are ambi­valently both exhilerated and appalled; their book is a witty and uneasy continuum of obsessed fascination and a sense of the ludicrousness of any belief in a totality of design. It was a matter of a short time before the work became a cult in itself, followed in 1977 by Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, with a believing pre­face by the old acid guru of the 1960s, Timothy Leary, for whom the trilogy and its secret are the sign that America is now moving “from its adolescence into the final stages of technological centralization preced­ing Space Migration.” WILSON J. MOSES LITERARY MYTH AND ETHNIC ASSIMILATION Israel Zangwill and Sutton Griggs Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was a man of two souls. As one biographer contends, “He was passionately devoted to the values of the Jewish past as enshrined in the ghetto, but at the same time, he sought to escape from what he felt to be the ghetto’s restric­tiveness.” He was born in London of a poor Russian immigrant family, educated at the jews’ Free School in the East End of London, where he later became a teacher. He publish­ed prolifically, essays, stories, and plays, becoming known for his “Dickensian” portrayals of types of London Jewry. But the best known contribution that Israel Zangwill made to the thought of the modern world was a phrase that he donated to American culture. It is a phrase taken from the title of his now almost forgotten play, 9

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