Pynchon's public

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

On major itarian grounds, the movies win. "The power
        of novels to shape the national conversation has
        declined," says Teach out. But I am not at all
certain that
        in their day "Moby-Dick" or "The Scarlet Letter" had
        any considerable influence on "the national
        conversation." In the mid-19th century it was "Uncle
        Tom's Cabin" that impressed the great public.
        "Moby-Dick" was a small-public novel. 


MD is often cited to make this point, but I think it an
oversimplification that 
fails to account for Melville's struggle to "tell the truth"
to a reading public that didn't want to listen. Melville's
silent years, his utter despair, his failure, changed they
way he approach fiction and the public. American novelist,
owe a great debt to the silence and failure of Herman
Melville. Had Melville been able to sell half as many copies
of Pierre as Proulx's "Shipping News" he may have been a
different  writer, a different man I think, and may not have
written his "Confidence Man." "CM" may be the Melville novel
that influenced Pynchon more than MD. 

"Thank you for calling central services, this has not been a
recording, thank you for calling....."


>From dogs in TRP, Grass, and TRP

After the failures of
Moby Dick and Pierre Melville attempted to change careers,
this too failed. Melville decided to write differently. He
would conform his fiction, on the surface at least, to
please the critics and the proprieties and ideological
beliefs of his readers. He would be careful, so as not to
openly challenge the moral, philosophical and aesthetic
values of the times. So Melville reached into an old bag of
tricks and played the Confidence Game. He knew that he could
not sell his books unless he appealed to the optimistic
beliefs of his puritanical, literal minded audience.
Therefore, he developed narrative techniques to conceal the
dark “mortally intolerable truth.” Melville’s fiction turned
black beneath a rich naturalistic surface. He began writing
complex ironic tales, and developed elaborate patterns of
imagery and subversive symbolism.  He experimented with the
complex relationships among narrative form, epistemology and
vision, unreliable narrators, and limited omniscient
narrators. He engaged the reader in detective work and toyed
with the mechanics of perception. He used sexual and
excremental puns and set up jokes directed at the reader’s
prudish idealism. He satirized every institution under the
sun and especially the conflation of Christianity and
Commerce, he scattered allusions and insults throughout his
texts. His confidence-man satirizes the social, political,
and economic systems of America. He modeled sympathetic
characters after Milton’s Satan. He incorporated other
Satires and Satirists into his stories. The literal minded
reader of the day was tricked into thinking he was reading
an
allegorical tale that would confirm his American idealism,
but Melville’s satire reveals the war, the never ending war,
of men hunting men. Most of his characters lack depth and
are identifiable only as what they do in the war or in the
market or in the institution or are understood by the
complex allusions wrapped around their names. Men become
dogs, snakes, or fantastic shape shifters. I have no doubt
that Pynchon was highly influenced by Melville and that
Melville’s Confidence-Man is the clearest example of his
debt to his mentor. A confidence man takes advantage of the
increased need for trust in strangers as folks move to
cities. In America they pulled hoaxes as impostors, ripped
people off with fraudulent land deals, and used multiple
phony identities to trick people out of money. No
institution escaped the bitter ink poured from Melville’s
satirical pen—stock markets, labor markets, book markets,
health care, religion, philanthropy, governments, schools.
Melville would expose any hypocrisy and pull back the layers
of social veneer to reveal the truth no one wanted to hear,
like Racism on every corner, north, and south. The sacred is
profane and the profane sacred, Christ is the prototypical
confidence man. Characters are broken, scattered and
shattered, or crippled or blind or DOGS.
Oh yes, the dogs. In  The Confidence Man the misanthropic
skeptics are associated with dogs, “since that is the name
for the philosophy of Diogenes and his followers comes from
the Greek for “dog.” But at least two of the operators also
share strong association with dogs: Black Guinea, because of
his canine fawning and insinuating. Thus, if the skeptics
are dog-like in their cynicism, the operators are canine in
their simpering approaches to their potential victims. The
word “dog” carries a comparable range of meaning in Timons
of Athens, according to William Empson, as a designation for
fawning courtiers at one extreme an snarling cynics at the
other. Melville’s text crosses literal and figurative
meanings by disturbing canine characteristics to both the
cynics and their antagonists, the con men.