camel-spotting: Pynchon entry in "Cult Fiction"

[harding-giannini]

Greetings --

Since a fellow cross-lister posted a message about William Gaddis' entry in
"Cult Fiction: a reader's guide" (1999, Contemporary Books, a division of
NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group, Inc., under license from Prion Books
Limited, London, UK. by Andrew Calcutt and Richard Shephard) to this list,
the entry therein on this list's himself seems due. Some bibliographic and
generally descriptive info about the book are in excerpts from the original
and a subsequent message to the Gaddis list, appended.

regards,
Victoria

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Thomas Pynchon
1937 --
Polyphonic paranoia

Born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937, little is known of the notoriously
reclusive Pynchon. There is only one known picture of him. In the
mid-fifties, he spent two years in the navy, then went to Greenwich Village
where he 'enjoyed only a glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement. . . I
spent a lot of time in jazz clubs . . . I put on hornrimmed sunglasses at
night. I went to parties in lofts where girls wore strange attire. I was
hugely tickled by marijuana humour.' He then studied at Cornell University,
where he befriended Richard Farina, folk singer and author of Been Down So
along It Looks Like Up To Me.

In 1958 he began writing stories, which were published in magazines and
appeared eventually in the collection Slow Learner (1984), graced with
Pynchon's humorous introduction: 'My first reaction, rereading these
stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell
upon.' After Cornell, Pynchon spent two years in Seattle as a technical
writer for the Boeing Aircraft Corporation, later recycling this experience
in the technological, quasi-scientific content of his more epic work.

Lying at the core of much of Pynchon's vast polyphonic work (he can shift
voice and style with ease) are labyrinthine systems of plotting, conspiracy
and paranoia by the bucketload, and the constant, shifting sands of
undermined meaning and signification. His first novel, V (1963), featured
his trademark, two opposed, and absurdly named protagonists (Benny Profane
and Herbert Stencil) in a double narrative, each wandering respectively
through the distorted present and the mysterious past in search of V. But V
is an enigma that keeps shifting -- a woman, a place,, a theory -- and is
constantly out of comprehensive reach. Pynchon's next book, The Crying of
Lot 49 (1966), was a fable satirising, as did the later Vineland (1990), the
excesses of the Californian lifestyle (continuing in the tradition of
Nathanael West, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, and many others). In Oedipa
Maas's search for the mysterious (and again constantly shifting) Trystero,
The Crying of Lot 49 shares many themes with V. This was a mere scrap,
however, compared to the sprawling Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Described by
some critics as a postmodern Ulysses, this huge novel, whose plot and
structure are almost impossible to describe, fuses history, paranoia and
technology into one vast glorious whole. The critic Richard Poirier called
Pynchon a novelist who 'has caught the inward movement of our time in
outward manifestations of art and technology.'
His latest mammoth offering Mason and Dixon (1997) -- a parodic historical
reconstruction of the lives of the two English surveyors who mapped out the
Mason-Dixon line -- shows that he has lost none of his now legendary
versatility and creative genius.

Must read: Gravity's Rainbow, V
Read on: Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Nathanael West. [All
are in the book.]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org]On
> Behalf Of Richard Romeo
> Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 1999 1133
> To: 'pynchon-l at waste.org'
> Subject: FW: eGAD: trainspotting again
[Gaddis material removed]

> The Authors
>
> Former record producer Andrew Calcutt in a lecturer, journalist and
> broadcaster whose previous publications include Arrested Development: >
pop culture and the erosion of adulthood, Beat: the iconography of > victim
culture from the Beat Generation of Princess Diana, and White
> Noise: an A-Z of the contradictions in cyberculture.
>
> He fronts a 'free and easy listening trio,' The Smokers, and never spends
> enough time with his family.
>
>
> Richard Shephard was born into a literary family; his mother worked as a
researcher in the London Library and then at Foyles bookshop.
>
> He co-edited the Waterstone's Guide to Crime Fiction and is currently
> managing editor of the Waterstone's website.
>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: victoria harding [mailto:vharding at harding-giannini.com]
> Sent: Friday, October 01, 1999 2208
> To: gaddis-l at list.sirius.com
> Subject: RE: eGAD: trainspotting again
[material addressing some Gaddis list members' feelings about Gaddis being
regarded as a cult author removed]
>
> The term "cult fiction" follows other volumes on, for example,
> cult movies, in which offbeat works with relatively few but
> extremely devoted followers are catalogued, described, and
> offered as an out-of-the-mainstream group. "Cult," I would
> think, is definitely complimentary in this usage. . .
>
> The introduction to "Cult Fiction" begins by borrowing the term
> "cult" from the phenomenon surrounding alternative rock and other
> music groups, which
>
> "enjoyed a 'cult following.' This means that while they were
> usually too 'difficult' for mainstream tastes and prejudices,
> they nevertheless occupied a central position in the lives of a
> devoted fanbase. There were quasi-religious overtones in the use
> of the phrase: these performers had been selected by a disparate
> community of people and held up as icons. Their work was
> interpreted as something like a sacred text, which carried within
> it an integral attitude to life, an alternative existential
> world-view. They were not just novel entertainers, they were
> auteurs whose canon of work built up a stylised outsider
> perspective from which to watch the modern world go by."

