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Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (1965)

di Paul Metcalf

Serie: Jargon Society (43)

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
954283,250 (4.11)11
"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."--William Gass,The New York Times "Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology--all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century."--Publishers Weekly "Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination."--Robert Creeley "A unique work of historical and literary imagination, eloquent and powerful. I know of nothing like it."--Howard Zinn First published in 1965,Genoa is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothers--one, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song. Paul Metcalf (1917-99) was an American writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. His three volumeCollected Works were published by Coffee House Press in 1996.… (altro)
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Genoa-A Telling of Wonders
clubfoot : ahab foot
rolling plains : "roughly like the sea" ... our sacred cow
Attic (greek) : the boat
moving backwards on the stern (walking in chains, feeling of being dragged) : a backwards teleology
ahab's violent thrust reflected (Melville, in the Pacific—the western extreme of American force—untethered, fatherless, the paternity blasted—turning—as Ahab—with vengeance and malice to match the monster’s: turning and thrusting back to his own beginnings: to Moby-Dick, the white monster: to Maria Gansevoort Melville . . .)
twinning/division (explicitly at the end of the third chapter), discourse of Janus in Genoa chapter 2,
brother carl : whale? , vitality? : lameness?
brother carl's hydrocephalus : "ocean in my head" "the headwaters, perhaps"
cetacean head and skeleton : sperm head and flagella : narrator body, It is this—the huge-headed and long-tailed sensation—that I have been experiencing for some time.
trophoblast invading maternal tissue; sharks eating themselves in a frenzy
cetacean head, and eye position (blindness in one eye, flat world) ; embryo wide-set eyes
columbus's gout; island treasures (won as crystals)

Columbus as casuistry: "“During this time I have seen, and in seeing, have studied all writings, cosmography, histories, chronicles, and philosophy and those relating to other arts, by means of which our Lord made me understand with a palpable hand, that it was practicable to navigate from here to the Indies and inspired me with a will for the execution of this navigation. And with this fire, I came to your Highnesses.”" and then the immediate contradiction, though magnanimous “I say that the holy spirit works in Christians, Jews, Moors, and in all others of all sects, and not only in the wise but the ignorant: for in my time I have seen a villager who gave a better account of the heaven and the stars and their courses than others who expended money in learning of them.”


herman melville as if sired from St. Elmo's fire (corpusants): “Oh, thou magnanimous! Now I do glory in my genealogy! . . . thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire.”

(on the paralyzed band leader)
What would I do:

to bring back,

to save,

to return,

a not very talented musician . . .


//from a panting, breathless worship of these works (melville, columbus), to qualified praise/derision, to those who do not even read it except compelled, and who are then, if not bored to death, similarly horrified.

Carib(ian) Charybdis—such, perhaps, as Hart Crane—the ocean already in his head—leaped into . . .

"Columbus at first thought he had discovered India . . .
. . . thereby lopping off, roughly, one-half the globe: a hemisphere gone . . .
Melville, describing Hawthorne: “Still there is something lacking—a good deal lacking—to the plump sphericity of the man.”"


so-so (not so good)
Moby-Dick . . . a great white monster, with “a hump like a snow-hill . . .”
not Leucothea, not a white and winged goddess, protectress, who gave Ulysses an enchanted veil . . .
but moving out from this, from the closed and friendly Mediterranean, from the near ocean shores,
moving out, as Columbus, across the Atlantic, and, through Melville, into the Pacific:
the white gull become a white whale, cast in monstrous, malignant revenge . .

"I recall the cigars I smoked and gave away at the plant on the occasions of Mike Jr.’s birth, our firstborn; and, with the tobacco smoke, I taste again the pleasure, the pride that I enjoyed at that time—pride such as a man might feel at the mouth of the Mississippi or Amazon, sharing in those waters that push back the ocean, the waters they are in the act of joining . . ."

"He began telling a story—a wild tale about barbering among primitive Eskimos in Alaska, the natives being confused between haircuts and scalping. The customers seemed to know that he was lying, and this added to it . . ."

triple repetition (funny?):
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and
Seeing me awake, he lit another cigar, handed it to me. I smoked, held my head in my hands, tried to reconstruct the evening. Carl finished SUPERMAN, picked up CLAREL, and

