Can or should creative writing be taught?

[Robin Landseadel]

On Dec 5, 2009, at 6:46 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> There are only a few academic articles that discuss the American
> philosophical strain that informs Pynchon’s works. I mean Pragmatism.
> But they are buried under the stacks that claim or assume Pynchon’s
> philosophical influences are Eastern, Transcendental, or not
> philosophical but Theosophical.

It would be useful/helpful if you were to offer up the titles and  
authors of the academic articles that frame Pynchon's writing within  
the boundaries of Pragmatism. I'm not certain what your background is,  
other than college-level English—it's the specifics that make me  
curious. It's clear that you're framing some of your ideas concerning  
Pynchon's writing in the context of Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James 
—were you reading these authors in your college studies or is this a  
more of a personal quest? I gather that Pragmatism is important for  
you, you may correctly gather that I know nothing about the subject. I  
suspect that I am not alone on this list in that regard. As Dixon says  
on page 314 of "Mason & Dixon": "Amuse me."

I can claim no proper College education but I can claim an ability to  
extract meaning from context. Pynchon's books have many references to  
Theosophical and Occult systems. The manner in which this material is  
presented is—to these eyes, at least—by no means negative. Sortilège  
is always right. Geli Tripping appears to commit a most virtuous &  
Christian act using the tools and resources of Black Magic. The  
shamans in Pynchon's tales, already on the right track, willingly send  
various lost characters back to the right path. I'd point to Lew  
Basnight's various transformations—starting on page 38 of Against the  
Day—as among the more interesting demonstrations of magical actions  
and their karmic consequences to be found in TRP's books. For whatever  
reason, this is a subject that reappears constantly in TRP's writing.

You may be scrying negative messages concerning the "Non-Scheduled  
Theologies" that are tossed into Pynchon's tales but I'm seeing acre  
lots of Magical Realism, often with attendant signifiers of Parrots,  
magickal tools & really cute Witches. There also appears to be various  
fables within these books that require Charles Hollander's "Magic Eye"  
in order to properly contextualize—I'd give a nod to Doc 'n Bigfoot's  
perambulations around West Hollywood as a more secular example. In any  
case, Pynchon has always seemed to be more of a publicans and sinners  
kind of guy anyway. I've probably said this too many times already,  
but it appears that heresy itself is the author's true idée fixe. I'm  
not attempting to box the author into some subdivision of a Wiccan  
enclave, rather I'd assert that the author is an extraordinarily  
heretical Christian. Excessively Catholic, one might say.

A lot of Pynchon is concerned with forks in the road. This all seems  
like a very "Hippy" trip to me, and Pynchon seems to spend an awful  
lot of his efforts and considerable resources focusing on this lost  
tribe. I've been saying for a long time "Take the man at his word." As  
far as I can tell, the man spends an awful lot of words engaged with  
Magic and the context in which the author is placing these  
observations appears to be "The Counterculture." If there are "only a  
few academic articles that discuss the America philosophical strain  
that informs Pynchon’s works" perhaps that is due to those articles  
being outliers. Perhaps the limited amount of biographical material  
concerning the author is actually useful, particularly in the context  
of the current novel. Perhaps the author owes more to Jack Kerouac  
than to William & Henry James.

> That said, I hope people will go on teaching writing. Teach people to
> write poems, letters, essays, editorials. Teach them to read, comics,
> billboards, Cassill's Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. It's the
> democratic thing to do. God knows we need to do everything we can to
> get out democracy back in the hands of citizens who read and write
> well.
>
> As Walt Whitman sez, Give them Books, Open the Libraries!
> http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00159.html

Amen to that!