 
                         20050709.01

                  Notes on The Pioneers (1)

     No sooner had the phantasmagoric echo of the July 8,
meeting of the Book Group faded, than I downloaded the next
"assignment", James Fenimore Cooper's "The Pioneers" from the
Gutenberg site on the Internet, and started to read, "Halb
zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin."  partly to assuage the
anxiety, mute and remote though it was, over the need to
become acquainted with a new book, not entirely dissimilar
with the need to become acquainted with a stranger, e.g. a
new patient. I plunged in and read the first nine-hundred
lines or so. In the background, or hovering overhead,
invariably is my own writing which demands at one and the
same time to be assimilated to and to be distinguished from
what I am reading; work for which I need both inspiration
from other sources and insulation, protection from them;
my own writing which persistently annoys me by flirting with
my consciousness, inviting me to spiritual intercourse from
which, at the last minute it withdraws, but in the face of
whose enticements I am helpless.

     As I started reading The Pioneers, I immediately looked
for the differences to distinguish it from Blithedale: with
which I had become familiar, - and of which, enamored. 
"Ach, wohl sind es andere Maedchen, doch die eine ist es nicht." 
and it occurred to me what I might well end up reading and
interpreting The Pioneers in the light of the Blithdale
Romance. I thought to myself: "Thus shines a good book in
a thoughtless world." And then the logical progression, if
one reads a random book in the light of a good book, why not
consider that perhaps all books are read in the light of The
Good Book. What makes the Bible "good" is of course, hagia
pneuma, sanctus spiritus, which as all transcendentalist-
existentialists know, comes from within; and thus makes all
scripture holy, makes, as Jonathan Mengs explained to Jacob
Doering, the Bible the prototype of all literature, makes
reading, makes the book and the reader's reflection on the
book a religious act in which he or she finds his or her
salvation. Hence the explanation why and how all books become
readable.

     That may require more than a modicum of faith, judging
from the first chapter which confronts the reader, right
before his very eyes, with the killing of a stag. I doubt
that Hawthorne would have presented his readers with so
insistent a picture of blood and gore and the wanton
destruction of one of God's creatures. But I will let it pass
for now, and read read on.

                         20050712.00

     If I have made no further attempt to read The Pioneers
this is the case, because if I had, I would have become
engrossed in the text to an extent that my preoccupation
with it would have interfered with the composition of
Die Freunde, the novel on which my work has recently been
more productive.  Whether I will interrupt to read
The Pioneers before the next book group meeting remains
to be seen.

     Meanwhile I reflect on the circumstance that any book
which is marketed becomes by virtue of that fact a mirror and
an index of the mentality of the population that chooses it.
One might even, relying on a crude statistical formula,
undertake to describe in terms of the literature of the
community, the intellectual, emotional, spiritual
characteristics of any given group of people.  In fact, the
reflection of literature and of the other species of art, is
the only access to the realities of the intellectual and
emotional life of a given time and place that we have.


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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
