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

[Mark Kohut]

Just caught up with this bit from HJ you sent.......

"That it, [the novel in question], be interesting"....well, pretty easy for TRP to fulfill, I'd say...

"They [novels] are as successful in proportion  as they reveal a particular mind"...
TRPs mind is right there, in every sentence, everywhere, hiding usually in plain sight...and in layers---have you learned how he writes as with anatomy text overlays? [notice that was "as if", not "with"--- like lasagna, say?]

"The tracing of a line to be taken, a tone to be followed."  

That we can do....

The more one reads TRP, the more one can read him.




--- 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.
>