Tastes (great, less filling)

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Reluctant as I am to enter the discussion about which of P.'s books is "best,"
I do think we need to lay out our criteria and sort them from issues of 
mere taste (although there's always more overlap between questions of subjective
taste and "objective" criticisim than we're often willing to admit).

Thus, Pynchon is to my taste as an author--far more than many others, including
some favorites of some other correspondents here.  So be it.

GR is more to my taste than either COL49 or V., but I think I also have
certain criteria that might go somewhat beyond mere preference.

I think at the base of my taste is a *dis*taste for what I might term "essentialist"
fiction, by which I mean writing that seems driven--consciously or not--by a 
certain notion of what a "good" novel is.  Offhand, I can think of four such
categories--The Novel of Plot, the Novel of Psychological Depth, the Novel of
Ideas, and the Novel of Language.  

Before elaborating, let me be plain.  There is nothing wrong, per se, with any
one of these categories.  Some writers have written some novels that I have enjoyed
or at least admired that would fall into each of these categories.  What I object
to is a trend on the part of writers who insist that this one category of writing
is "real" writing or on the part of readers who use this category as their
sole, or at least main, criterion.

Briefly, the Novel of Plot designates perhaps the great majority of fiction,
certainly in the area of much 
"popular" fiction, based on the myth that to be worth reading, any novel must
"tell a story."  Even EM Forster in ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL knew it wasn't that
simple.  The question of what stories are worth telling, what characters are 
worth writing or reading about, what makes a story "satisfactory" is vexed by
unexamined assumptions.  *How* a story is told is at least as important.

The Novel of Psychological Depth is at the forefront of literary modernism,
beginning around the time of Henry James.  Again, when it is done well, it can
be done as well as any other kind of writing, but the immersion in what turns
out to be a fairly simplistic notion of "depth" in the creation of "rounded"
characters excludes vast aspects of life and more often than not holds a 
mirror up not to nature but to the self-image of the reader.  (This is one
aspect of Lacanian psychology that I find suggestive even when I don't accept
its premises or conclusions!)

The Novel of Ideas (a term of Lionel Trilling's) is, I think, the most
mistaken of these categories.  No novel (not even the cheapest Novel of Plot)
excludes ideas, but if an "idea" is to be worked through in plot and character,
it leads, in my view, only to Bad Writing.  Plot and character follow Idea or
serve as allegorical statements to be measured for their profundity, which
usually turns out to be pretty shallow.  Such an emphasis characterizes the
weaker aspects of writers as diverse as Sinclair Lewis, Saul Bellow, and
Anthony Burgess, to name a few.

The Novel of Language is largely an academic exercise in the proof of the
ultimate inability of language to communicate.  Such exercises have their
value, but once the proof is given, are more examples needed?  Robbe-Grillet
stands at the vanguard of this type.

Now, as I've said, there are individual novels under each of these types that
I can admire as a matter of single-minded control on the author's part, and
I even enjoy some of those examples, but I think the best writers are those
who cross over and combine and transcend these categories.  To me, Pynchon is
one of those authors, and GR is the book in which he does that best (so far).


That does not mean that he is "flawless."  That does not mean that there are
not aspects of his writing that I find questionable or tedious or simply
puzzling.  But the complexity of his handling of plot, character, theme
and language are enough to keep me going, in same way that writers as
different as Dickens, Conrad, Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Samuel Delany keep
me going.

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)