meshugginah posts

[Jules Siegel]

At 03:18 PM 07/4/97 -0400, MantaRay at aol.com wrote:
>We are, in the end, Jules, talking about authenticity and you are basing
your judgment of a fictional work against a personal experience which you
consider authentic, not reality itself.

This is cute, but it's really just double-talk. I was a reporter covering
the youth culture. I spoke to hundreds, perhaps thousands in communes, rock
bands, clubs, crash pads, jail cells. I know how people talked, just as I
know how Yiddish is spoken. No writer is more scrupulous about reality than
I am. I didn't see everything but I saw a very large sample. More than that,
I lived it.

Vineland is a caricature by someone who did not have very much close contact
and whose personal lifestyle is the opposite of the real world many seem to
believe he's attempting to portray. My point isn't that this is bad writing,
(although I could make that one, if I wished to be the target of the usual
inane flaming) but that this was my world and it grates me to see it
reflected in such an awkward and unfeeling parody. It's also annoying that
others seem to think this is the way things really were, that Thomas Pynchon
had a handle on the underground.

The thread started because Vaska commented that he seldom gets the wrong
word. In my experience in reading his work, he frequently is using words he
doesn't really quite appreciate in ways that he doesn't seem to have
carefully considered. In the last couple of months I have pretty much read
Gravity's Rainbow in full. I found many things in it that I admired, but
authenticity wasn't usually one of them. Vineland was quite disappointing,
to say the least, and not merely for the reasons I'm discussing here.

This kind of discussion is important because people are trying to understand
an infuriatingly difficult writer. There's all kinds of close textual
analysis going on. The presumption is usually that Pynchon is basing his use
of these words and figures of speech on some reality and that what he means
can be deduced by careful study and reference to the presumed sources.

I'm saying that the reality is mostly in his own head and has very little to
do with anything outside. These are invented worlds and they may have some
internal consistency but they do not correlate very well with the sources.
It's all library research and the OED and bits from TV and doggerel parodies
of songs that in some cases were actually masterpieces of popular poetry.

>The 60s are over. All these posers (like Clinton himself) who were fighting
the good fight don't amount to anything when they step aside from those
beliefs and screw the rest of us. 

You have my feelings exactly here. My position is that Thomas Pynchon was a
poser. He was someone off on the edge peeping in and he never had any kind
of real engagement with the time or its people. When I look at his works, I
see a kind of political cartoon in which I can recognize certain faces,
among them loved ones. They are drawn in a cold, grotesque style that tends
to ridicule rather than reveal their best qualities. Am I supposed to like this?

Despite what you say, historians do use fictional works as descriptive of a
time. Fiction is often political propaganda. It affects the way people think
about real-world issues and how they act on them. Pynchon's works do provide
a very accurate description of certain states of mind that were and are
typical of our time. The rest of it is not very accurate in a historical
sense. Some of it is even damaging, as in his drug gluttony scenes in
Gravity's Rainbow. Mascaro took me to task for even mentioning drugs when
talking about Pynchon's work. He felt this was politically uncool from the
drug using perspective. But it's OK for Pynchon to draw these absurdly
skewed and often ugly caricatures of drug users that have less merit than
Cheech & Chong and none of their warmth?

You're quite resentful about us Sixties types telling you that we tried to
change the world and failed. How do you think we feel when someone like
Thomas Pynchon is included among us? He's not even as close as Joan Didion
or Tom Wolfe, and believe me when I tell you that I cringe when I read their
stuff, although I have to say that Tom Wolfe did at least mix in with the
folks in an intense way before writing about them.

I am not criticizing Pynchon as an artist. I am informing those who consider
him some kind of historian that he is a primary source only sui generis,
that is of himself and not of the world he portrays. In these novels and
short stories he captured some of the spirit of our time at the expense of
its historical reality. You don't think that matters because you weren't
part of that historical reality. I was. You don't like what People magazine
does to people. To me, Thomas Pynchon is the literary version of People and
uses pretty much the same techniques. People is exquisitely well done from a
technical sense. That doesn't mean it can't be criticized for what it does
in a political sense. The same goes for Thomas Pynchon.


--Jules Siegel Apdo 1764 Cancun QR 77501
http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/jsiegel.htm