Meshugginah posts, and other things sundry

[Vaska]

Tom Stanton writes:
>Would you have us dismiss Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" because he
>got some entomology wrong? 

[etc.]

Since when has criticism come to equal indifference or a refusal to engage
with a writer's work?  If God is in the details, let's make sure some imp
hasn't managed to wriggle himself in there, too.  

Jody seems upset that I've dared to suggest Pynchon's got careless since
_GR_: don't shoot the messanger, folks.  If we admire Pynchon, as I do, for
[among other things] the intricate care he brings to his craft as a writer,
and if we also tend to see this as an ethical stance of some importance and
value, as I again do, then let's not descend to any further attempts at
hagiography here.  Instead, let's go back for a moment and look at the
number of messages posted in the last 2 months that suggest _M&D_ is riddled
with tiny little flaws of chronology, fact, etc.  Whenever someone's brought
up an example of a certain sloppiness, say, in _M&D_, various people have
jumped in to argue -- oh, just about anything to spare Pynchon and perhaps
themselves the embarrassment of having to admit that yes, the man has been
caught napping.  What is this?  White House spin-doctoring during Reagan's
second term?  Now that's what I'd call embarrassing.

>He complains that "Vineland" isn't accurate reportage as
>further support. 

I had the impression that the point Jules was trying to make addresses the
issue of Pynchon's entire political perspective in _Vineland_.  Part of
which perspective expresses itself in the way Pynchon chose to represent
that particular time and place, and the people involved, in his novel.  All
of which strike me as very legitimate questions to raise.

>It isn't that we cannot face the
>criticism -- I can find a lot I don't like in "Vineland" -- but that the
>basis of
>the critique is one person's recollection, supported as ever by the fact that
>he writes more clearly, more truthfully, and more sincerely than TRP. Others
>who have chimed in on their NC experiences in support of TRP's rendition
>tend to be ignored and/or shouted down. 

I really think it's a pity the issue was raised by Jules rather than someone
else, since people on this list tend to dismiss his interventions on purely
personal grounds.  As I mentioned in another post, I do think that
"athenticity" is a red herring.  Look at it this way: until a certain
African writer dared raise some objections to what Conrad was doing in
_Heart of Darkness_, for example, no one had noticed the points the African
guy had to make.  This strikes me as more than roughly analogous to what's
going on here, on this list, right now.  And it's not a matter of some
clumsy wording here and there: the most neutral term I can think of at the
moment is perspective.  We haven't even begun to talk about that, yet.

>Please show us the text where TRP claim of the "writer's ability to get the 
>truth of that lived life in a way that may escape a 'mere' historian" in
>any of his
>work. 

The quotation was posted on this list just a few weeks ago.  Please refer to
the archives.  

>TRP appears to have gone to great lengths to leave himself & his 
>personal life out of the discussion altogether in order to focus on the text, 
>not on whether he was there & living the life he's written about. There are
>no relationships between TRP's "life" and what he wrote, and this disconnect
>is deliberate. 

The expression I used, "lived life," did not refer to Pynchon's private life
at all.  I don't know why you read it in that sense.  Somewhere in _GR_
Pynchon has this passage about the city [I'll go find it now]: yes, it's
about the city as a place of communal life, containing all that "pedestrian
mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful
piece of street ... [where] dialectics, matrices, archetypes [may all]
connect, once in a while, back to some of that proletarian blood, to body
odors and senseless screamings across a table, to cheating and last hopes
[without which] all is dusty Dracularity, the West's ancient curse...." (GR,
262-3).  This may go some way towards elucidating what I had in mind.  

Now for the second point: we do not *know* that Pynchon has left himself or
his personal life our of his fiction.  We simply have far too little
evidence to make any such conclusions at all -- and pace everything Joyce
has said on this topic, I do find it hard to imagine a writer capable of
achieving such a feat of extra-terrestrialism.  Put this last remark down to
some quirk of my own, some failure of the imagination, if you like.  The
fact remains that we have absolutely no reason to believe that "[t]here are
no relationships between TRP's "life" and what he wrote."  Pynchon's
reticence on this, and his fierce resolve to keep as much as he can about
his private life away from the public eye, may just as well point to the
opposite.  I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here.

>Jules' complaint is that TRP did not live the radical life,
>took no
>risks, stayed on the sidelines and went to the library for his facts, and thus
>cannot have got it right, or, worse, manipulated the facts and the scene to
>create his own world. At the risk of offending, I must now say -- DUH?! Of
>course he did! That is the whole point of the work of creating fiction -- to 
>create *your* world, tell *your* story, and deliver *your* message, making 
>choices as you go along. 

I agree with this much: every writer delivers a personal vision, and that
too seems quite beyond controversy.  Keeping Pynchon's work to this level of
discussion, however, is tantamount to reducing it to that "dusty
Dracularity" he once very much strove against.  

Almost every character we meet in _GR_ and certainly Oedipa in _L49_ are far
too often in that "projective" writerly position you seem to think is the
be-all and end-all of fiction-making: and almost invariably, Pynchon casts
such "projective" attempts in a very dubious light indeed.  Both _GR_ and
_Vineland_ are, also, very much "about" mediated lives, lives manipulated
and distorted by the way in which film, music, and art in general, including
religion, have shaped their subjects' consciousness.  Literature is one of
those refracting prisms, one of the "media" that either distort or help
focus our vision more sharply, more accurately.  As much as I may enjoy
reading Pynchon, I don't see why we should exempt his work from the kind of
scrutiny he, among others, has encouraged us to bring to our engagements
with texts.  

Again, do have another look at his article on Watts -- it implicitly pleads,
and with a certain poignance too, against the ultimately dismissive [I
realize this was not your intention] stance that would consign Pynchon's
writing to the category of -- well, fluff.  The point of satire is that it
always claims to have got it right: without such a claim, however implicit
it might be, it has no leg to stand on.  The next question then becomes:
does *this* particular piece of satiric writing actually enlighten, or does
it play into some of our own less reflective or less loveable or less
defensible motivations, evasions, perhaps even into what Pynchon as a once
practicing Catholic would call our tendency to indulge in all sorts of
little "sins of omission."  And "fudging it" would come into that category,
I think.

>I'm still going through MD for the 1st time so let's cross swords on this
>at another time. I assume you think TRP's gone soft...

Not soft, exactly -- but yes, let's postpone that discussion for a later and
perhaps less flame-happy time.

Vaska