Warning: discussion w/ literary merit in progress

[MantaRay at aol.com]

And now for the long response: 

(for all you crybabies out there, this discussion has literary merit)

>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. 

No, it's not because you use your own personal experience again to refute
it...

>I was a reporter covering
>the youth culture. I spoke to hundreds, perhaps thousands in communes, 

...yadayadayada...

>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.

You didn't live reality, Jules, you lived your life, from your POV, with your
own biases infiltrating everything you saw and did. Same as everyone else,
including Pynchon. How do you know some of these people you interviewed
weren't posers like you feel Pynchon is? And why am I supposed to dispose of
the literary merit a particular book might have, because another writer tells
me it's inaccurate? This is completely circular, and one of the reasons
nothing ever gets done in this country. Debating the particulars of speech,
dress, manner, etc. leads nowhere; which is one reason I try to stay away
from the endless discussions of ketjap, blah blah because they have less to
do with what these books (or any texts for that matter) say than how they say
it. When I use my impressions of my family to form characters in my works, I
could care less about whether they are "authentic" or not; if I was a
satirist, I'd care even less. And I'd care less what they thought about it
all.

>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. 

This is the point. People "believe" this is what he's trying to do; perhaps
they're wrong. And it makes sense to have a caricature that doesn' jibe with
reality; people are idiots if they realize something is a caricature, then
get upset if it doesn't match reality.

>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.

1) Yes, you're point is a self-absorbed one. 
2) I personally dont' care whether or not Vineland gives us the real
undergorund. If I were looking for "reality" TRP would be the last person I
check in with. If I want commentary on reality, subversion, and a critical
eye, I go to GR. 

>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. 

Who's to say he has to consider any of this? Who's to say that he cares about
accurately refelcting reality? Jules, if he really did, don't you think he'd
be on the phone with you before he wrote it? This is a simple issue. 

>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.

I haven't heard any other reasons...

>I'm saying that the reality is mostly in his own head 

What's new? Isn't that where most reality is nowadays? That's where the work
begins. If you polled the list, you might find a great many of us who think
that reality for you is solely in your head. I value my experiences and get
slightly irritated when posers try to pass themselves off, but it's natural.
And most of all, posing is fiction, just like lit. It's expected.

>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?

That's not the issue. If you don't like it, what the hell are you doing on
the p-list? In any case, the 60s, as far as I'm c

>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
>