HJ "The Art of Fiction"

[Campbel Morgan]

You are welcome. Guess I should have been more specific, but that
essay is one such that I too discovered after a duck duck google
google google, but as I have no clew what rough beast, its hour gone
round alas when I was disposed and could not join the hunting of this
mighty Snark back when you all read AGTD, just what you all caught,
butchered, froze, in the waste labarynth on all this ....and as I've
always feared sounding like or listening to a broken record, my most
sentient stone is silences; although I did take a few turns threw
those archives just to be polite and keep the cat in the hat in the
house, the list nannies out. I did also find, no doubt a project of
some bright person here on this Waste, a reading list at Amazon.com:
books that one reader or maybe a team of readers consider influential
or possible influences of AGTD. I did not find Peter Gay's The Naked
Heart, although I think it looks interesting. And, I did not find too
many of the books that influenced prior works and surely influence
AGTD as well. The list does include, for instance, Henry Adams, but
not Brian Branston's Gods of the North (or maybe I missed that?). In
any event, I'm not all that interested in the Religion of AGTD,
although I have always been convinced that Religion and the Class
Struggle, and specifically the Labor struggle in America, are major
topics in his works, I'm interested in the Henry James connection here
because I also maintain that Pynchon, call him modern, postmodern,
metafictional, hysterical, post-modern satirist...is an American
novelist. Now that will piss a few folks off, but let's not get stuck
on phrases and cliche' at the expense of honest dialogue and
discussion. O-Kay? Also, a good introduction to the period and its
development, from Melville's CM to the Muckrakers, is Bradbury and
Ruland.  Melville, Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and so on
...all got more and more cycical and better as authors, although their
later works as with Pynchon's were/are not recognized as such...and
they had good reason to react as they did to what was happening in
their nation and in the world/earth. Pynchon is a keen student of the
American Novel and its development. Now we don't have to be rocket
scientists and chemical engineers to figure out why, do we? Fiction is
an art, like architecture. But this, as the priest in Hugo's HND says,
will kill that. This is a book and that is the cathedral. O HENRY! But
Adams, still the most infleuntial work on Pynchon, try as he might
could not understand how that would be killed by a new this. Pynchon's
catherdrals are attempt against the day. They are, as Melville
famously said of his works, designed to fail. Now, that Miami Vice
book, potboilinghardedgedeggofabestseller, that's shit & money.


On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 12:24 AM, Bekah<Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Thank you Campbel!   The sentence
>
>> Also, there are critical essays on James's
>> influence in/on AGTD and the influence of American Pragmatism generally on
>> Pynchon.
>
> struck me as being worthy of some Googling and I came up with:
> http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/35/1/197.pdf