a look at the James Wood AtD review - part 2 (couple spoilers)

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

...didn't know the review was up at Powell's.  Cool.
Still, the New Republic may prove interesting...

this caveat probably isn't needed, but my comments 
tend to the lightweight and irreverent

Section 1 - in which Richardson/Fielding is proposed as 
a duality, and Pynchon is placed in the Fielding camp.

One of the comments beneath the NR review advises that
Ian Watt originated this duality, and expresses surprise
that Wood doesn't credit him...I'd probably go with Wood
in that those who'd care already know...

but it's an interesting distinction and reminds me
of another famous one, involving even earlier
writers but noting a similar difference: Dante/Shakespeare
involving depth vs breadth, introspection vs action,
internal vs external, character vs plot, 
pure reading pleasure vs stage-friendliness
(though this last one bumps against the consensus
that GR is unfilmable...) -- and I'll follow Wood
by not crediting that one (tho' it's because I can't remember)

Wood prefers the Richardson tradition.

He notes of the Fielding tradition "no one can 
really be in danger. Thus the rapid, farce-like, 
overlit simplicity of the happenings in Fielding"

-- ignoring the interiority of Webb's death in 
the narrative, to cite one obvious example, 
or the stark description of the bombed cafe.
Now the train Frank blows up.  That isn't 
slapstick, it isn't revocable, it's muted because
we aren't on the train..it's more like a CNN report...
and suggests that the distance Frank (and by extension,
all of us news-viewers) immediately
achieves is tragic (though, true, this isn't dwelt on,
unless by the reader) -- o-or, the flat affect
after having shot Sloat...the thing I identify 
with here is that his emotions _are_ damped down,
that this action is imposed on him, separate from
the really interesting parts of his life...

One of my English professors said _Clarissa_ had 
affected her deeply, to the point of tears streaming
- apparently she could identify. Clarissa was recognizable 
and affecting to her.  I have never found time to finish
reading it, though it's on my list based on her statement
(I've bogged down in the unrelieved sadness, and, admittedly,
because of failure to identify)

I'm tempted to give up on trying to prove 
AtD worthy on Wood's terms.  
_AtD_ is everything _Clarissa_ isn't: it has travel, 
the spotlight moves around (and the doubling
motif suggests that we all have much in common, so
that insights from one character may apply to others), 
it has science, history, humor...
though, heck, the suffering maiden gets a fair share 
of attention too (that Lake is in durance vile, come on) 
- and the prose varies around different characters
and parts in a way that speaks as usefully as 
quotes and direct description (trying to prove 
that is beyond my scope here)

But I still feel like looking at a few more points in
the Wood essay, gently differing as with a friend.

a) "Pynchon's works are prodigies: they do everything 
but move us."  Ouch, if true.  Because what else is there?
Richardson moved my English prof to tears, but
(Fielding-ish) Dickens also moved tycoons and 
legislators to tears...
Pynchon moves people to learn, and to laugh, and 
maybe, just maybe, to think.

b) "His characters sit down and lengthily, 
larkily "dispute" ideas with each other 
as if sitting in roadside taverns and sharing 
pipes and pots of ale."

-- and often, not just "as if", 
but while literally doing these
things.  At various times, people find it
satisfying to do just that...and Pynchon is there!
(did I mention, I tend to lightweight commentary)

b) "Pynchon makes use of the British espionage novel 
of international intrigue (John Buchan, Eric Ambler), 
the Victorian and Edwardian adventure novel 
(H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne), Western dime-store 
novels (Louis L'Amour), English comic farce (Wodehouse), 
and many others I am not badly read enough to recognize."

Toldja he was a believer in the canon...
but at one point, anyway, Pynchon did say he was
writing for the ages...so that's a fair cop

c)  "The novel swoons in the false gas of the inauthentic; 
it delights in the copied, the second-hand, the centerless 
imitation, the flawless fraudulent surface. Like the rest 
of Pynchon's work, this novel accumulates meaning 
only to disperse it."

Is this a non-sequitur, or did I miss a connection?

d) "Webb has an almost mystical devotion to dynamite, 
and an unbudgeable paranoia. "There is a master list 
in Washington, D.C.," he announces one day, "of 
everybody they think is up to no good, maintained 
by the U.S. Secret Service." 

but they did, and so did the Pinkertons!
not that there's anything wrong with that...

e) "Reef Traverse travels through the West, 
determined to avenge the death by killing 
the killers."

not for long...

f) "He also assumes his father's mantle, 
continuing the mystical anarchism 
of detonation. "Each explosion was like the text 
of another sermon, preached in the voice of the thunder...."

the only time they were like sermons
were on the way back with Webb's body,
blasts without a target during those days,
I thought - after he settles in and bombs
things in earnest, they're pushed from the
foreground and not much characterized...
as, also, like in Webb's career 
we only witness 1 blast
as far as I can remember
(that's a fan's nitpick, but it did stir me
to trying a chronology that would involve
that particular blast as being the one from
which Vibe's investigators followed the trail 
to Webb, which would mean that Kit was recruited
before Vibe knew the full extent of Webb's enmity)

g) "Kit Traverse, who has one of the largest roles 
in the book, accepts compensatory payment from 
Scarsdale Vibe"

chronology (Kit recruited in 1899, Veikko's
postcard dated 1900) suggests payment couldn't
have been compensation
at that point, and in fact support dwindles
after Webb's death
...again, a fan's nitpicking.  I would hate
to have to summarize _Clarissa_: this lord
guy has these myrmidons, and he keeps
calling her a sauce-pot, it went on, and on,
and I kept wishing she would hit him with a 
frying pan like Lake did Deuce...

