The Academy

[Jules Siegel]

Murthy Yenamandra wrote:
 
> Jules Siegel writes, among other things: [...] From what I see here, many of the people on the list have not been able to get through Gravity's Rainbow and, in fact, are here in order to understand it better.

I didn't write this. Steve Maas did. I believe it was a response to my
comment about academic art and writing in general. What I mean by
academic art is art that is created for the academy, which is not the
same as work studied by the academy.

This is going to be another lengthy reply. I'm sorry if I seem
long-winded and self-reflective in these explanations, but I am trying
to be precise. I am responding to the very evident seriousness of your
comments by telling you how my time looked to me and how I participated
in its construction, as I see that much of your difficulty with Tom's
writing is a result of living in a vastly expanded time zone. Gravity's
Rainbow is in one place. You're in another. You need a time machine to
get to where he was when he wrote it.

Let's go back to Cornell. I don't think that Tom necessarily created his
work for the academy. I do know that he studied writing at Cornell. I
only spent one very unhappy year there and wrote one short story which I
submitted to Epoch, the literary journal. It was rejected without
comment. I went over and talked to the faculty member who edited the
publication and he told me in a very frosty and condescending manner
that it was "too slick." When I challenged him to explain what he meant,
all he could offer was a single phrase, in which I described a gift to a
girl as having "the unmistakable sheen of sterling silver."

The story, which I lost a long time ago, was a very naturalistic
description of a young man's unrequited love set at a tawdry
middle-class students party in The Bronx. There was no symbolism, no
learned references, no complex language: just the bare relation of what
was said, what things looked like and how the boy felt. Today, I believe
they call this minimalism, although I don't know if that would include
how he felt.

Tom was always a diligent student. He got straight A's. I think it is
quite clear that his early work, as I pointed out in a previous posting,
reflects his academic training. What many found interesting was the way
he combined very contemporary material, including scientific thinking,
with the kind of writing methods then taught in college literature
courses. Academic scholarship is useful for uncovering the meaning of
works that have been clouded by time, or are otherwise difficult to
appreciate. Because of the evolution of the English language, you can't
really understand Shakespeare without a gloss. Some of his terms have
opposite meanings today. Then there is the problem of establishing the
original text. I'm sure you all have been through these courses and
understand what I'm saying.

Everyone wants to get good marks in school. More than that, most writers
begin without a plan or a life theme. If you go to the University of
Missouri they teach you how to write newspaper copy. If you went to
Cornell in 1954, they taught you how to write the kind of works that
they studied, not necessarily in a direct pedagogic formula, but by
implication. Literature was important because it was studied, it seemed;
therefore, to obtain approval, one wrote works that lent themselves to
study. This is where Pynchon began. I don't know where he has gone. I
was taught how to write by working writers and editors: Mario Puzo,
Bruce Jay Friedman, among others. These are two very different
disciplines. They are not mutually incompatible, but there is a great
deal of antagonism on both sides. Academics once held popular writing
(and art) in contempt. This aroused resentment among writers and artists
who did not fit their criteria.

Example:

> 
> "That's Not Art, That's Illustration"
> 
> Almost everybody is an artist these days. Rock-and-roll singers are artists. So are movie directors, performance artists, makeup artists, tattoo artists, con artists, and rap artists. Madonna is an artist because she explores her own sexuality. Snoop Doggy Dogg is an artist because he explores other people's sexuality. Victims who express their pain are artists. So are guys in prison who express themselves on shirt cardboard. Even consumers are artists when they express themselves in their selection of commodities. The only people left in America who seem not to be artists are illustrators.
> 
> --Brad Holland, from his book Illustration America,
> as excerpted in The Atlantic, July, 1996.


To see this debate more clearly, allow me to move the discussion to
another field, Top 40 radio. Bob Dylan was a campus hero when he wrote
mass market songs using the methods of the folk song and acoustic
instruments. When he turned to rock and electric guitar, he was
literally howled off the stage at Newport. At about the same time, 1965,
I wrote "The Big Beat," for Cavalier, a Playboy knock-off, in which I
used academic methods of cultural analysis on Top 40 music. Other
journalists -- especially the British -- were edging in the same
direction, but my piece was acknowledged at the time as having defined
and synthesized a new way of looking at popular music.

During the years that followed, rock criticism evolved into an industry.
People began writing music to fit this industry, which before long
became a subset of  the academy. Believe me when I tell you that a
course in the cultural significance of rock would have been a joke in
1963. I am not saying that this began with my article, but that my
article was an expression of an emerging consciousness, exemplified by
"A Whiter Shade of Pale," the consummate synthesis of classical style
and modern content. The Academy hit the Top 40 Number One with a Bullet.

Pynchon, I think, is kind of a literary version of Procul Harum. He is a
university-trained writer whose training is reflected in his methods and
whose interests are reflected in his content. He requires elucidation
because his interests are so varied, ranging from lowdown jokes to
highbrow science. This elucidation has become even more important as his
sources have become clouded by time. Many of you have no idea what the
Sixties were like. You're too young. Few Americans my age need banana
peel smoking explained. How many of any of us have had the freedom or
inclination to spend day after day in the library pursuing anything at
all that interested us at the moment? Tom did, so what was easy and
familiar to him was often obscure to anyone else. He has become a puzzle
in his own lifetime not so much because he deliberately wrote puzzles,
but also because the frenetic evolution of modern information technology
and marketing has speeded up the passage of perceived time.

If anyone wants me to continue this theme, let's hear some civilized
questions and additions.


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