The anti-Mailer (fwd)

[Chris Stolz]

I quite sympathise with him--
 look at the public big male writers-- Grass, Mailer, Bellow,
 Updike, Garcia-Marquez-- in each (least so with the Columbian),
 the public personality and the possibility of communicating
 directly and non-artistically have taken over the  writer part of
 these men.  Mailer and Bellow are windbags, Updike a featherweight
 and Grass a guilty liberal German (at least Grass is a useful
 politician).  Marquez has had his moments, I suppose...
 
 This may all just be personal, however.  My favorite writers were all
 non-celebrities (Richardson, Proust, Kafka, Musil, Pynchon).
 There is, I think, something to be said for being a person first
 and a writer second.  Pynchon's work is often dismissed by people
 as being too intellectual and not "human" enough, which I take to
 mean that his concerns are not primarily psychology and the
 narration of a developing self.  However, it gets glaringly
 obvious as you read his work that those funny fictional devices
 with the strange names-- his characters-- become sometimes engagingly and
 heartfeltly realistic and moving.  I really get the feel, reading
 _V._ and _CL49_, that the narrator wants to get through to his
 readers on a very basic and, uhh, human level.  It's in the tone
 (something too much ignored in criticism of Pynchon):  his
 narrators are sincere (in the early work at least), and you
 really get the feeling that he imagined his characters as thinking and
 emotional people as well as just fictional devices.
 
         I think his
 public silence may be an attempt to preserve for himself the
 possibility of personally staying connected with the many
 different (class, racial, economic) realities and their
 inhabitants which public writerhood often prevents.
 
         Mailer and Bellow have become wonderful public speakers
 (and terrible novellists), but it is incredibly obvious that their
 own class, racial and social backgrounds severely inhibit their
 ability to get through to people from different backgrounds, as 
 well as writing about these backgrounds.   All
 I can say is, I think that Pynchon has taken those who live near
 the so-called margins of white and powerful U.S. society more
 seriously and intelligently than either Bellow or Mailer, and I
 for one imagine that his work would appeal more to, say, black
 people, or a non-middle-class crowd, than Bellow's or Mailer's
 would.  As a Canadian, I find that Pynchon brings out the best of
 American culture, while I see Bellow and Mailer as exemplars of
 much of its (middlebrow) worst.
 
 
         Pynchon's fiction, it seems to me, often concerns the problems of
 getting through to different worlds.  Oedipa uses the Tristero to
 skirt the possibility of directly confronting the world at the
 edges of her vision, and _V._ has as one of its central themes
 the inward lookingness of late European colonial culture (and of
 pre-Civil-rights America) and the difficulty which members of the
 dominant culture have in seeing the other side of the world.
 These novels, I think, also stress how easy it is for the world
 one builds (a la _Citizen Kane_) to become a trap.  And in his
 remarkable essay on Watts, P. writes that the beginning of
 understanding the reailties of L.A. and Watts lies in getting
 *out* of the endless media mirrors and by taking a walk, on your
 own two feet, down to where those other people live...as the
 writer, in a low-key and open-minded way, himself did when writing
 his article.
 
         Pynchon's silence allows him to move as an ordinary person
 through the world, rather than having to live constantly reminded
 by media, fans and academics, of his life as a writer.  He can
 remain a guy who writes, instead of becoming a Writer.
 
         Or maybe it's for family reasons.  He wants his wife and kids (if
 he has any) to have normal lives, an admirable motive indeed.
 
 
 chris