h) Mark's letter dealt with the possibilities
for meaning in the Archduke's visit to Chicago.

i) "And I quite liked the mayonnaise joke, 
though it has the feeling of a gag prepared 
in advance, before the actual narrative cooking 
has been done"

what with the way Charles Hollander explained
the "for de Mille" pun in GR, and what with
the "Marquis de Sod" joke in Vineland, 
there may even be a reason for that.
In GR, an admiration for the more tolerant 
mores of France?  In Vineland, a juxtaposition
of the hymn to popular freedom (freedom
from having a king?  disbelief in the divine right
thereof?  a virile disrespect for undue authority?
a demand for "the consent of the governed"?)
with the symbol of violent aristocratic privilege
- all tied up with the idea of an actor gaining
percentage points in a landscaping business,
ie the ascendancy of advertising and service
industries, and, obliquely, Reagan's presidency?
And now, Reef backing away from the Marseillaise
right after it calls the citizens to arms?
Beatles, 1969 - "better free your mind instead"

j) "Here Reef, on the trail of Fresno and Kindred, 
reflects that the stooges are even worse than the plutocrats: 

    If Capital's own books showed a balance 
in clear favor of damnation, if these plutes 
were undeniably evil hombres, then how much more so 
were those who took care of their problems for them, 
in no matter what ignorance of why, not all of their 
faces on the wanted bills, in that darkly textured style 
that was more about the kind of remembering, 
the unholy longing going on out here, 
than of any real-life badman likeness...  

Again, the musical control is flawless, and the 
long sentence, slowly read, is perfectly comprehensible. 
...The ellipsis in the above quotation is Pynchon's, 
and marks a section break; and in a way, the ellipsis 
is the only place this long sentence has to go--into 
the empty terminus of broken meaning."

(but I sez)
This is Reef's thinking.  It doesn't seem perfectly
comprehensible to me, nor a statement of Pynchon's
- I don't think Pynchon qua Pynchon would fail to return 
to the topic or quail before extending past 7 clauses
- except insofar as he is "thinking as Reef."
Reef is as uncomfortable with taking up arms as Kit, 
so instead of continuing his screed against the 
hired men - though it's a valid point, a villain
without myrmidons is impotent -
he branches onto the topic of wanted posters,
and "unholy longing" which I link (maybe unwarrantedly)
with the longing Vibe feels for Kit, the longing
Foley Walker observed in the gay club, the longing
- however repressed - between Deuce and Sloat...
and the longing of Reef's grief (hey, that rhymes)


k) "It is fair to say, I think, that the 
intimations of positive connectedness are 
reserved for the most rhapsodic prose"

vice versa, I would say.  What can he mean
by this inversion?

l) "One wonders how many of his "fans" might 
dwindle away were his genial, nicely hippie-ish 
view of anarchists closer to the gloomy conservatism 
of Joseph Conrad."

yeah, that Vineland was a real glimpse of the
utopian success of the anarchists (?)
and Webb getting beat to death after abusing
his family and expressing his willingness to
kill people who aren't primary targets - laugh riot...
but even Lew's witnessing the anarchist meeting 
in Chicago shows, and I think inspires, a
development of human sympathy - not a total embracing
of goals and certainly not of methods...

m) the bit about lists and how all the places
are the same...
 he seems unwilling to relish the items in the lists.
They aren't the same, obviously.  Some people enjoy them;
I've spent some time with the mess on Slothrop's desk
and considered it a golden hour, for instance.
Someday I may even find the patience to discern interesting
differences in Clarissa's letters.  

n) "What all this means, in practice, 
is that Against the Day is a massive novel 
that never feels spacious, because it so rarely 
slows down to describe anything properly, never 
indulges in that rallentando of respect whereby 
each note is awarded its imperishable thisness. 
Instead, the descriptive keyboard is manically 
swiped, up and down, up and down, from top to bottom, 
as if some genius child were proving to us that 
yes, he can play the piano."

The praxis of reading that works best for me
is to wait until something grabs me, then
reread that point and broaden out around it
to see how it ties together to the other places
that affect me.  I don't think I
made that up, and I think good writers write 
to that intentionally.
It's possible nothing in the book grabbed him
that way...
Is it possible that because of the idea that
Pynchon is a dangerous radical, Wood felt
threatened and didn't let anything grab him that way?

curly d) "But there again, the fact remains that the 
New Orleans of Against the Day, the New Orleans set down 
on the page, is a city of grinning Negroes and gumbo. 
Either it is offensive if he means it, or it is slightly 
differently offensive if he doesn't mean it, because 
he has still committed it to paper."

New Orleans as seen through Reef's eyes -
I'll bet that Clarissa'd reach for
smelling salts if she had to go to New Orleans,
and be happy that lord guy brought his myrmidons.

theta) "Naturally, a search for truth implies a wariness 
about the definition of truth. But it is hard not to feel 
that Pynchon is postmodernistically consumed by the 
latter, while he merely snacks at the former."

Perhaps if a counterexample were given...

point the last) "Well, then, you might read the great novels 
that are set in the same era as Against the Day: these 
include The Man Without Qualities, Remembrance of Things 
Past, The Radetzky March, The Secret Agent, Confessions of 
Zeno (which ends with a prophesy of something very 
like atomic destruction), The Magic Mountain (which 
ends with the Great War), The Good Soldier Svejk. 
Many of these are quite funny--but not farcical--novels, 
above all profoundly involved with the exploding of truths, then finally devoted to the search for truth."

...instead of a list...