aw. Re: Farina Intro (also: Pynchon und Fitzgerald)

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

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Paul Mackin schrieb:

> 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 . . .
> 

° Actually you're right. It wasn't even a masquerade party, I
should have had another look. "We showed up once at a party,
not a masquerade party, in disguise --- he as Hemmingway, I as
Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had been through
a  phase of enthusiasm for his respective author". However, the sentence before informs us that Farina and Pynchon got "on the same literary wavelength", and so I assume that the Rainbow painter loved his Fitzgerald, too. An internally mediated contradiction (in sich vermittelter Widerspruch), so to speak
with Hegel. Let me add that I have difficulties with seeing a significant Hemmingway influence in Pynchon's books, though this is not saying much 'cause I haven't read any Hemmingway for quite a long time. In "Caries and Cabals", Tony Tanner names regarding 
V neither Hemmingway nor Fitzgerald as a major influence. Yet Conrad, Melville, Henry Adams, Faulkner, Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Evelyn Waugh, Lawrence Durrell, Dashiell Hammet, Nabokov, Borges & Joyce. "Gravity's Rainbow", which wasn't published when Tanner wrote his essay, shows in its satirical dimension the influence of Burroughs. Around 1970, think of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann or Fagen & Becker, lots of younger artists seem to 
have been under that spell --  

KFL +
 

>
> 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.
> 


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+ 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 --

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)-