> Further excerpts from the introduction:
>
> "Cult fiction is a shaky concept at best and in no way finally
> quantifiable. It is a 'catholic church' and takes its authors
> from every denomination. Some, in fact, are arch-modernists
> culled from the aforementioned Literary Canon; avant-gardists
> whose narrative strategies break the rules and cross boundaries
> to question the very nature of reality. Yet the majority operate
> outside the traditional literary *conservatoire.* Cult fiction
> in its first instance came from (although it didn't know it at
> the time) the rise of the great cities which produced the
> mythical bohemian enclaves: the Left Bank in Paris, Greenwich
> Village in Manhattan and Soho in London, areas where artists
> lived shoulder to shoulder with the immigrant communities and the
> criminal fringe. They were places where the young and
> disaffected could find life with a raw edge and experiment with
> new lifestyles. As places of creative cross-pollination they
> continue as a subject and source of cult writing today. Other
> cult authors first operated in the pulp and popular margins and
> have only recently had their popular arts reappraised. Others
> are representatives of excluded minorities, whether black, gay or
> the politically extreme.
>
> "To attempt a definition, cult fiction is literature from the
> margins and extremes. It is usually a work that is written by or
> about, or gives voice to or imagines a section of society that is
> different (deviates/transgresses) from the mainstream, and
> therefore offering a different angle on social reality.
> Deviance, as many criminologists have pointed out, is anything
> that is labeled as such. Likewise the deviant behaviour at the
> core of cult fiction can be anything that is seen as socially
> undesirable or unacceptable that unites a hidden community in
> recognition of a truth. This carries through from the benign
> (trainspotting or an unhealthy obsession with record collection)
> to the truly malignant (satanic murder rituals). . . .
>
> "Accordingly, we drew up a list of authors, then set about
> writing fairly short entries on each of them, summarising their
> lives and listing their themes and preoccupations, interspersed
> with anecdotes and criticisms. The result of our efforts is
> *Cult Fiction: a reader's guide.* It is intended to serve as a
> concise and entertaining introduction to those writers you've
> vaguely heard of and always wanted to find out more about, and
> also as a standard work of reference for a milieu that is not
> accustomed to reference books. . . ."
>
> Some of what is omitted discusses how readers identify with the
> deviant characters in cult fiction, and how the highest ranking
> among authors is reserved for those who live the lives of their
> characters, and a group of other dubious assertions that seem
> true except for when they're not, which is at least as often.
>
> Finally, the list of authors is, as mentioned earlier, really
> rather extensive, and to give some idea of the range, I'll choose
> a couple for each letter of the alphabet, to give an idea of the
> company our man is keeping herein.
>
> Nelson Algren, Guillaume Apollinaire, Brendan Behan, Jorge Luis
> Borges, Italo Calvino, Lewis Carroll, JP Donleavy, Fyodor
> Dostoevsky, Bret Easton Ellis, Frederick Exley, William Faulkner,
> Ronald Firbank, Jean Genet, William Golding, Dashiell Hammett,
> Hermann Hesse, Jerome K. Jerome, Erica Jong (& J. Joyce), Franz
> Kafka, Ken Kesey, Sheridan Le Fanu, Doris Lessing, Carson
> McCullers, Yukio Mishima, V. Nabokov, Anais Nin, Flann O'Brien,
> George Orwell, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond
> Queneau, Thomas de Quincey, Rainer Maria Rilke, Damon Runyon,
> Budd Schulberg, Mary Shelley, Hunter S. Thompson, Dalton Trumbo,
> Boris Vian, Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Wolfe.
>
> (It goes without saying that Barth, Vonnegut, Pynchon, Salinger,
> DeLillo, etc. etc. etc. are here too.)  So -- not such bad
> company after all  . . .