Yates’s The Easter Parade and the Vision of the Artist

    In this, Part II of my essay in aesthetics, I am going to try to apply the principles I espoused in Part I to an analysis of Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade in an attempt to more fully articulate the approach I favor in the appreciation of literary artworks. It will involve some sniping at various other approaches, which I take to be current – even pervasive – in the field of modern literary criticism. This is a habit I will not indulge in normally – unless provoked – but one which, I hope, will make clear to myself and to my readers, just where I stand in these debates. More importantly, I hope my position will clear a theoretical space in which writers like Richard Yates, and their efforts, might be taken more fully at face value, i.e. as they actually intend their works to be taken, as Art, and less as examples of the way we “consumers” can amuse ourselves.

A Brief Foray into the Minefield of Modern Aesthetics

    This essay - in which I make no claims to any  profound originality, but only to the more or less orderly collation of various active ideas which guide my thinking about Literature and Art, and which I whole heartedly hold to be correct -  is intended as both a general statement of aesthetic principles, and as a prelude to the immediately following discussion of Richard Yates's The Easter Parade.
   It will be seen that I am still 'solid' with the New Criticism' school of thought, generally, and for that reason have made no great effort to reference the obvious sources. (I will be more intent on reference and rebuttal when it comes time to refute the foolishness of the newer schools of thought, such as 'de-constuctionism', and 'reception theory'--all Post-Modernist philosophies which I abhor.)

Port Mungo, by Patrick McGrath: An Essay on Morality in Fiction, in Two Parts

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      Wow! Patrick McGrath’s Port Mungo (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004) is a deeply disturbing contemporary portrait of narcissism and moral dissolution in the figures of Jack Rathbone, a young, ambitious English painter and Vera Savage, his free-spirited (and older) lover and fellow artist, who flee the dull restrictions of London society for New York, then Havana, and, eventually, Port Mungo, Honduras; presumably, to ‘make art’, to master their craft and to conquer the art world (ala Paul Gauguin) in the generation after world war II. It is an exciting – even riveting – account of the artists’ exotic life and Jack’s development as a man and a father, as told by Jack’s very eccentric and adoring sister, Gin.
   Just as the Honduran setting is exotic and alluring, so also is the narration. The account of Jack Rathbone’s dedicated quest for artistic maturity is charmingly and deceptively naïve. Full of the kinds of lush and tumultuous detail that we expect from the lives and struggles of young artists and lovers, the tale lulls one into a languid acquiescence as to the possibility of romantic adventure as naturally and seductively as a tropical lagoon. But it is also deceptive. It lulls us; it lures us. Why? Is it because the author is also enchanted?