Meshugginah posts, and other things sundry

[Tom Stanton]

At 12:05 PM 7/6/97 -0300, Vaska wrote:
>>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.

Nice try at a deflection but I'm not buying it. I never suggested that we
ignore
the details. I suggest your basis for judging surrealist writing isn't one I'd
accept. Respond to the point: why are the details so important? And at
what point does a writer get to invent instead of report?

>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. 

What you're saying is not that he's slipping up on research, but that the
views expressed in GR have become softer, less edgy, maybe even less
important in the last two books. If you want to stand on this claim, back it
up, but let's not fall on the sword of details as proof. 

> 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.

davemarc's useful post on this seems to indicate TRP screwed
up the use of the word. Fine, he made a mistake in a work of fiction. 
What % of MD has factual flaws? Does this invalidate the whole thing? 
Why? I just don't see how you can leap from some errors in fact checking
to the breakdown of TRP's work since GR.

>>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, 
>>[s n i p]
>
>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.

If Jules had not raised the specific objection, based on his experiences,
would it ever have come up? And on what basis do we judge the author's
perspective on the subject? Is "Heart of Darkness" any less a story because
someone objected to it? 

>>TRP appears to have gone to great lengths to leave himself & his 
>>personal life out of the discussion [s n i p ]
>
>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.  

No clue what point you've tried to make...

>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 [ s n i p ] 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.

We have no basis for assuming he left anything in, or to what degree.
My point was that he has made a very deliberate effort to keep his
personal life at a distance from the texts he's created, & I have to
believe all that trouble has a very distinct purpose: to avoid discussions
about how he lived being used to judge what he wrote. The guilty pleasure
of Jules & Chrissie discussing his life has affected how I re-read GR 
during the on-line discussion & after "Lineland." I see Chrissie's photo 
& it replaces Bianca's (and even Jessica Swanlake's) in my mind's eye.
I don't *want* to know all those details because it doesn't allow me the
pleasure of imaging them from the text. I really think that was TRP's whole
purpose.


>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.  

No one said (& I never said) the work shouldn't be examined & critiqued.
I question what tools are used. A few factual errors, which I contend are
in any published work at any point in time, don't invalidate it. Jules'
comments
can be taken in what ever context you like, but they are one person's POV and
I would contend it isn't a very objective POV at that. If you have specific
examples,
run 'em up the pole...