CORRESPONDENCE:

...Gilkey is well-taken), what is at issue, then, is the problem of the limits of the right of any state to sovereign control over its resources...

...Taylor's models for McHale (Joyce in "The Dead," Steinbeck in East of Eden, Frost in "Desert Places") are perverse...

...To wit, by and large the United States has not cut off exports of food supplies needed by underdeveloped nations...

...It is certainly off the mark in reading McHale...

...O'Neill, but look you straight in the eye and give you one of the least chic of all cliches: two wrongs don't make a right...

...As to the former, there is the matter of the distinction between military attack and economic strangulation, which raises the thorny issue of a definition for the term aggression in the context of an economically interdependent world...

...But do not tell McHale to write sadder books...

...Oil prices, on the other hand, rose from $1.80/bbl in December of 1970 to $11.65/bbl in October of 1973-an increase arising from economic considerations to be sure (e.g., resource depletion), but from political and ideological ones as well...

...Despite the success or failure of these attempts, they were constructive gestures undertaken in response to pleas for help, pleas in the form of fire, blood, looting, and destruction-the (Continued on page 92) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 67) only language our society seems to understand...

...Gilkey's position on the moral issue, if I understand it aright, is that there is a distinction to be made between self-defense in the event of overt attack and self-defense in the event of economic strangulation...

...There is racism in both South Boston and Roxbury and it is ugly to be sure...

...Taylor may not want McHale to do this, but he does...

...Like most accounts of the busing situation in Southie, his tends to present a condescending, condemning view of the lower-middle-class Irish Catholic population in the area while, at the same time, he takes the rather tiresome, worn-out position of the intellectual white liberal in offering chic sociological explanations for the roots of the Black community's problems...

...Recent issues of magazines such as Harper's and Commentary have carried articles setting out in some detail the strategy and tactics for such intervention, and it is a relief to find that there are yet those who would refrain from saber-rattling in a discussion of the issue...

...There are, however, serious flaws in Prof...

...earned wealth (acquired through labor, skill, and intelligence) to those already inordinately rich and becoming more so with each day, who contribute nothing of themselves to what they claim and sell as their own, is not a condition likely to produce either friendship or peace...

...Alinsky's Diamond, he writes, "would be about the mysterious and sudden coalescence of random or disjointed circumstance into the supreme fact of terror, of paralyzing, existential fear...

...How sure is McHale's grasp here...

...in response to economic strangulation, it would be we, and not they, who would instigate the attack...

...Class oppression is a serious evil and its elimination will certainly make easier the elimination of racism, but that is a long-range process as things look now and blacks should not be asked to wait for its completion...

...O'Neill, nor in most of the rest of America...

...In fact (though naturally I do have "norms of value for a literary text," both conscious and unconscious), I read McHale with no particular expectations, generic or otherwise-still less with an a priori notion of what he is trying to do...

...American leaders cannot and should not accede to the argument that the time has come for the developed countries to share out their ill-gotten gains with the formerly exploited less-developed countries...

...You don't know Boston-South, North, East or West...

...In two out of the three novels, and in major sections of Farragan's Retreat, McHale tries to develop a comic vision of life or at least of the particular, ethnic materials he works with...

...With the problem stated in this form, the specter which arises is not that of the United States rattling its sabers in response to a challenge to its luxuries ("our mammoth autos and our unique levels of consumption"), espousing the communal nature of any property we need but do not possess...

...For whom is terror "the supreme fact...

...They refer the reader to ill-defined contexts, as ill-defined as Taylor's concept of what McHale has been trying to do...

...but because they do this same thing, less well...

...As Taylor says, not so sure as it might be...

...But is the matter all that clear-cut...

...There has been violence and bloodshed and destruction in South Boston, yet no one, including Mr...

...In the extreme case, enemy troops wielding guns on American shores might not be qualitatively distinct from foreign oil company managers wielding control over costs and prices in an American (or world) economy heavily dependent on their oil, or at least heavily dependent on the financial resources having to be expended to obtain that oil...

...But granted that such an extreme case has yet to arise, there are yet problems with the application of the moral principle to current realities...

...I heard those languages loud and clear in South Boston...

...Surely in reading novels, one must be especially observant of the old critical saw: do not criticize an author for the book he didn't write...

...mark taylor Warring for Oil Cambridge, Mass...

...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published.turally have a better chance of being published...

