Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

[Henry]

Toni, is that you? I'm sorry, but what I reported was the essence of what was said, and not a misrepresntation in any way; I have no axe to grind here. 
There are plenty of otherwise intelligent, talented people who are twisted by their personal history. 
Try to avoid conflating messages from more than one person or, if you must, then provide attribution.
HM

-----Original Message-----
From: jbor at bigpond.com [mailto:jbor at bigpond.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2006 10:44 AM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Tracking the ever-elusive Great American Novel

I'd be interested to know what Morrison really said, rather than a 
(wilful or otherwise) misrepresentation of it. She's one smart cookie.

I'd imagine that she was referring to the fact that the Venus de Milo 
is one of the most celebrated (if not *the* most celebrated) Greek 
statue of all time -- at least since its rediscovery in the early 
1800s, broken and limbless on some Aegean rubbish heap. It is a 
sexualised torso, and it is regarded in Western culture as an ideal of 
feminine "beauty". It's pretty easy to see her point.

By the by, it was good to see Updike's "Rabbit" series so highly-rated, 
though the absence of _M&D_ and the prominence of _Underworld_ seemed 
ass-about to me.

This bears repeating:

"More common was the worry that our innocent inquiry, by feeding the 
deplorable modern mania for ranking, list-making and fabricated 
competition, would not only distract from the serious business of 
literature but, worse, subject it to damaging trivialization. To 
consecrate one work as the best - or even to establish a short list of 
near-bests - would be to risk the implication that no one need bother 
with the rest, and thus betray the cause of reading. The determination 
of literary merit, it was suggested, should properly be a matter of 
reasoned judgment and persuasive argument, not mass opinionizing. 
Criticism should not cede its prickly, qualitative prerogatives to the 
quantifying urges of sociology or market research."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/scott-essay.html

best

On 20/05/2006:

>> I once heard Morrison on the radio, where she said that the Venus de 
>> Milo
>> was a misogynist work because its amputation/disfigurement of a woman 
>> image,
>> leaving only the sexualized torso.

> y'know, I've thought the same thing several times. (Sometimes when 
> high)
> But isn't really the point of the thing that it survived all that 
> history, even though it's somewhat broken?



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