Writing Theory--OH ROCKS

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Watson wrote:

 "All mainstream reviews  of MandD take their time to get in
at least one negative comment about  Vineland, something I
lament because I feel that Pynchon had to write
 Vineland to write MandD. This leads to my question...is
there anything
 written about the idea that novelists write "pre-writes" in
the form of
 smaller novels before their bigger works, ie no V without
the story from
 Slow Learner, no GR without TCOL49, no MandD without
Vineland."



"There is a Hand to turn the time
. And a Soul in ev'ry
stone
." GR.760

"As a statue, planted on a revolving pedestal, shows
now this limb, now that; now front, now side; continually
changing, too,
its general profile; so does the pivoted, statued soul of
man, when turned
by the hand of Truth"  Melville's Pierre XXV. iii.

Critics have perused nearly every book Melville read,
expounded upon every scrap of writing. They have collected
his refuse like those fanatics Dylan complained about who
picked through his garbage or camped outside his window
desperate to hear or smell something profound in the Idiot
Winds that blew through the curtains in his room. If one
hopes to discover how Pynchon matured as a writer, his
"pre-writing" or "writing process" by exhuming bodies of
rumor or extrapolating from ambiguous Blurbs I think the
ironies and excesses of  Melville Critics Inc. should give
us pause. Perhaps we should remember that Melville's
material contribution to our common humanity was nearly lost
to fire, family, a moody disposition, economy, and an
indifferent and often hostile public that silenced him as he
struggled to tell the black truth by writing novels he said
he knew would fail.   Surely every detail, every scrap of
paper can be a valuable discovery, a footnote, a correction,
a clarification or confirmation that Melville or Pynchon or
Dylan or any other spinner of yarns that fascinates the
critic held "such and such a position" or was a "this and
not a that." While there is no doubt that Rilke's or
Melville's or Pynchon's letters can illuminate an otherwise
obscure passage or stanza, we have, as Tom Colin noted, the
text we are reading in common to consider. In the critical
industry one small scrap may overturn a critical house of
cards precariously erected with frangible "facts" or dubious
critical sophistry. Once cracked the study crashes down into
shards and scraps again only to be glued back with some new
sticky artifact or discovery by some poor and exhausted
young scholar--cannon fodder--in the perpetual battle of the
books. A fine biography like Ellmann's of Joyce, or any
prudent approach, such as Harold Bloom's "Anxiety of
Influence" can provide valuable insight into the comparative
hermeneutic of the major themes and representations in the
grand dialogue of great minds:  a great discourse where even
minor figures-often neglected-- may affect the course of
major turns in the arts and sciences. But it seems to me, at
the end of the day, it is the art, the books themselves,
that will tell us most,  or at least as much as we can hope
to understand about how the minds of genius create such
beautiful faces in the stones of our hearts, minds, and
souls. 

In these postmodern and "postmodern" times, perhaps only
some odd combination of Foucault's notion of "genealogy" and
Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" can begin to describe
the complex web of relationships, the constant debates,
between different theoretical schools (where is rj when you
need him?). Today, the critic writes a narrative and the
novelist is a critic and our whole understanding of all the
stuff we once thought quite complex enough with quotation
marks has been upended like my giant oak tree in the yard
and "(re)Named" not a tree at all, but a root without
boundaries. I stand looking at a tree, but faced with an
arresting display of rootless vines twisting into some
cultural pathography contemplating my own Rhizomaphobia. 

That's enough of that crap, right? 

In any event, Melville's progress as a writer can be found
in his texts. I would recommend first Pierre and Moby-Dick,
then Confidence Man and Billy Bud, and last, his long poem
Clarel. In Pierre we find Melville writing about writing.
Pynchon writes about writing too. For Pynchon, it is the
Slow Learners with Introduction, particularly "Low Lands,"
MMV, V. and Lot 49. Charles Hollander's "Pynchon's Politics"
Pynchon Notes 26-27 is most helpful. R. Romeo is reading
David Seed's  "The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon,
1988, (See also,  "Pynchon's Early Labyrinths" by Mark D
Hawthorne, College literature 25.2, spring 1998, pp. 78-93.  

I find it quite interesting that Pynchon's Rocket in GR
functions in much the same way as Melville's White Whale in
Moby-Dick. One interesting difference is that the Rocket is
never given the natural life mystery of Melville's whale.
This Pynchon saves for bananas, stones, and mother earth.  

