Farina Intro (also: Pynchon und Fitzgerald)

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 13:09 +0000, lorentzen-nicklaus wrote:
> + Not much to say on that one. What you have? A busload of sentimentality, pastor Pynchon's usual calamity-howling about
> the young ones (see also the Slow Learner Intro) who put too much emphasis on youth and tend to forget that they're going to die later or sooner, plus an adequately sounding report of Pynchon's encounter with Farina and the novel's manuscript.
> [Sound sample: "Well, I've been down so goddamn long that it 
> looks like up to me ..."] Interesting I find the fact (?) that Pynchon went to masquerade partys as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Is
> there really an influence? Somewhere on his sites Otto quotes a person who writes that Pynchon's art resembles a mixture of Fitzgerald and Henry 

> James, but I never understood how this is meant. OK, like in Fitzgerald's books you can also find in Pynchon's issues like a general

>  ambivalence towards modern 'capitalist' life, psychosis & addiction, or long unhappy love relations. A-and the American cream. 

> Perhaps one of you out there can say something about similarities in style. I always liked "Tender is the Night" very much and will probably be re-reading 
> it soon --

I thought perhaps the Fitzgerald impersonation was supposed to stand for
the other guy--Farina. That would have been cooler than advertising
one's own erstwhile influences.  But no matter . . .

Both F and P possess a prose style whose sublimity derives in no small
part from lack of parsibility.

Strong irrationalism apparent in both.


Neither seems interested in speaking the "truth" about reality or the
world, but rather in addressing and imagining the "scars" inflicted by
the world upon individual consciousnesses.  

In a way very postmodernist.




 



> KFL *
> 
> 
> "One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology 
> of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size
> of a pin-prick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are 
> more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an 
> eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but
> if we should there is nothing to be done about it."
> (Tender is the Night, part II, chapter 11)-
> 
> 
> 
> 
>