Bill Gray & Pynchon

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

In 'Broken Estate' "Against Paranoia" James Wood attempts to
understand Don DeLillo. He fails miserably. His misreading
of DeLillo is not surprising, given his misreading of TRP,
and his reluctance to recognize American postmodern
fiction's place in the "Estate." Wood fails to understand
what the hell is happening in American Fiction today, he
gripes, snarls, whimpers and attacks the postmodern author,
often confuses authors and characters, fiction and history,
comedy and irony, realism and the use of images, and while
he laments the loss of Jane Austen's Heroic Consciousness
and Herman Melville's eloquence, he fails to appreciate both
Austen's philosophical foundations and Herman Melville's
metaphorical quests for a "silent god."  Wood likes the
left-handed compliment, he seems to think that he could do
it better than these raw talents, if only they knew what I
know about novels, if only I had their muse, boy I'd show
them how to write a novel. I suspect, as I often do with
critics, that he spends too much time reading critics and
responding to them, and not enough time with the books he
writes about. He praises Melville to the heavens, but his
Melville  chapter demonstrates that he's no Melville scholar
and his radical reading of Melville's biography, is an
indication that he is bending Melville towards something not
found in Melville's novels and biographicals.  He talks a
bit about MD and Mardi, but what he really wants to do in
this chapter is accuse another scholar of not writing a
proper biography of Melville.  Interesting to note, that
Wood choices to include a chapter on T.S. Eliot in his
broken book of fiction, not that Eliot is irrelevant, in
fact I would argue, he is the most important poet to our
centuries American novelists, but Wood does not write about
Eliot's contributions to 20th century American fiction, he
writes instead, about anti-Semitism. Politics is fab baby,
and what can one really say about 20 plus authors and their
works in a little broken book anyway? But what I really want
to comment on, is his misreading of Don DeLillo's MAO II,
and the use of images (pictorials) in american postmodern
fiction. Wood acknowledges DeLillo's "great brilliance,"
compares him sometimes favorably, but mostly with
left-handed compliments and stuffy derision, to Tolstoy, and
Dostoyevsky,  though I think Fitzgerald, Doctorow, and of
course Pynchon more suitable, more germane. Wood complains
that MAO II was a "geometric sermon" "dominated by the very
images it sought to overpower." He quotes, or rather abuses
DeLillo's essay (NYT,1997) "The Power of History," and
suggests, that perhaps, Delillo suggests, perhaps,
suggests..., and after too many suggestions, perhaps Wood is
suggesting that he can only suggest, but why does he force
his suggestions onto authors and blame them for suggesting
what he only suggests and qulifies with perhaps, perhaps....
Perhaps, I suggest,  he's confused.  Delillo's narrative in
Mao II, while not as slippery as GR's narrative, (nothing
is?) is nonetheless, very modern, slipping in and out of
characters and mixing voices with an ease and grace much
like Virginia Woolf's 

(Wood says Woolf's "LH" is her best, I agree, but he loves
it because it represents, he thinks, his broken estate
theme--"This contradictory belief, that truth can be looked
for but can not be looked at, and that art is the greatest
way of giving form to this contradiction"),

narrative in "To the Lighthouse." Wood, one suspects, should
love MAO II, but he doesn't, he gripes about its paranoid
state, political paranoia, the explicit paranoia of
characters, narrators, authors, and although he has no
problem separating these in Woolf, for example, he gets them
confused in DeLillo. He attributes Bill Gray's paranoid
terror/narrative/media/culture to the author, and he also
uses the much abused Author/Character (not Bill/Delillo, but
Scott/Delillo) to suggest perhaps what can only be suggested
when critics neglect to suspend disbelief in the
fictionality of characters. A big problem for Wood, its no
wonder he doesn't like Dixon and Mason, M&D, Gershom and
Washington, and pot smoking presidents in fiction, and in
life too, one suspects, as I suspect his dislike for
America's greatest novels and novelists  more political than
anything else. 


