doktor's pre(in)scriptions (was fawning culties)

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

This is an interesting conversation, though it gets a little hard logistically to keep track of.  

I think, first of all, I think you get totally carried away by Henry's cute "chamber-piece" 
metaphor:
(quoting jimmy here):
 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.

You get so swept away by the metaphor that you start making completely unjustified 
extrapolations from it (symphony?).  What possible connection to the question of GR's 
quality can the observation about adding notes have?  I never dreamed you were accusing 
GR of verbosity. You can't really mean that can you?  One of the reasons folks call it 
sometimes a *prose poem* is not because it lacks a coherent narrative, but because it 
sustains an almost inhuman density of language, for over 700 pages.  Verbosity is empty 
language. (I'm not sure what *excessive* verbosity might be.) I doubt you could 
show me 
any chunks of empty language in GR. But if you can, please do.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, and maybe email posts, but we're not talking epigrams 
here either.  There are just as many lousy short novels as long ones.  We can't be saying 
simply shorter is better, can we?  That'd be as bad as simply saying longer is better, and we 
all know no one would say that, hmmmmm?

(quoting jimmy):
>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.

Yes, as I was thinking over your post last night, I saw that here is our closest corridor for 
fruitful exchange.  We all come to our reading with expectations.  When I referred to your 
post as *doktor's Rx* I was thinking: prescriptions = pre(in)scriptions.  We prewrite our 
books in part before we even open them, maybe laying the foundations for those solid 
frameworks you mentioned earlier. In a real sense this pre-writing is an act of  (perhaps 
creative) appropriation. But GR is one of those books that will not allow a reader to 
pre-in-scribe it.  To appropriate it.  We can't pre-write it. 

 But I would say that it, literally, re-writes us.  In this power I find its majesty (not an 
inapproapriate word, IMO). Almost everybody on this list has attested to a kind of 
sea-change that reading GR triggers.  I really don't mean metaphorically either when I say 
we can think of this change as a re-writing of our conscousness, a re-inscribing.  This is 
accomplished, partly, by anticipating and subverting our readerly expectations (for 
example, *You will want cause and effect*, but we'll never get the cause and effect we 
want.)  This goes way beyond mere *iconoclasm.* At least for me, GR fundamentally 
redefined the idea of what a novel can do, (as well as, or, through the process of, 
redefining me, and my world) partly by not doing all the things I had been trained to 
expect a novel to do.
I'm not claiming that GR is the only novel to do this. Only that what it's doing isn't 
accurately called *iconoclasm*.  Iconoclasm is a much more trivial activity.  Even United 
Colors of Benneton ads can excel at it. If you want a great treatment of the kind of literary 
iconoclasm I think you're referring to, read Gilbert Sorrentino's MULLIGAN STEW 
which is a tremendous send up of novelistic expectations as well as a killer satire on the 
standard regime of mediocre postmodern writers going for that iconoclastic gusto.  If you 
want to read a really lousy *iconoclastic* postmodern novel, check put that rewrite of 
SISTER CARRIE (author's name mercifully forgotten).

GR, like all of P.'s writing, creates much more than it clasms.  Since I think TP is one of 
those writers who writes the same book over and over again [like Melville, like Joyce(?)], I 
guess I'd have to say that each of his four novels is great.  Interestingly, I think his less 
than great writing is in some of the short stories, precisely in the ones that rely on plot, 
structure, brevity--like the short stories *Entropy* or *The Small Rain*;  I have no 
problem saying that they are good, not great.

I'm sure further thoughts will spring from this exchange.

john m