MMV

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 15, 2004 11:59 AM
Subject: MMV

> Context:
> 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna', Pynchon's second published story,
> appeared in _Epoch_ in Spring 1959. Subsequently Pynchon
> enrolled in a creative writing class at Cornell University taught
> by the journal's editor, Baxter Hathaway (cf. SL: 17).
>
> So low is Pynchon's regard for it that the story is not mentioned -- let
> alone included -- in the collection of his early stories published as
> _Slow Learner_ (1984). Pynchon describes the stories that have been
> included in that collection as "pretentious, goofy and ill-considered"
> (4); it's safe to say that he believed that 'MMV' is even worse.
>

It is only safe to say that this story isn't included in that bundle that he
calls "pretentious, goofy and ill-considered" (4). More would be
speculation. Maybe, but this is speculation too, it is left out of "Slow
Learner" because it is spared for a later collection of stories he considers
to be better.

>
> Where Siegel is clearly near enough to a Pynchonian alter-ego, his
> fictional college roommate, Grossman, is perhaps based on Jules Siegel.
>

I can't see this. An identification of the author with the protagonist seems
very unlikely to me. Who would identify with such an asshole?

> Theme:
> Like much of Pynchon's work the story centres on a clash of cultures and
> belief systems, both those various cultural and family heritages which
> serve to make up an individual and the different worldviews which compete
> or co-exist within a society. No one religion or perspective is privileged
> over any other as "the One True Faith" in the story,

Abolutely right.

> though there is a
> sense of smug self-satisfaction in the way that Pynchon has Siegel leave
> the shallow and selfish pseudo-bohemians to their supposed just deserts
> at the close.
>

In this I disagree. I don't share this sense and I don't think that the
story has
a morale like "they were so shallow they deserved to die" or "they looked
too weird, it served them right."

> Comment:
> With its ostentatious and often gratuitous references to Shakespeare, the
> Bible and gnostic Apocrypha, Jewish funeral traditions and Catholic church
> rituals, bullfighting, Dada, Goethe, Eliot, Conrad, Albertus Magnus,
> Santayana, Gaugin, foreign language phrases, Ojibwa culture and
> psychopathology, and more, the story suffers from precisely the same
> pretentiousness that it satirises in the shape of the partygoers babbling
> on about "Zen", "San Francisco" and "Wittgenstein" -- perhaps
> self-consciously and self-parodically, though, if so, not overtly enough.

I wonder what's wrong talking about those topics? Aren't we doing that
too at this party here? The "disappointment" is Siegel's, not necessarily
the author's and I disagree to the following:

> It's clear that
> Pynchon identifies with Siegel and is distancing himself from the
> pseudo-bohemian partygoers,

"almost as if he had expected some esoteric language, something out of
Albertus Magnus."

"He was the most widely read of his time. The whole of Aristotle's works,
presented in the Latin translations and notes of the Arabian commentators,
were by him digested, interpreted and systematized in accordance with church
doctrine."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus

That doesn't read as if Albertus Magnus is *that* esoterical that he would
fit into the "Zen, San Francisco and Wittgenstein"-list that had begun to
get "en vogue" in the Fifties.

> but what is particularly jejune is the way the
> narrative ultimately resolves itself in a blood-bath: it's a species of
> that characteristic and supposedly shocking "and then the world exploded"
> climax ending written by barely-pubescent prodigies ("a pose of ... somber
> glee at any idea of mass destruction or decline" as he describes it in SL:
13).

If I would apply something from "Slow Learner" to MMV it would be
the part about "literary theft" -- and yes, I do "believe that nothing is
original and all writers "borrow" from "sources (...)" (SL 17) and that
therefor nothing's wrong when young writers are doing that too to improve
their skills.

He repeats the above quoted judgement on the juvenile interest in disaster
on SL 18: "(...) the apocalyptic showdown."

I think I agree more to Charles Hollanders' conclusion:

"In this, his second story, Pynchon's skill is already evident. He weaves an
apocalyptic tale from the disparate strands of Shakespeare, Conrad, Eliot,
Stoicism, information theory, horror movies, anthropology, psychopathology,
and one allusion to Rumanian politics. And, in its way, on its terms, it
makes perfect sense."

"Pynchon's Politics: The Presence of an Absence"
Pynchon Notes 26-27, spring-fall 1990, pp. 5-59
http://www.vheissu.org/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_7

I agree to Charles because the story does make some sense to me and I like
the way the manifold references are woven into the story. There maybe faults
and weaknesses but I'm not half as good as a critic as he was as a writer
already in those early days. In fact I've only heard once such a good story
in any of the creative writing seminars I've attended, where, by the way,
negative critique was "forbidden." The worst thing that could happen was
that nobody said a word.

So concluding from this I'd say our discussion here already proves
that it's a good story.

Otto