...Cort quotes himself as asking a Southie resident the following: "Did you ever think that maybe one of the reasons for the crime and murder in Roxbury is that black people are rebelling against the discrimination and injustice of the past...

...And it is this problem of the application of the moral principle which must be dealt with since, as Paul Seabury pointed out in a recent issue of the New Leader, "Protracted deprivation brought about by a transfer of...

...And they are not doing that in South Boston, Mr...

...In this arena the appeal to purported historical analogies to the cases of mid-century Germany or Japan is destructive...

...If you are trying to say, and you seem to be, that in the city of Boston the Irish are as oppressed as the blacks, then you had better come back to Boston and take a second look...

...to our well being," -this, he asserts, is morally absurd and self-contradictory...

...georoe m. caldwell Harvard Divinity School Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...

...Neither alternative seems particularly palatable, but it would seem to be in the interests of the United States to let it be known that the freedom of oil-producing states to move their fists is not unlimited...

...MICHAEL C. O'NEILL Reply Mr...

...28] Langdon Gilkey provides a succinct statement of the case against the now much-discussed possibility of American military intervention in the Middle East in response to oil price increases...

...Leaders of the black community answered Dr...

...The difference between the oppression of poor Irish and the oppression of poor blacks is not simply a difference in degree but a difference in kind, because the latter is compounded and intensified by another factor, the racism of rich and poor Irish, rich and poor WASP, rich and poor what-have-you...

...Department of English Fordham University Reply Gerard Reedy refers to McHale's "comic vision of life," magisterially insists that McHale is "working in the genre of the comic novel," and brands as "ill-defined" my "concept of what McHale has been trying to do," all by way of taking exception with my "generic expectations from McHale...

...Furthermore, then, it is a refusal to make such a concession which Secretary of State Kissinger wishes to convey when he asserts that the United States would contemplate the use of force in the event of strangulation by the oil-producing countries...

...Prof...

...Encourage his comedy to refine and deepen itself...

...And maybe the Blacks and Whites of Boston will start to realize that their problems do not begin and end with a busride to school or the color of a person's skin, but are embedded in a society which discriminates against the poor and lower-middle-classes because oppression is a fundamental element of the industrial corporate state...

...Gilkey points out that in the case of military intervention by the U.S...

...All readers and critics, consciously or not, carry with them expectations from or norms of value for a literary text...

...And I found, I'm sorry, that Farragan's Retreat is a superb novel because it makes you shudder, or more precisely, because of the way it makes you shudder (by showing that the merely funny is not merely funny), and furthermore, that McHale's other novels are less successful, not because they do other things (of which I would presumably disapprove...

...He supports this view by pointing out that the logic of any argument to the contrary would lead to the conclusion that underdeveloped nations, already faced with rising prices for needed agricultural commodities, have a legitimate case for intervention when we suddenly cut off exports...

...Cort, is able to look at this activity not simply as racism, but as something deeper...

...For McHale...

...These are the books that McHale wrote, not the ones I wanted him to...

...Although much of his reportage is probably accurate-for I, too, have visited South Boston in an attempt to sort out matters there for myself and found the situation similar-he fails to delve beneath the surface coverage of select people and events...

...O'Neill makes some good points...

...No, an "emphasis on existential terror and shudder" is not my "critical rule of thumb," but I believe that it is exactly such an emphasis that Tom McHale's fiction has so far tried to force, which does make it, with respect to this fiction, a kind of supreme fact...

...For, particularly in the case of a democratic society, excessive focus on the moral issues of international politics could, in this matter, lead either to an attempted globalistic solution (America as the world's filling station attendant) or to a tit-for-tat policy of responding to third world economic initiatives in kind...

...This emphasis on existential terror and shudder may or may not be useful as a critical rule of thumb...

...This class oppression bit has some validity, but as you and others have used it the argument becomes a cop-out and an evasion of the fundamental issue...

...Indeed there are other, obvious works by these same authors that would illuminate McHale's comic vision and, granted, make one wish for more from it...

...Gilkey's approach to the problem, and a brief discussion of these might serve to point out the intractability of the issues-in particular the moral arguments-which the professor would have us believe are clear-cut...

...And maybe if the Christians among us could be true to their founder for a time, they would stop condemning and might understand and forgive and see themselves in their Southie brethren...

...Military action in the former case would be, in his view, justified...

...I shall try not to condescend, Mr...

