Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me,

[Dave Monroe]

Literary Criticism
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Fariña's novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, took a
beating from the critics when it first came out. Not even the tragic
death of the author could restrain the reviewers from unleashing their
contempt (although one relatively sympathetic critic, William Hogan of
the San Francisco Chronicle, admitted that he had written "a fairly
detailed negative review" which he felt compelled to re-write after
Fariñ's death). Been Down was often reviewed alongside Pynchon's The
Crying of Lot 49, which was published a few months later, and many
critics did not spare that novel either. Time magazine, reviewing both
novels together with Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, dismissed all
three as "gibberish literature."

As the years passed, resistance to the counterculture faded with
familiarity as the counterculture slid into the mainstream. Many
people who were "on the scene" in the sixties were now on the faculty,
and began to try to make sense of Fariña's strange novel. One early
attempt was the Yale Review. I've listed it in the criticism section
instead of the review section because, unlike most reviews, it sought
to take the novel seriously, even though it concluded with a judgement
against it.

1.) Contemporary Reviews (unfavorable unless otherwise stated) ...

[...]

2.) Literary Criticism

Trachtenberg, Stanley. "Beyond Initiation: Some Recent Novels." Yale
Review, vol. 56, Autumn, 1966, p. 131-138.

Discusses Been Down So Long with The Crying of Lot 49, The Saddest
Summer of Samuel S., by J. P. Donleavy, A Generous Man, by Reynolds
Price, and The Last Gentleman, by Walker Percy. Traces the evolution
of the Initiate in literature from the "transcendent truths" of Greek
tragedy to the black humor of contemporary fiction. The Initiate once
passed from innocence to experience with a morality modified by
confrontation and reconciliation with society. In the 19th century,
the Initiate began to resist reconciliation and retreated into
childhood. The current existential hero is dispossessed from reality
and bereft of values. The character of Gnossos relies upon "a set of
assumptions outside the novel" and fails to "acknowledge the source of
his sense of betrayal." Gnossos does not understand "where he is
really at" and is therefore unaware of his responsibilities.

Richard Lehan. "The American Novel--A Survey of 1966." Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol 8, Summer 1967, p. 437-49.

Lehan identifies several thematic trends in recent fiction: unheroic
heroes, Romantic wanderers who take to the road in quest of one
all-encompassing experience that will both illuminate the mind and
satisfy the soul, escape from the ennui of modern man diversted of
hope, all of which he summarizes under the heading of "homelessness."
He dismisses Fariña's and Pynchon's novels briefly in the concluding
paragraphs:

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Richard Fariña's Been Down
So Long It Looks Like Up To Me are not successful novels--not because
their characters are beat and rootless--but because they are
motiveless. In [other novels reviewed in the survey], we see
characters caught between two worlds--we see them in contrast to the
societies they either accept or reject. In Pynchon's and Fariña's
novels, however, we move into an isolated solipsistic world. Such a
world must be its own justification because all we have is an
inarticulate hero to justify it.

These novels demand more narratively than Pynchon or Fariña supply.
Since the novels of 1966 are, in the main, obsessed with homeless
people, it is not surprising that their great narrative achievement is
often a scene dealing with the moment or moments of rejection. Pynchon
and Fariña begin beyond this point, take the rejection for granted,
see erratic behavior as an end in itself, and are content to remain
within the hole in time. Their novels might be more accomplished if
they themselves were aware that what is going on within this hole in
time is a modern dance of death.

[...]

Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of the Allusion. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

Identifies Fariña as a "kindred spirit" to Pynchon. He suggests
Slothrup's dream of The White Rabbit in Gravity's Rainbow (page 468)
may symbolize Fariña, who played the voice of The White Rabbit in the
Tale Spinners for Children recording of Alice in Wonderland. He also
suggests that Fariña's Heffalump may represent Pynchon, as Gnossos and
Heffalump engage in a trivia contest involving Fariña's and Pynchon's
common pop-culture interests in Hop Harrigan and Tank Tinker (who are
also mentioned in Pynchon's novels). Some other similarities:

There were obviously many shared enthusiasms and paranoias, and much
intellectual cross-fertilization. Sometimes they even wrote the same
way. Though Pynchon has the wider stylisitic repertoire, both tend to
favor fast-moving prose that often defies conventional grammar,
depending on participial phrases that ought to "dangle," but somehow
propel instead. Their works are equally studded with catalogues,
equations (both had abandoned engineering programs), and parodies of
the Mass, not to mention references to movies, the harmonica, the
color magenta, aqua regia, black and Latin culture, comics, radio
serials, and Vivaldi.... In jazz, they shared a contempt for Dave
Brubeck, and a liking for Ornette Coleman.... Both delight in comic
voices. The Nazi officers, pachucos, Transylvanians, blacks, comic
Englishmen, and radio characters like Lamont Cranston who stalk
through Pynchon's fiction may have been inspired by Fariña's
repertoire of such voices, which his sister-in-law, Joan Baez,
describes in her introduction to the Long Time Coming collection. Both
loved comedy, and both were fascinated by death. Though Fariña was
often, in his wife's term, very "deathy," he did not live long enough
for his youthful, Hamlet-like brooding on mortality to mature into
real nihilism. Perhaps in time, like his friend, he would have
tempered nihilism with something like mysticism and discovered in
fantasy and in the heartening vistas of the imagination that physics
is metaphor, not law.

Seed, David. "Richard Fariña's Protest Novel." Journal of American
Culture vol. 5, no. 2. Summer 1982. p. 104-114.

This is probably the single best essay on Fariña's novel. Its
interpretations are compatible with those of Bluestein (above) and
Stephenson (below), but with a greater emphasis on the irony, leaving
little room for doubt that Fariña knew what he was doing and did not
intend Gnossos to be an admirable character. But Seed is also
realistic about Fariña's achievement: "Clearly a novel of this kind is
prepared to take risks and not all the gambles will pay off," and he
goes on list some of the novels faults. A clearly written and
well-balanced assessment of the novel, with several keen observations
I've not seen elsewhere, and responses to some of the critics.

[...]

Pynchon, Thomas, "Introduction." Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To
Me. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Pynchon's affectionate tribute to his old friend, written as an
introduction for the 1983 reprint, includes valuable insights into
Fariña the man and the artist. This essay was reprinted in Cornell
Alumni News, June 1984. It is also available online at the Thomas
Pynchon Website.

Seed, David, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1988.

Observes several similarities in the styles and themes of Pynchon and
Fariña, including: an interest in the Beat lifestyle (which he also
traces back to Helen Waddell's study of medieval mistrels, The
Wandering Scholars), a critique of consumerism through references to
pop-culture, the use of mock-picaresque chapter headings to "comically
distance the reader from the absurd sequence of events," and two
Pynchon characters that resemble Gnossos: Nathan "Lardass" Levine
(from the short story "Small Rain") and Slothrop (from Gravity's
Rainbow), who struggle for Exemption and non-commitment by trying on a
variety of roles.

[...]

McCarron, William. "Fariña and Pynchon." Notes on Contemporary
Literature 22, no. 4 (1992 Sept). Pages 11-12.

Briefly summarizes the thematic similarities between Fariña and
Pynchon observed in two recent books, David Cowart's Thomas Pynchon:
The Art of Allusion, and David Seed's The Fictional Labyrinth of
Thomas Pynchon.

[...]

http://www.richardandmimi.com/litcrit.html

http://www.richardandmimi.com/beendown.html