My reading of TRP

[Jules Siegel]

RICHARD ROMEO wrote: 

> Having met Mr. Pynchon, do you feel that has had any effect in any way on your reading of his work?

This is going to be a rather long reply, because in order to answer your
question accurately I have to talk about myself more than about Tom and
I also have to present some background on the power politics of
linguistic style. Since Arne Herløv Petersen asked me for some
biographical information, this may not be a complete waste of the
group’s interest.

If I hadn't known him, I might never have read V. I was into W. Somerset
Maugham, John O'Hara and John LeCarré, among other novelists. I never
liked Faulkner, but read him as a duty. I thought Hemingway was a
pompous jerk, but I was enchanted by Raintree County by Ross Lockridge,
Jr. (a very under-appreciated and complex masterpiece) and Moby Dick, so
it's not just clarity of style that I go for. My SOHO friends used to
jeer when I tried to explain to them how great Norman Rockwell was.
Robert Grossmann once said very fondly, "Jules, you have a touching
nostalgia for reality." All art is abstract art, however. Rockwell is no
more realistic than Rauschenberg. He is just more accessible.

I realize that I am condemning myself here to being dismissed as
bourgeois and trivial. This may be true, but I see linguistic (and
visual) style in terms of power politics. English spelling has never
been regularized the way most other modern languages have because it is
a tool of class warfare. If you don't learn how to spell English by age
12 or so, you never will, just the way you will never be able to speak a
foreign language without an accent if you learn after puberty. I believe
that Spanish, Italian and French spelling were regularized under
Napoleon in order ease the path to mass literacy. After the Russian
Revolution, the Russian language was extensively revised. Old Church
Slavonic characters were removed from the alphabet. Modern Russian may
be the world’s most logical language. It is easy to learn and easy to
write. When Stalin was firmly in power, my Russian teacher used to say,
"In Russian, as in Russia, there are no exceptions to the rules."

As with everything British, our deliberately eccentric spelling system
is used in several ways by the ruling class to maintain the upper hand.
Among them:

[1] If you spell impeccably and are not a member of the ruling class,
you are a grind.

[2] If you are a member of the lower classes and you can't spell, you
deserve to be poor because you were born stupid.

[3] If you are an upper class snot and you can't spell, it's a
reflection of your status--you don't have to spell when you are born so
well; your servants do it for you.

As you may know, there are two competing systems of English grammar,
prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive grammar is usually based on
the rules of Latin and Greek, which are declined languages -- that is,
words are inflected to indicate their meaning, as in whom, which is a
kind of fossil. Russian is a highly declined language with precise
shades of meaning defined by strictly regular changes in suffixes and
prefixes. As a result it is eloquently terse. English language
translations of Russian novels are so long because English requires
approximately one-third more words than Russian to express similar
ideas. Descriptive grammar is based on English as it is used. Modern
English is not a declined language but a syntactic language. The
position of the word in the sentence tells you what it means. You often
cannot understand the word unless you understand the sentence, the
paragraph and even the whole work. I am being quite simplistic here, and
I will welcome correction by any linguists reading this, but I think
that you will find me accurate in outline.

When I was younger, a very Latinate prescriptive grammar was taught in
private schools and descriptive grammar was taught in public schools.
When I attended Cornell, we were given a freshman English grammar
qualifying exam which I failed miserably because I had never heard any
of the terms they used. So prescriptive grammar was a kind of invisible
affirmative action program for the well-born. I never forgot that bitter
lesson, nor did I ever have the luxury of writing very much merely to
please. At first, I wrote mostly at the behest of others to promote
their points of view. I worked simultaneously in the Nixon and JFK
campaigns in 1960. Even as a free-lance writer,  I wrote to inform,
sometimes to convince.

Writing was almost always an instrument of economic power for me,
whether my own or someone else's. I had to struggle very hard to
maintain my own sense of self. When I realized that people were reading
what I wrote and it was affecting their lives, I tried to be faithful to
the truth and to the interests of the class into which I was born. That
made me a very difficult writer to deal with me. It also made me
essentially incapable of truly appreciating the merely decorative in
writing. I was irrevocably scarred by the facts of life in our time. I
had to take larger and larger doses of amphetamine in order to mediate
these contradictions. During the 1970s, I began to give up writing and
turned to visual art, writing out books in my own handwriting for the
sheer pleasure of the action of writing. Eventually, I gave up defining
myself as a writer and turned to graphic design as a profession. Here I
am only interested in the decorative and the trivial and I have no
pretensions at all and I am much happier for it.

I don't know whether Tom studied prescriptive or descriptive grammar. I
do know that despite his family’s middle-class economic situation, he
had ruling class prejudices and a ruling class higher education which
were reflected in his style of writing. He is a decorative writer, as
befits his status. His writing is an expression of his sexuality, like
the male bird’s brilliant plumage. My writing has always been
utilitarian, as befits my status as a low-born prole. It is the nest,
rather than the song. He once wrote me: "I am a spider, spinning my web
out of my own substance. You are a bumblebee, going from flower to
flower gathering pollen and nectar." I took this as an insult, but it
was a very great compliment.

Summing up: Had I not known him, I would probably have dismissed his
work as obscure and essentially useless. I wasn't interested in solving
lengthy literary crossword puzzles (although I once astounded a group of
fellow students in the Hunter College cafeteria by completing the New
York Times crossword puzzle in ink). I read his work not because I found
it fascinating, but because he was my friend. When he stopped being my
friend, I stopped reading his work.


-- 
Jules Siegel Website: http://www.caribe.net.mx/siegel/jsiegel.htm
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