Genoa: A Telling of Wonders - Paul Metcalf (week 2)
Details
Michael Mills, the narrator of Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (Paul Metcalf, 1965), is a trained physician who has abnegated all medical practice. Paralyzed by his professional responsibility and haunted by the crimes of his brother, he retreats to an isolated attic, where he meditates on fatherhood, loss, madness, health, faith, Herman Melville, Christopher Columbus, and the mysteries of the human body.
He particularly directs his thought to the grim science of "teratology," i.e., congenital birth defects. (The phenomenon, which originally signified "monstrous portents or wonders," renders the novel's subtitle.) The themes of inheritance and monstrosity converge upon American myth and history, where Michael wrestles with notions of genetic and historical determinism, and his withdrawal turns emblematic of the failures of science and civilization. The book itself presents like a "Frankenstein patchwork" of ruminations, memories, and quotations set off in disparate italics, boldface, and indentation.
Paul Metcalf (1917-1999) was the great-grandson of Herman Melville. He said that he wrote Genoa in order to escape the long literary shadow of his progenitor (not unlike the burdened quest of its narrator). The result is "truly, unmistakably original": a "helixing of quotation and consciousness, with its multiple fonts and its open-ended grammatical structures... and its huge, unquenchable obsessions with the past." (Rick Moody)
Schedule:
- Week 1 (8/23): Chapters 1-3
- Week 2 (8/30): Chapters 4-7
Genoa: A Telling of Wonders:
Collected Works of Paul Metcalf, Volume I:
Supplemental:
- Wonder song by Natalie Merchant
Extracts:
- "Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity." (Moby-Dick, 1)
- "... the department of Morbid Anatomy was his peculiar love; and... he had a most unsightly collection of Parisian casts, in plaster and wax, representing all imaginable malformations of the human members, both organic and induced by disease. Chief among these was a cast, often to be met with in the Anatomical Museums of Europe.... All your eyes and all your horrified soul were fast fascinated and frozen by the sight of a hideous, crumpled horn, like that of a ram, downward growing out from the forehead.... The horn seemed the mark of a curse for some mysterious sin, conceived and committed before the spirit had entered the flesh." (White-Jacket, 61)
- "What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?" (Moby-Dick, 89)
- "The bleakness, the savageness of glens between, seem to make Genoa rather the capital and fortified camp of Satan: fortified against the Archangels. Clouds rolling round ramparts aerial. &c." (Journals, 12 April 1857)
This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.