melville: “Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.” - 'more annihilated than repentant'
Obnoxious Carl, quoting Melville ( )
  Joe.Olipo | Nov 26, 2022 |
The experience of reading Genoa was disturbing. It wasn't simply the setting, a two hour drive from here. It was a vertigo, the weight borne by the protagonist. There's a Stoner-type grace to the character in his labor. This uphill toil is something palpable. I can relate, along with the anxiety. The whispered doubt. The shudders. I recoil from this awareness and accept it as my own, or at least something similar. I thought the collage mechanic rather effective. I liked the twinning of Melville and Columbus. There's something visceral in their failure: the ache of their arc. It was interesting that as I read this novel, my best friend kept sending me pictures from his holiday in Cuba. There's much to measure in that distance. The crash of waves against a relative silence. Though Metcalf informs us early in the book that where I sit typing was once the floor of an ocean and later just south of an enormous glacier. I carried our rock salt down to the basement last weekend. I never opened the bag and the traces of actual snow this past winter were more of a joke than a hazard. The final insertion of Dreiser and Debs didn't work for me, though it must be admitted that all of my trips to Terre Haute were to see my best friend. I had contemplated a Melville project with various adjacent texts including Olson and Perry Miller. I'm not sure about that at the moment. ( )
  jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |
I love this book. But I don't get it.
I mean, I get the fictional story that is told, about Michael's brother Carl. At least, I get what happened. But I'm not sure of its significance. Or how it relates to Melville, or Columbus, or any of the other connections that are made. I mean, at times I could see the connection. But I don't understand the bigger picture. Was there a bigger picture? I'd love to hear what other people think.
See, despite this, despite me not 'getting' it... I really liked this book. It is a thrill to read, to learn about Carl, and to read the thoughts and readings that Michael quotes, to see the connections he is trying to make, or happens to make. I love Melville's writing, so of course I'm going to love a book that quotes freely from him and intersperses it into these thoughts that Michael is having.
I don't know. This book had me hooked from the beginning to end. And now I want to know more about it.
For those that don't know, and want a run-down: Michael Mills is an club-footed MD who refuses to practice. He comes home, feeds himself and his children, and then retires to the attic. The whole book takes place, let's say, over one night, as Michael ruminates about his brother Carl, his family history (he is related to Melville), and freely associates his thoughts with quotes from Melville, with the Columbus myth, with spermatazoa, and everything in between.
I want to read it again...

Just found this review. It is excellent. Behold:
As to the question of man’s monstrous inheritance, Metcalf admirably avoids offering up easy answers — the emphasis on literature does not lead the narrator to suggest that we as a species are redeemed in any way by instances of artistic excellence, nor does the narrator offer up literature as some method for finding solace. But the sympathy Mills has for Columbus, despite crimes committed upon the native population of the lands he “discovered”; for Melville, who doomed his family to penury with his will to fame; and, finally, for his murderer brother, points to the way literature can aid an understanding of monsters and their crimes. It is a simple truth, one that is easily forgotten, and one that the family members of those killed in Charleston seemed to acknowledge when they offered the murderer their forgiveness: Buried within every monster is a man.
( )
1 vota weberam2 | Nov 24, 2017 |
Who is Paul Metcalf?

I wondered the same when I first saw his name, about nine years ago, listed in my absolute favorite top 100 novels list: Larry McCaffery's The 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction, a list focused primarily on the most innovative of modernist works, as well as every novelistic niche under that little read (and perhaps lesser understood) literary umbrella known as "postmodernism".

McCaffery featured on his list innovative writers (James Joyce, William Gaddis); the avant gardish types (Robert Coover, John Hawkes, Kathy Acker); the poster-boys of postmodernity (Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, David Foster Wallace); the magical realists (Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez); the metafictiony masters (John Barth, Raymond Federman); the linguists (Gertrude Stein, William H. Gass) who replaced plot with language; all of them (and too many more to itemize by name) digressive loopty-loopters who pushed the limits of the novel structurally, narratively, point of view-wise, in ways previously unimagined in literature, assuming we disregard Laurence Sterne's (Tristam Shandy) contribution, as well as Rabelais a couple centuries even earlier, writers both who were essentially writing postmodern literature in the 1700s and 1500s, respectively.

But Sterne and Rabelais are the rare exceptions to what exploded in the 1960s: Narrative that shed the modernist trappings of its more orthodox forebears and embraced instead, in sum, loose linguistics, loose allusions, loose plots (if any), loose connections and non-linearity. Trading obvious meaning, in other words, for secret meanings if not meaninglessness altogether. Fiction that was so experimental it was next to impossible to read at times, like Finnegans Wake or The Making of Americans or Gravity's Rainbow or, the ironically titled, The Recognitions; but fiction, nevertheless, in its oft-purple prose you could not possibly read aloud without pausing often to take a breath (or pausing for your oxygen mask), that was, despite its difficulties, typically fun to read for the sheer flamboyance of it's riffing prose, as if the language itself were shot up with steroids and pranced around in the ring flexing its obscenely large muscles (to the boos of most in the old guard and to the delirious cheers of a hyper, younger minority); literature so loathed (and yet so loved), that it left no middle ground among its audience: You were either in to it all out, or you couldn't stand any of it, no doubt! There was no middle ground.

Paul Metcalf, essayist, poet, under-appreciated postmodern novelist, ranked in the 43rd slot of McCaffery's cult classic list, was definitely in to it. He wrote some weird, and at times, indecipherable shit, to put it bluntly (try making heads or tails of his Araminta and the Coyote) and found no fame or wealth for his lifelong efforts. Just like his great-grandfather before him ... Herman Melville.