...I disagree with Taylor's generic expectations from McHale...

...Of course, if Father Reedy wishes to ignore all the characters in McHale's work who anticipate and then die violent deaths (in the passages that I "isolate"), if he persists in believing that he has an inside track on what McHale has been trying to do, and if he allows a predetermined notion of comic decorum to erase or flatten out McHale's best moments, that's his business, but then, please, no more on the generic expectations of others...

...To the Editors: In his letter to the editors [Feb...

...Comedy is more or less mature and true to experience in its greater or lesser grasp of the anxieties and shudders of life-which it integrates, overcomes, and smiles at...

...Taylor usefully points some of these out...

...Taylor's are deaf in at least two places...

...It is, in fact, the cry of a ghetto of a different sort pleading in the language of violence, the only language America understands, for the right to shape their own destinies as human beings and to hold on tightly to what little opportunity to pursue happiness our class society has allowed them...

...Hardly...

...Robert Coles made similar points in a full-page piece in the Boston Globe last October...

...When our large cities erupted in awful violence during the sixties, we condemned the Black population for lawlessness, but offered them as a result of their bloody protests many, if ineffective and short-sighted, programs intended to improve their lot as human beings...

...In the absence of any clear-cut case of strangulation, or even of an adequate definition of the term, debate on the possible equivalence of military attack and economic strangulation gives way to the matter of these various specters raised by current realities or, more accurately, to the matter of inter-state perceptions, images, and intentions conveyed...

...Given the absence of a clear-cut case of economic strangulation, and given the various negative consequences of intervention by the United States alone in the absence of such a case (and, in pointing these out Prof...

...To begin with, the substance of Prof...

...There are two problems with this, one dealing with substance and the other with application...

...Meanwhile, there is a very simple little something that everyone, rich and poor, can do to relieve a major part of the oppression of black people, and that is simply to look upon them and treat them as human beings like our own beautiful white selves...

...I believe we would do well, in this context, to remember Felix Frankfurter's remark to the effect that "my freedom to move my fist is constrained by the proximity of your face...

...There are other languages beside violence that all elements in our society still understand, and among them are the languages of human respect, and disrespect...

...Moreover, such price rises as have occurred have been consistent with economic realities of factor costs, shortages of supply, and the consequences of inflation coupled with economic recession...

...I suggest we all ask ourselves if South Boston is not rebelling against these very same things and that we consider the possibility that striking out against busing forced upon them from outside their community might be their only means of rebelling against the discrimination and injustices being served upon them in a rigid class society...

...Something remains to be integrated perhaps...

...likewise, "what McHale can do at the top of his form, as he has shown once, is make you shudder . . ." (italics mine...

...Then, it would become impossible to label the busing problems as racism or prejudice, and we might begin to glimpse the complexities of the issue which have eluded us SO far...

...Coles and they answer you...

...This is all very easy, very pat, and very unhelpful...

...But perhaps we should,stop merely condemning South Boston and recognize, as we did with the Blacks in the sixties, that their outrage is symptomatic of our society's failure to fulfill the promise to all Americans of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...Rather the specter is the quite tangible one of oil-rich sheiks extracting undigestible, surplus revenues in the sale of unmanufactured commodities...

...GERARD REEDY, S.J...

...it is beside the point to isolate passages of "existential terror" in a writer working in the genre of the comic novel...

...McHale uses standard topoi freely (e.g., the henpecked husband, the eunuch, the picaresque journey), as comic writers frequently do...

...And the really chic sociology is on his side...

...JOHN C. CORT Ill-Defined Concepts Bronx, N.Y...

...To the Editors: Although I usually enjoy Mark Taylor's work in Commonweal, I am disappointed by his first "regular literary column" [McHale's Retreat," Mar...

...Should present conditions prevail over an extended period there is a danger of the recrudescence of American globalism and, more possibly, the threat of a new mercantilism...

...Such a concession would not only be of dubious wisdom, it would be, in fact, a concession to an argument based on often false premises -an ill-conceived exercise in breast-beating over economic disparities which have arisen, not so much from the nefarious activities of capitalist-imperialists, as from the strengths of certain forms of economic and political organization...

...Phrases like "Christ figures, of a sort" and "no perceptible metaphoric value" betray a want of thought...

...But military response in the latter case, "to steal whatever territories and goods belonging to others we may consider necessary to our survival or even...