Suggestions & Digressions

[Paul Mackin]

A digression of above average usefulness, however,  hopefully in curbing 
certain irrational exuberances manifest from time to time with regard to the 
place of Gravity's Rainbow in the total scheme of things. Forget serving two 
or more muses. It's sufficient to stipulate that Gravity's Rainbow the novel 
will NOT be called as an expert witness in an International Court of Justice. 
May be good background reading however. 

                 P.



On Thursday 01 March 2001 09:11, you wrote:
> Yes, thanks John Baily and Michael Perez and all. Is it
> infinite ingress that makes us so digress? Knotting in we go
> not talking of Botticellio.
>
> I don't think it's presumptuous or dogmatic to suggest, even
> to provide an axiom as Malign has:
>
> "I'm offering up as an axiom (which you need not accept)
> that one
> can't properly serve two muses, let alone three."
>
> BTW, In Ulysses Stephen says he has three masters.
>
> And
>
> "Thus, the corollary:  GR's  success as art precludes its
> being written for other purposes."
>
> Malign is not coming out of some strange and unknown
> country. Faulkner and Nabokov are his examples.
>
> Again, I turn to Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, where in
> laying out his concepts,
> "applied author" and "implicit reader" (concepts I will
> apply to Pynchon) he surveys the "rules" for writing
> fiction. In Chapter 3, "All Authors Should Be Objective,"
> Booth address Maligns axiom.
>
> [[[To succeed in writing some *kinds* of works, some
> novelists find it necessary to repudiate all intellectual or
> political causes. Chekov does not want himself, AS ARTIST,
> to be either liberal or conservative.  Flaubert, writing in
> 1853, claims that even the artist who recognizes the demand
> to be a "tripple-thinker," even the artist who recognizes
> the need for ideas in abundance, "must have neither
> religion, nor country, nor social conviction." Unlike the
> claim to complete neutrality, this claim will never be
> refuted, and it will not suffer from shifts in literary
> theory or philosophical fashion. Like its opposite, the
> existentialist claim of Sartre and others that the artist
> should be totally  engagé, its validity depends on the kind
> of novel the author is writing.]]] RF.70-71
>
> Booth provides lots of examples, including Swift's
> Gulliver's Travels and Dante's Divine Comedy, but this goes
> to the Genre argument I will make later so...
>
>
> If one cannot derive a dogmatic ethical system (I am not
> going to argue that P is a moralist) one can identify
> characteristic themes and ethical direction in P's fiction.
> Once the "applied author" of GR has been identified, we can
> turn to specific examples, say Marvey (justice?), and make
> more sense of them. We can make more sense of P's use of
> books like Sasuly, of his David Seed Letter and his use of
> the Herero articles, of the connection he makes from IG
> Farben to the US, from Nazis to Civil Rights, and so on, and
> perhaps my comments will not make the eyes of Malign glass
> over, once the Freudian/Technology and Sodomy/State
> symbolism is credited to the "applied author" and not
> entirely this readers own prejudices, views of race
> relations in America unformed or naive.