Digression--American Tradition. We live in interesting
times, I think some revelation is at hand, and although
difficult to estimate at close quarters, and although often
represented, particularly in the academy, as political and
campy, narrowly focused and technocratic in character,
merely relativistic and culture-bound, often regional in
style,  a universalistic perspective--global both in its
transcultural reference and in conceptual form--is both
repossessing the premodern, modern, Eastern and Western
heritages, and opening new frontiers.  There is a
fundamental difference between American literature and
nearly all the other Major literary traditions of the world:
it is essentially a Modern, recent and international
literature. We cannot trace its roots directly back into the
mists of American antiquity. We need not search for its
origins in the remote springs of its language and culture,
or follow it through from oral to written, then from
manuscript to book. The old Norton American anthologies of
literature, do not begin with Beowulf and the Pearl Poet,
proceed through Chaucer to Shakespeare and Milton, the
Romantics, Victorians, and so on, but with a Puritan legacy.
The estate TRP, with a muse as great as Melville's, has
inherited is rich enough so that in NYC alone, in the last
50 years, America has produced Poets to rival any in the
world. Pynchon is the most important, not only because he is
the best living practitioner of the Poetic art in America
today, not only because he captures the postmodern
experience,  but because, in addition to the Puritan legacy
that Pynchon springs from, and the european heritage,  the
American continent once possessed major pre-Columbian
civilizations, with deep, rich, heritage of culture,
mythology, ritual, Poetry, and Pynchon brings it all into
his fiction and as Pynchon scholar  Charles Hollander
states, " captures and contains the dazzling complexity of
late twentieth century America" and "rubs elbows with the
great writers and thinkers of the ages." 

Delillo and particularly  MOA II, will probably always be
associated with Pynchon, but while this is natural, as it is
to associate Farina and BDSL with Pynchon, it is unfair to
the artists and the reading public, distorts by reduction,
and fails to recognize the rich and varied American literary
tradition--pre-Columbian, European, Puritan, Modern,
Postmodern. So I want to get to images, pictorials. As I
mentioned previously, the most important book in all this is
Hawthorne's HSG. I noted that Pynchon turns not to
pictorials in his first novel, V., but to mirrors (the
mirror is the direct precursor of the daguerreotype, photos,
film, TV) moves to film in GR and to TV in VL. As McHale
notes, "The ciema-oriented reading of GR has become
something of a topos of Pynchon criticism...", and certainly
Pynchon's use of film, images, and the like, have much to
do, as they do in DeLillo, with our postmodern experience,
but as I noted, we can trace Pynchon's use of images
directly to Hawthorne's text from Pynchon's and the way in
which the daguerreotypy functions in Hawthorne's gothic
Romance to the way in which film (particularly its reversal)
function in GR.

Emerson's famous new england transcendental  "I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents
of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or
parcel of God....The health of the eye seems to demand a
horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far
enough," becomes in Delillo's Mao II master Moon's never
tired Karen's "the single floating eye of the CROWD (my
caps), inseparable from her own apparatus of vision but
sharper sighted, able to perceive more deeply." 

No broken estate here, as Karen's father zooms in
"documenting" his daughters wedding, musing, "When the Old
God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended
faith?" 

TBC

Terrance 

 




 
Richard Romeo wrote:
> 
> Been reading a couple of essays regarding Bill Gray and Mao II in the
> DeLillo-only recent issue of Modern American Fiction.  Couple of things come
> to mind--in at least one essay, it is claimed that Bill Gray is a prisoner
> of other's interpretations of him and his work, because he refuses to "set
> the record straight" or give his view of events in his life or into the
> idiosyncracies of his work.
> I wonder with all these tidbits of information regarding Pynchon's life,
> notably the purported Farina biography, the Wanda debates, etc., does he
> feel hemmed in, like Bill Gray,  by his own stands on these issues, namely
> his own silence. I guess he feels once he opens his mouth, the cat, so to
> speak, is out of that bag.
> Secondly, much speculation on the Gaddis list regarding Agape--some have
> contacted the publisher and the agency representing the estate--seems we
> shouldn't expect anything until next year.  Also, seems there may be other
> work besides AA--letters or who knows what. Interesting to see how this
> plays out--a reclusive writer and what he's left for posterity--I suspect he
> left definitive instructions about what to release may be the cause for
> delay.
> 
> Rich
> 
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