GRGR Austen-Conrad-Pynchon (is also GRGR Re: Achebe on Conrad

[jbor]

Yes, the comparison is an apt one. I guess that just as Austen was wryly and
covertly writing about and commenting on what she saw and heard in that busy
communal drawing room and what she looked out on through the window to the
gardens and meadows beyond so too was Conrad writing about and commenting on
what he had seen at Marseilles and in his adventures as a mercenary seaman
and then later in the British Merchant Navy. In both instances writing was a
substitute for doing, changing, being, I guess; and, ironically perhaps,
their works helped along the very processes of social change you note, by
changing attitudes first, being read and understood in proceeding
generations.

The difference between them is a difference in literary technique which
resides in the narrative agency (or voice) which is employed in their work
-- the distancing effects between self and text which are used in order to
enact a "suspension of disbelief" in the reader, to draw us in to the vision
-- and which permits the labelling of Austen's novels as realist and
Conrad's as Modernist.

Pynchon, in his mature work at least, fragments narrative agency entirely,
explodes the artifice altogether, and constantly imposes on the reader a
consciousness of the processes of writing and reading and the relationships
between writer, text, reader and the shared reality/ies which they inhabit.
This approach to textuality is labelled postmodernist. But his texts are and
will be read and understood in the same ways that Austen's and Conrad's are,
have been and will be -- both bounded by *and* looking beyond their
particular contexts. And, likewise, changes in attitudes, changes in
behaviour, changes in society, will (hopefully) ensue.

best

----------
>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: GRGR Re: Achebe on Conrad
>Date: Wed, Sep 20, 2000, 2:17 AM
>

> I agree as well.   I've probably had to read, starting in high school,
> Conrad's Heart of Darkness in, for a classroom setting more than any
> other work, strangely enough, and I was at first surprised by comments
> on Conrad's colonialism or whatever.  Did indeed seem a step up from
> Kipling, for starters, and, certainly, from representations in most
> other media (cinema, television, fiction [historical and/or science,
> much of which can indeed be read as historical, ethnographic, even,
> litearture by other means ...],and so forth).  An indictment of sorts,
> even.
>
> Reminds me of a favorite case, that of Jane Austen, troubling all those
> Victorian class, gender, power, even, relationships, generally, in the
> end, reasserting the Vivtorian line (via class-appropriate marriages,
> non-marriages, largely) nonetheless, and yet, those questions had been
> raised, those relationships had been troubled, one need not necessarily
> accept a text's conclusion, conclusions, whilst working through its
> prolems, problematics (and one must wonder, to what extent did Austen
> intend, expect anyone to?  To what extent COULD she have, even?  Effects
> beyond intentions, in any case ...).  All texts are ineviatably of their
> contexts, albeit in a dynamic, rather than determinate, relationship
> with them.  Iinteresting question here is, how so with those of Thomas
> Pynchon?
>
> Kevin, jbor wrote:
>
> A great amount of _HoD_'s tensions are
>> driven by perspective, and it is worthwhile to criticize it from
>> perspectives not found in the book.
>
> This is, again, extremely well put. Thank you.
>
>
>