The comparison with Westerns is an interesting one to me, because lately I've been thinking about the writer who has remade the Western: Cormac McCarthy. I find him more Homeric than Virgilian. The pace of his books is as relentless as that of the _Iliad_ (if anything, McCarthy's characters exist even more strictly in the present), and there is a similar sense of the non-progress of humanity, and the persistence of an inscrutable, violent world (although McCarthy's world is even more inscrutable than Homer's, for there are no divine characters). And McCarthy has been able to study the history of the West and dissect out the essential while leaving behind the full weight. It reminds me of how heavily History sits on the _Aeneid_, and prevents it from soaring to the heights of the _Iliad_. ............................................................................ ..............
"Do they really know each other, do they really give anything to each other? or is all they have to share this ... same conspiracy against reality they try to share with me?" William Gaddis, _The Recognitions_ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
