A Symbolic Pile-Up

A summary of the third installment of Some Unspeakably Wretched American Novel (1900):

A woman with a beautiful face but a slightly deformed body asks a sculptor to "realize" the urn from Keats' poem so that she might put it in the "wild garden" she's devising.

"I thought if  could see the vase I should understand how Keats felt when he wrote," she says.  "But now I feel that it must not stand in the garden.  It must be alone somewhere in the wood."

Three friends of the pair then walk up, examine the vase and profess confusion:

"'Ode to a Grecian Urn,' that was?" asks the scholar.

"The Keats poem?" inquires the doctor.

"The 'Bold Lover'—is that Lincoln?" bids his wife.

It is.  His beloved, the "happy melodist," the "mysterious priest" and those who accompany him to the sacrifice—they're all Lincoln.  One stands on a rock, bearing the President's "strong, homely, humorous face, a look of loneliness in the eyes."  Another has his "hands clasped, palms down, thinking of his life, of his boyhood, of the past."

Below the rock stands a "long, ungainly figure of Lincoln, the boy, in a hunting-shirt, his hand resting on an ax-handle, one foot on a log, a serious figure, in the brief pause from labor, considering with quiet, lineless face the future, as above him the complete [men] regarded an heroic past."

After assaying the sculptor's "realization" of Keats' poem, the scholar—who, at the moment, ismaking love to the sculptor's beautiful but lame patron—insults the "broken-backed chair" with "one cracked leg strengthened with twine and a splint of wood" performing the duty of a pedestal:

"Why did you put it on that hideous stool?  It is very beautiful, but the chair spoils it.  It is like putting a beautiful head on a distorted body."

His beloved's beautiful head swivels on its distorted body and everyone—Lincolns included—hyperventilates in horror.

What happened here?  So glad you asked:

You see, the sculptor swerved to avoid a strangely familiar disabled lady toddling across the interstate, slammed Ekphrasis-first into a parked Keats, looked behind him, gasped at the fleet of Lincolns bearing down on him and jumped from his ride just as the Great Emancipators began pounding it one model year after another after another after another.

His friends—who were following him but had been stranded by a red light the sculptor roared through—pull up, scream in disbelief, then follow a trail of blood across some well-manicured wilderness.  They quickly find the sculptor and his shaken patron deep in conversation about this transitory life—which they compare, unfavorably, to aesthetic immortality of the type enshrined in poesy.  Keats, Lincoln and how to keep Nature looking its most natural occupy the company until the scholar, crushing hard on his beloved, interrupts the gay proceedings with a thoughtless remark about the "lame" turn the conversation has taken, and everyone—dead Lincolns too—hyperventilates in horror.

What?  You have a better explanation?

Comments

[Chance]

"'Ode to a Grecian Urn,' that was?" asks the scholar.

The scholar's area of expertise clearly wasn't keats, as it's "Ode ON a Grecian Urn."

[History Geek]

My explanation? It means the author really wants me to have another rum and coke.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Chance, those aren't direct quotes from the novel, but I checked and he flubbed it, not me. Probably an artifact of the time, though, since everyone assumed they'd memorized everything and never double-checked a thing.

H.G., I'm right there with you. Except for the Coke, which I'm deathly allergic to. But the rum, yes, sometimes my subject's idiocies do drive me drink. Then again, as graduate students, that comes with the territory.

[john_m_burt]

All those Lincolns. Wow.

All I can think of is Dick Lupoff, in an essay in the book _All In Color For a Dime_, writing about a 1940s comic book artist whose characters all looked like Randolph Scott: "The hero is Randolph Scott. The wise old scientist is a bewhiskered Randolph Scott. The newsboy is young Randolph Scott. The damsel in distress is Randolph Scott in drag."

[Brian]

Indeed, Scott, graduate students are not driven to drink. They drink, because they are...