Paul Metcalf indeed had some big shoes to fill as a writer, didn't he? The pressure was on. He admitted as much to feeling it. He found being the great-grandson of Herman Melville burdensome, and so went mainstream a bit (for him) when he wrote Genoa: A Telling of Wonders in 1965, his most accessible, and mostly unknown, masterpiece.

Genoa was the novel he had to write in order to get the Melville monkey off his back. No surprise, then, that Melville infiltrates this short, but dense, novel. Though calling it a novel may be inaccurate in describing what Metcalf accomplishes here, as he skillfully weaves together throughout the complex, shifting narrative of Genoa, chunks of quotations from both the works of Melville and the man who influenced him, Christopher Columbus, the latter through his letters and diaries. What Metcalf does with these two legendary oceanic adventurers' writings is not all that dissimilar in concept to what Burroughs did with his "cut-up" technique: chopping up parallel themes and motifs (rather than sentences a la Burroughs) and inserting them in just the right spots to advance the narrative of his novel. A haunting novel of the story of one soul searching man, Michael Mills, presumably Metcalf’s alter ego, desperate for answers, and Carl Mills, his brother, who suffers, we soon learn, from a progressively debilitating, ultimately incapacitating, unspecified mental illness.

The novel opens with Michael Mills in the attic of his home, rummaging through old copies of Melville texts, reminiscing when he and his brother, Carl, discovered old Melville artifacts in the attic of their childhood home in Pittsfield, MA. His reminiscing takes us back to the beginnings for not only he and his brother, but to the nautical and novelistic beginnings of Melville and Columbus. We learn of Melville’s first visits to Polynesia, the setting for his first novel, Typee, and of Columbus’ first voyage across the Atlantic. We read of ensuing voyages, and how those experiences for both affected their psychological and philosophical worldviews. Weaved between the quotations of the two icons, we witness the lives of the Mill's brothers drifting irreparably apart as Carl flounders out -- unreachable -- upon some raging sea inside him, carried farther and farther out to sea by the constant currents of his unhealable madness. The story of Carl’s demise into madness recalls that of the Pequod’s -- and it's captain -- in Moby-Dick (and Metcalf makes the connection clear), while Michael’s repeated attempts to reach across to Carl, over what amounted to a very un-Pacific Ocean of storming insanity, echoed Columbus’ failed attempts to regain the favor, recognition, and support of the Spanish Monarchy for his "blasphemous" expeditions. The Catholic Church was certain the World was flat back then, you might recall, and Columbus proved the proud Church wrong, a dangerous (if not fatal) de-mythologizing endeavor in those days.

Metcalf likewise de-mythologizes, or, rather, humanizes the legend of Melville. Melville had a son commit suicide. Melville's own father died of a mania related madness. Melville suffered, like we all suffer, and he might've been, if we're to believe Metcalf's inside-information gleaned from Genoa, just a tad mad himself. And mad, that is, much like the madness of Carl's -- the veritable, familial white whale -- that Michael Mills must confront, and maybe make some personal peace with.

Metcalf worked his melding storytelling magic to perfection, intermingling Melville's and Columbus' complicated lives, legends, de-mythologizings, and quotations, along with Michael Mills' first person storyline, into one seamless narrative triumphantly: Three voices, in effect, simultaneously speaking, but sounding (and reading) like a single coherent voice, written by one author. A single voice tossed often into its respective troughs of individual despair, yes, but lifted inevitably, despite the melancholy and suffering taking their indefatigable tolls on every person, into individual and collective peace. Acceptance. Again, each individual strand comprising the rope of narrative: Melville's, Columbus', Michael's, Carl's, and toward the conclusion, even a bit of Theodore Dreiser's and the Lewis and Clark expeditions'; no matter their individual outcomes good or bad, collectively attained varying levels of peace with their lives, once the narrator, Michael Mills, reconciled himself with his own past, and with the present plight of his doomed brother. In so doing, Metcalf, vicariously, reconciled himself to the shadow he'd lived under, that brilliant, but daunting, legacy of his great-grandfather, Herman Melville. Sounds like Metcalf experienced a catharsis of Pequodian proportions, I'd say!

Genoa: A Telling of Wonders is a wonderful, complex and profound read. I fear I've not quite done Metcalf's accomplishment (and his genius in accomplishing it) the justice it deserves. So do yourself a favor and read Genoa: A Telling of Wonders, and discover why Larry McCaffery included it in the upper half of his list, The 20th Century's Greatest Hits. I doubt you'll be disappointed. ( )
6 vota absurdeist | Mar 19, 2008 |
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"[Genoa] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time."--William Gass,The New York Times "Genoa is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology--all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century."--Publishers Weekly "Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination."--Robert Creeley "A unique work of historical and literary imagination, eloquent and powerful. I know of nothing like it."--Howard Zinn First published in 1965,Genoa is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothers--one, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song. Paul Metcalf (1917-99) was an American writer and the great-grandson of Herman Melville. His three volumeCollected Works were published by Coffee House Press in 1996.

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