Hemingway and Pynchon

[Paul Mackin]

Derek brings up good points. Yes I suppose Updike and Roth are logical and
plausible counterexamples to my "child of the sixties" formulation but I
would say that, somewhat strangely, these two seem almost to fit better
into the generation of Bellow and Mailer even though closer in age to
Pynchon and having started to write about the same time.  Why this should
be probably has no very easy answer. We may not know enough about P to
understand why he should have eschewed attention to normal male concerns
of success, honor, love, etc., to focus on the doings of schlimiels, mad
questers, fat second lieutenants and other n'er do wells. Or put another
way why does P never write about highly intelligent individuals remotely
of his own calibre with presumably like concerns and interests? Do we know
enough about the guy to even guess?

About the current assessment of writers like Hemingway (and Fitzgerald too
I suppose). Is it that their writing is STILL rated highly or is it a
matter of REassessment after a period of lesser enthusiasm? I don't know
but am asking.

			P.





On Wed, 31 May 2000, Derek C. Maus wrote:

> 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.
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
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>