Hemingway and Pynchon

[Derek C. Maus]

On Wed, 31 May 2000, Paul Mackin wrote:

> The thing of it was that P being a child of the 60s civil-rights
> and antiwar sentiment could never in a thousand years have done the
> virility thing that was such a Hemingway trademark. 

Why not? While I agree with you that Pynchon *didn't* adopt Hemingway's
stance, I think the presence of writers like Updike and Roth (who are at
least as much "children of the 60s" as Pynchon, who was thirty when the
Beatles broke up...) says that anupdated version of the "virility" thing
was eminently possible. Nobody did it with quite the same Wallace
Stevens-punching, head injury-suffering, I-liberated-Paris-personally sort
of flair that Papa did, but then again, who would have wanted to?

> This being said, H was a superb prose stylist and will eventually be
> reassessed favorably.

Not to give too many of my "motherfucking postgrad intellectual" roots
away, but take a look at the number of new books and dissertations being
produced on Hemingway--and don't cheat, Paul, you can't *just* look at the
admittedly humongous number of ones that are doing posthumous
psychoanalysis--and you'll see that his prose is still rated rather
highly. This was, of course, one of the main complaints against the recent
"new" Hemingway novel, since it was released without the benefit of the
anguished editing and revision that most of his work underwent.

> The similarly between H and P you find may be because both could
> capture so well the mordant irony of it all.

Oddly enough, if I see correspondences between Heminway and GR, it's in
the short stories, where he manages (using the very mordant irony you
mentioned) to capture individual moments so precisely. I think of the
meeting between the old boxer and the young Nick Adams in "The
Battler" each time I come to the scenes in which Tyrone is wandering
around the blasted-out ruins of the Zone, not necessarily because the
scenes have anything directly in common, but because the former really
defined the kind of mood that I think is present in the latter and has
become something of a personal archetype of such a setting (to wit, I
thought of that scene when William Blake and Nobody come across Iggy Pop
and Billy Bob Thornton by a fire in the woods in Jarmusch's DEAD MAN).

I guess what I'm saying is, if you see the connection in AFTW and GR, it's
there for you. Now showing it to someone else...that's a chameleon of a
different color.

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Derek C. Maus               |   "Heck, I reckon you wouldn't even be
dmaus at email.unc.edu         |   human beings if you didn't have some 
UNC-CH, Dept. of English    |   pretty strong feelings about nuclear
http://www.unc.edu/~dmaus/  |   combat."  --Major Kong, DR. STRANGELOVE
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