IVIV (1)

[alice wellintown]

>
> do you think it's an excursion into romance territory again?
> as you had a thesis about romance vs novel (did I get that right?)
> involving a forgotten generation of bawdy funny feeling-rich american books?
> (gotta find that post again...)
> and thus that most people don't respect romances like they do novels.

That Pynchon is an American is fairly obvious, but for several
reasons--and it was cool for Pynchon--the critical industry didn't
quite see it that way at first and so the postmodern critical theory
folk kept talking about his works as if they were written by some
French professor. So the idea that his works might be mistaken for
Salinger's was no more absurd than the idea that he might be Deleuze,
Zoyd might be an autobiographical anachronism worth writing a
disertation or two on. Recently, we've been reading about Pynchon &
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, and Toni Morrison,
Wallace, Gaddis, Roth, Updike, Moody, DeLillo, Melville, Poe,
Williams, Emerson, James, other Americans North and South. And, I
expect to read something on the influence of Brasilian authors on
Pynchon's works any day now. The Gabriel José de la Concordia García
Márquez comparisons are important and I'll just note that Pynchon,
Roth, Ma'rquez are all pushing the the "pornographic" more and more as
they age and this is not endearing them to certain females and males
in the academy.  And, out there in the reading world, let's say there
is a certain prudishness that the "92nd Street Y gray-hairs,"  hip as
they may once have been back in the day, still attach to authors. Last
year (?), seeing half the crowd nearly napping,  Derek Alton Walcott
read a poem to wake them up. Some started humping in the seats whiles
others grabbed their crotches in mid-dream, but half got up and
walked, not out, cause the wine was free and he was signing books too,
bit to the adjacent room. But Pynchon has been, as is the American
Tradition, arguing that the Tradition of American Gothic and Romance
(and sure its roots are English and European--Luddite) has earned a
place in the world of serious prose fiction. The classic American
statement on this is not Pynchon's Luddite Essay but Hawthorne's
Preface to The House of the Seven Gables. A novel every student of
American Literature should read. Not that I don't love that Scooby-Doo
Real Estate connection, but Hawthorne's novel about the Pyncheon's is
a bit more important. The moral, that Ahab story form the book of
Kings that fascinated Hawthorne and Melville and has, for better or
worse, been as important to the American Romance Tradition as Genesis
and the Fall of Adam and Eve.

 WHEN A WRITER calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed
that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and
material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had
he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is
presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible,
but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The
former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to
laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside
from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that
truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own
choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his
atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen
and enrich the shadows, of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to
make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and,
especially, to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and
evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the
dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit
a literary crime, even if he disregard this caution.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose,
at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this
particular, the author has provided himself with a moral;--the truth,
namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the
successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage,
becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief;--and he would feel it a
singular gratification, if this romance might effectually convince
mankind--or, indeed, any one man--of the folly of tumbling down an
avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an
unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the
accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.

AND, from the Custom House, Scarlet Letter.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs,
with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to
lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire
dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or
played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as
by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and
fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each
imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here,
without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form,
beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had
returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.
  The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing
the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and
ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the
moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of
human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we
behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove
farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such
an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone,
cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need
never try to write romances.
  But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of fire-light, were just alike in
my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a
gift connected with them,—of no great richness or value, but the best
I had,—was gone from me.
  It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention; since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous
coloring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in
literature