HJ "The Art of Fiction"

[John Bailey]

Welcome back Terrance, even if you're not Terrance. It's been a while
since someone's been so associative, provocative and evocative. I like
it.

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 9:44 PM, Campbel Morgan<campbelmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>