Rush to Judgement . . . HJ "The Art of Fiction" Authors must be Free to Fall

[Mark Kohut]

Hey, one cannot always count on a jamesian to have a fancy prose style, 
as Lolita might put it.....love them p's.......

have you read "Against the Day"?......

Or, even just the beginning? 

What do you think is Pynchon's perspective on Pugnax reading "Princess Cassamassima"?.....which dog "usually preferred lurid tales of his own species" if I remember aright? (I am away from a copy)

A--and know about the Wells---James kerfuffle over ...the meaning of fiction? What think ye? (Beyond, surely, favoring James heavily?)

MK

--- On Sun, 7/19/09, Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com>
> Subject: Rush to Judgement . . . HJ "The Art of Fiction" Authors must be Free  to Fall
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, July 19, 2009, 9:32 AM
>  
> I'm not one to complan
> about missing Fanboys, even when they confuse an already
> confused prose style such as the one Mr. Pynchon employs
> with hysterical sentences that often add shopping lists to
> laundrey lists to FAQs and how-do-you-dos I'm just
> getting my two sentences in before I'm introduced as yet
> another character thickening the stew or is it the pot? But,
> and I must admit this first, while I applaud the freedom of
> fiction, I can not abide a tale that taxes me
> and disappoints me as well. This is, for starters, my
> problem with Mr. Pynchon's California stories. They
> remind me of the old pun:    
> "Spanning the globe, to bring you the
> constant variety of sports...the thrill of victory...and the
> agony of [the feet] (cue, not the skier
> falling off the ramp but the barefoot surfer dude high
> stepping across a boiling blacktop parking lot as blisters
> bubble beneath the balls of his tender
> toes)...the human drama of athletic
> competition...THIS is 'ABC's Wide World of
> Sports'!!!"
> 
> The
> agony of Pynchon's prose is put up with when we span the
> globe, but when we're stuck inside a pothead's
> paradise in a Pasadena parking lot, even after a quick trip
> to Japan or Hawaii, it is a sort of pain up with which I
> will not put. 
> 
>  
>  
> from James's essay,
> "The Art of Fiction" 
> [We seems to err]  in attempting to say so definitely
> beforehand what sort of an affair the good novel will be. To
> indicate the danger of such an error as that has been the
> purpose of these few pages; to suggest that certain
> traditions on the subject, applied a priori, have already
> had much to answer for, and that the good health of an art
> which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must
> demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise,
> and the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only
> obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without
> incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be
> interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, but
> it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is
> at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us)
> strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer from
> being marked out, or fenced in, by prescription. They are as
> various as the temperament of man, and they are successful
> in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different
> from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a
> personal impression of life; that, to begin with,
> constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to
> the intensity of the impression. But there will be no
> intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is
> freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be
> followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out,
> is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the
> very thing that we are most curious about. The form, it
> seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact; then the
> author's choice has been made, his standard has been
> indicated; then we can follow lines and directions and
> compare tones. Then, in a word, we can enjoy one of the most
> charming of pleasures, we can estimate quality, we can apply
> the test of execution. The execution belongs to the author
> alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure
> him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the
> torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is
> no limit to what he may attempt as an executant--no limit to
> his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.
> Here it is especially that he works, step by step, like his
> brother of the brush, of whom we may always say that he has
> painted his picture in a manner best known to himself. His
> manner is his secret, not necessarily a deliberate one. He
> cannot disclose it, as a general thing, if he would; he
> would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a
> due recollection of having insisted on the community of
> method of the artist who paints a picture and the artist who
> writes a novel. The painter is able to teach the rudiments
> of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good
> work (granted the aptitude), both to learn how to paint and
> to learn how to write. Yet it remains true, without injury
> to the rapprochement, that the literary artist would be
> obliged to say to his pupil much more than the other,
> "Ah, well, you must do it as you can!" It is a
> question of degree, a matter of delicacy. If there are exact
> sciences there are also exact arts, and the grammar of
> painting is so much more definite that it makes the
> difference.
>