(Fwd) Political Pynchon

[Chris Stolz]

fred Jameson is a classic mis-interpreter of third world
literature.  That article (among other things) participates fully
in the stereotype of the 3rd world as nothing more than an
ecconomic backwater, and takes the stupid old Marxist stance that
ideas are only a function of economic conditions, in (t)his case:
we are rich, and therefore have the luxury of writing
psychological novels, while the latin americans and africans
can't really do much more than fight the socialist struggle.

Carlos Fuentes has called Pynchon "the greatest living American
Latin-American writer."  He mentions in the same interview in the
Village Voice that Pynchon's technique is closer to the recent
magic realist tradition of Latin America than to any of the
American fictional currents (a dead-on observation, methinks).
I suspect that the ground shared by Pynchon and SOME of the magic
realists (the early Garcia-Marquez, for example) consists in a
refusal to take the vocabulary of either psychological realism (a
la Proust, James, Joyce, Woolf) or more traditionally "realist"
fiction, such as Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, as authoritative.  Like
the Guatemalan Nobel winner Asturias (who developed magic realism
as we know it in order to try and present the point of view of
Mayan Central Americans), Pynchon's fiction exists *between* the
categroies into which most literature fits (realism,
psychological, political, allegory, etc.).  Different kinds of
reality overlap in his work.  The psychological is as real as
abtract philosophy and politics.  His is the consumate modern
fiction because it is the synthesis of different ways of seeign
the world, rather than using one approach to suggest other points
of view (as "realist" fiction does).

Pynchon's closest literary relative-- and this is for some reason
never discussed, perhaps because it is a daunting task and
perhaps due to the language barrier-- is the austrian Robert
Musil, who, as George Steiner recently put it, refused to accept
that the philosophical and poetic, the technical and artistic,
are divergent alternatives.  Musil, however, is a much better
writer, the only 20th century writer to rank alongside Proust.

chris