The rocks and stones in Melville's Pierre are too long to
list, but Melville's intense reading of scripture, where
stones and rocks are all over the lot explains in part why a
sailor was so interested in stones, perhaps Pynchon's
interest in rocks and stones owes something to his intense
reading of religious texts or maybe even his intense reading
of Herman Melville.

>From Melville's Clarel

10. A HALT  
 
 In divers ways which vary it
 Stones mention find in hallowed Writ:
 Stones rolled from well-mouths, altar stones,
 Idols of stone, memorial ones,
 Sling-stones, stone tables; Bethel high
 Saw Jacob, under starry sky,
 
 On stones his head lay--desert bones;
 Stones sealed the sepulchers--huge cones
 Heaved there in bulk; death too by stones
 The law decreed for crime; in spite
 As well, for taunt, or type of ban,
 The same at place were cast, or man;
 Or piled upon the pits of fight
 Reproached or even denounced the slain:
 So in the wood of Ephraim, some
 Laid the great heap over Absalom.
   Convenient too at willful need,
 Stones prompted many a ruffian deed
 And ending oft in parting groans;
 
 By stones died Naboth; stoned to death
 Was Stephen meek: and Scripture saith,
 Against even Christ they took up stones.
 Moreover, as a thing profuse,
 Suggestive still in every use,
 On stones, still stones, the gospels dwell
 In lesson meet or happier parable.
 
   Attesting here the Holy Writ--
 In brook, in glen, by tomb and town
 In natural way avouching it--
 BEHOLD THE STONES! And never one
 A lichen greens; and, turn them o'er--
 No worm--no life; but, all the more,
 Good witnesses.
                The way now led
 Where shoals of flints and stones lay dead.
 The obstructed horses tripped and stumbled,
 The Thessalonian groaned and grumbled.
 But Glaucon cried: "Alack the stones!...

 "The stone was man's first missile; yes,
 Cain hurled it, or his sullen hand
 Therewith made heavy. Cain, confess,
 A savage was, although he planned
 His altar. Altars such as Cain's
 Still find we on far island-chains
 Deep mid the woods and hollows dark,
 And set offlike the shittim Ark.
 Refrain from trespass; with black frown
 Each votary straight takes up his stone--
 As once against even me indeed:
 I see them now start from their rocks
 In malediction.".....

 (Quite mindless of Paul's courtesy)....

 But asked, 'Did Paul, embarked in ship...
 
 'Saint Paul, sir, had not zeal enough;...

 Even Zion's hill,...

 Nay, Sinai...
                              
 Tread Judah?....

 "Look, is he crazy? see him there!"
 The saint it was with busy care
 Flinging aside stone after stone,...

 While every stone that he removed
 Laid bare but more. .....

"With patient look,
 Poising a stone as 'twere a clod:
 "All things are possible with God;... 

Stones in GR

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/gravity-f.html?gravity.header.html&gravity.left.html&stones.html

Rock in V. 

"He had been short and built like the island of Malta
itself: rock, an inscrutible
heart." 19; abandoned quarry, 24; "Only this quarry: the
dead rocks that were here
before us and will be after us." 26; Profane "tripped over a
rock," 42; "The younger
girl produced from her reticule a rock," 68; "toss imaginary
rocks about," 82; "bones
that should be alive, not rock rods under the flesh," 86; "a
faceless delinquent
heaved a rock at [the bus]," 96; "This mineral period
ended," 100; "What religion is
it [...] where the highest condition we can attain is that
of an object--a rock." 106;
"creatures all at peace among the rocks," 215; "She was
sitting in the rockery [rock
garden] with old Godolphin." 246; "after braining an
inquisitive goldfish with a
rock" 248; stonemason, 261; "tossed what was left behind a
rock for the vultures and
flies." 263; "sleek dark rocks," 270; "huddled among some
rocks," 275; "the gray of
pulverized rock," 275; "the non-humanity of the debris,
crushed stone," 307; "as the
Ark was to Noah so is the inviolable womb of our Maltese
rock to her children"
318; "stone and metal cannot nourish," 335; "Seek mineral
symmetry, for here is
eternal life: the immortality of rock." 340; "in that return
from the rock was nothing
to confess." 345; rock 'n' roll, 360; "they found a rock
near a stream," 391; "'Rocks
[...] He always looks for rocks." 430; "The characteristic
stillness [...] of the rock.
Inertia." 445; "Ask the rock." 451; See also entropy;
inanimate