The Last Word on Vidal

[Paul Mackin]

I was thinking of the following as a contribution to the "Cooler than thou" thread, but Rodney's latest suggests it belongs here.
 
Aside from Vidal for a moment, has anyone besides me (and Rodney obviously) been troubled by the fact that so much of our own  discussion is a little on the order of fan-club-type stuff and not
very . . .er . . . critical? Too often people tend to sum up in twenty-five words or less what P. is "saying"  to them and leave it at that. This is not a total waste of time, a lot of interesting ideas come forth,  but it does leave one wishing for a bit more spice. Something on the order of the Speilberg fray maybe.

In the normal scheme of things critics have to be hipper than the industry they exist to critique. (Pop music is a perfect example.) With Pynchon, however, it is very hard to follow this pattern. Pynch has postitioned himself as so hip already that it is virtually impossible to be hipper than he is. Therefore interesting criticism is not very llikely to emanate from the usual suspects. Even LitCrit, which seems to me about the hippest thing going, has trouble dealing with Pynch.

I devoutly beleive that what Pynch (and the rest of us) need is a little bit of criticism from the OTHER direction. Of course,  Vidal is not exactly what one would call SQUARE. But in the present case, he may be about the closest thing we're apt to get. 

					P.

Rodney Welch wrote:
> 
> Oh Andrew, for heaven's sake -- this thing has gotten way outta
> hand. My point, as I recall, was this:
>         Gore Vidal has some interesting and insightful things to say
> about Pynchon. What? you ask. What do you want me to do -- recite the
> entire essay? You can read as well as I can. The essay is called
> "American Plastic" and it is included in Vidal's book United
> States. It is an answer of sorts to Donald Barthelme, who had made
> a list of some of the most important writers of the day (mid-70s),
> including Pynchon. Vidal's essay serves as one man's take on those
> writers.
>         What impressed me about the essay -- what, indeed, impresses me
> about all of Vidal's essays -- is that once you get past his churlishness
> and his spite and his knee-jerk paranoia there's a great deal of honesty.
> I think the key to writing a really good essay is this: telling the
> absolute Emersonian truth without sounding like an asshole. Or
> perhaps just telling the truth at the risk of sounding like an asshole,
> even at the risk of alienating yourself from the crowd.
>         Vidal didn't say anything especially shocking in his essay, but
> he did appear to me as someone who had read fairly closely in the (at
> that time) three Pynchon texts. He thought the prose, by and large, was
> kinda ordinary -- but he also rather liked the scale of P's
> ambition. He confessed that he didn't fully understand all the
> entropy-heat death stuff, eventhough he gave a solid-sounding layman's
> precis and knew its source in Henry Adams and beyond. (Didn't P.
> himself say in the Slow Learner intro that his initial foray into
> entropy was based on "second-hand" knowledge?) So -- to your question,
> why do I think what he says needs to be taken seriously? Because I think
> there's something vital about any sincere, honest attempt (which is what
> the word essay actually means) to come to grips with a difficult, complex
> and puzzling work, particularly one that goes against the crowd. There
> is nothing easier, I think, than to write an essay in praise of Pynchon
> -- it takes balls to read the full ouevre and say, as Vidal did, look,
> I'm just not as impressed as the rest of you and here's why.
>         In the end, he was clearly successful -- the essay is two decades
> old, and it still draws blood from Andrew Dinn, whose only response (and
> he is not alone) is to say that Gore Vidal can't write worth a shit
> anyway. As he puts it, "their structure is formulaic; the scale of their
> ambitions is ... that of an apprentice piece, a miniature exercise in the
> carpentry of ideas; the flow of the narrative is like an apprentice's
> piece - all the rough joints on display; and the prose is clumsy and
> contrived; a great expense for the purchase of such small witticisms
> and satires as Vidal manages."
>         In other words, the same kind of fill-in-the-blank crap people
> say about authors they don't know, don't remember, but are sure they
> don't like -- especially if said author has hurled a poison dart at
> one's own personal sacred cow. RW