No fawning P-cultie, I

[doktor at primenet.com]

Steven Maas, John M. and Henry M. have all written concerning my assessment
of GR as a lesser novel than V. or CoL49.

I'm very tempted to adopt Henry M.'s intriguing position.  He writes:

        Perhaps GR is not a great novel because it isn't a novel. Are all long
        works of fiction novels? How important are the elements that we have
        all been taught are necessary or required in a novel?

        * * *

        IMHO, GR is perhaps a lesser novel but a greater work of art than
        COL49.

This is a personally tempting position because it would permit me to
express my admiration for Pynchon's art in GR without compelling me to
admit that it is a great novel.  But the more I think about this, the more
I'm convinced that Henry has proposed a distinction without a difference.
Call GR a prose poem, a work or art, a masterpiece or what you will: surely
there are _some_ criteria against which we may judge it.  As to CoL49,
however, I think Henry is right-on when he says:

        IMHO COL49 is a wonderful, modern chamber piece. The formal,
        trad structure (plot and character development, for example) that we
        expect is there in spite of modern dissonant themes.

Henry's wonderful chamber piece metaphor helps me respond to John M. when
he writes:

        On what ground sdoes the lack of *economy* in GR imply a lack of
       quality?  Where does economy become an important variable?

You don't make a chamber piece into a symphony just by adding more notes.
Had we but world enough and time, excessive verbosity were no crime, but
since time for all of us is limited in one way or the other, part of the
writer's job is to present his stories, themes, ideas and truths in a
reasonably compact form.  Brevity is the soul of more than just wit.

John M. is correct when he says to me:

        ... it seems to me that you're criticism stems from the book's failure
        to adhere to certain preconceptions of what you what from a novel, or
        what you think a novel should do.

Yes.  Guilty as charged, and not especially ashamed thereof.  I'd like to
meet someone who doesn't open a book of fiction to page one with _some_
idea of what to expect.  While deliberately disrupting these expectations
can be liberating for the writer and bracing for the reader, it doesn't
make a book great, just iconoclastic.

In a similar vein (I think), Steven Maas writes:

        The issue of whether or not GR has a plot, or too many plots, or
        whatever, strikes me as a red herring, that is, as irrelevant to the
        question of whether or not GR is a masterpiece. To continue the fish
        metaphor, if something smells, looks, sounds, and tastes like a catfish
        it's likely a catfish.  GR, so to speak, smells, looks, sounds, and
        tastes like a masterpiece (to me), no matter how many or how few plots
        it has.

Steven, I'd appreciate it if you'd flesh this out a bit, because I'm not
sure I follow your shorthand.  Do you agree that plot is an essential
element in fiction?  I have a hard time imagining how I would adjudge a
novel as a masterpiece without considering plot(s), any more than I could
determine whether a painting was a mastepiece without considering factors
such as texture, balance, use of color and space.

It's hard to compare the quality of two or three books without yeilding to
the subjectivist temptation of saying
you-have-your-opinion-and-I-have-mine.  To Henry, John and Steven (and the
multitude listening in) I ask, what _are_ the appropriate criteria for
determining which of Pynchon's books are great, as opposed to merely good?

--Jimmy

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/Insouciance/index.html


P.S.  Re Henry the Navigator, my vote for best bar in the world goes to El
Navigador in Lagos, The Algarve, Portugual (where ol' Henry is big stuf).
P-list meeting there someday?