antw. harold bloom; col 49 (was: Re: douglas fowler)

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

Terrance schrieb:

>> ...  I would love to
  teach GR so I could have an excuse for reading it again and again and I
  may get the chance to do just that, but I got to thinking maybe that is
  a very selfish thing to do because I think half the students would not
  finish it. Life, if you are blessed, is choices. Harold Bloom once said,
  we can't read them all. Coming from him that's good advice. What do want
  to read? Man, that's not too bad. You can read Fowler or Faulkner,
  Pynchon or Spiderman, the Village Voice or the Daily News. A nice thing
  about Pynchon-l is that we all like to read and talk about what we have
  read or might read or tried and didn't like. Most of us don't lioke this
  internet list stuff as much as reading a good book or going to the park,
  but we do have an opportunity to talk books with other people who give a
  shit sometimes. <<  

 *** just last week i bought a price-reduced copy (11,25- €) of the german  
 edition of harold bloom's "how to read and why". in the subway i already read  
 the chapters on the zauberberg, blood meridian, and col 49. from this last one 
 some quotes and thesises (in re-translation) with comments of mine, if you  
 like. (in the cormac part bloom btw says that he appreciates both, gr and m&d). 
 the following deals with the crying of lot 49 +

 (1) refering to the scene in chapter five where oedipa is holding the poor old 
     man in her arms - "she was overcome all at once by a need to touch him as 
     if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it. 
     exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps 
     and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her 
     smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning. she felt wetness 
     against her breasts and saw that he was crying again. he hardly breathed 
     but tears came as if being pumped. 'i can't help', she whispered, rocking 
     him, 'i can't help'. it was already too many miles to fresno." (p. 87,     
     picador edition) - bloom says that oedipa is here so far away from the 
     author like no other of pynchon's (usually cartoonish) characters until 
     "mason & dixon", where, according to bloom, both title characters are 
     "figures who fully became human beings". yes, there is this kind of change 
     in pynchon's work, but it already takes place in "vineland". according to 
     my impression, that is. what do you think?           

 (2) "probably the tristero is, like so many underground societies, at least 
     morally ambivalent. of the pynchon in 'gravity's rainbow' one could think 
     that he's favoring something which he calls 'sado-anarchism', and this 
     might be the ideology one would most likely associate with the tristero."

     bloom is putting it very carefully;  i'd say that the pynchon of gr has    
     indeed some sympathies for sado-anarchism ("'ludwig, a little s and m 
     never hurt anybody'." 737), but i do not see the tristero connection yet. 
   
 (3) bloom, celebrating his own "reader's paranoia", observes the cali gold rush 
     of 1849 (with its violent social implications) as the hot real world 
     contact zone where - and this is, if you ask me, a truly great idea! - 
     col 49 and mccarthy's "blood meridian" meet in their archeology of the 
     forks in the road america actually took ... 

 (4) pynchon "is a playful cabbalist of the tarot type, so that anything in the 
     novel can mean everything or nothing".     

     if i'd write something like this here people would think "that twisted 
     mystic shit again..." but hey, it's harold bloom who says so, and if you   
     take it with a grain of salt it's nothing yet the untold truth!        


              ~ vgl. harold bloom: die kunst der lektüre. wie und warum wir     
                lesen sollten. münchen 2000: bertelsmann, pp. 272ff., 276f. ~ 


herzlich, kai*