Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me,

[Ian Livingston]

This is great.  Thanks Dave.  Been Down So Long (etc) was a gas to
read when I read it 30 years ago.  I'll have to try it again sometime
soon.

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> Literary Criticism
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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
>
>