Vice, Henry James, Raymond Chandler, etc.

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 25, 2009, at 5:04 AM, Campbel Morgan wrote:

> As Paul noted, it's quite a lot to tackle in this forum;
> characterization is a huge & complex topic. That said, and while I do
> recognize that many a P-List participant can not abide a critical
> term, even a standard one like "realism" or fundamental, though
> arguably no longer useful,  critical idea like flat character/round
> character, and that the interest in, what is surely the most thrilling
> series of events involving the BA of this Listserve, that is the epic
> battles of the prodigious enfant terrible, James Wood and the old yet
> terrible king of infantile and hysterical realism,

I'm going to need some sort of chart here. Let me get this straight:  
are you saying that James Wood is the " the prodigious enfant  
terrible" and that Thomas Pynchon is " the old yet terrible king of  
infantile and hysterical realism?" Because if you are, then you're  
simultaneously putting out a crude insult and a specious parallelism.  
I mean, what epic battle? On one side is one of those lit-crit types  
who's applying a rigid template to a canonic author who got there by  
breaking templates. And on the other is an author whose stylistic  
affiliations owe little, at this juncture, to those models you so  
clearly suffer from the sorts of fan-boydum you accuse p-listers of.  
Pynchon owes at least as much to Chuck Jones cartoons, James Joyce's  
internal dialogs, Raymond Chandler plots and similes and Times of  
London advertisements as he does to Henry James and Henry Adams.  
Again, applying a modernist template to a postmodern author is flat  
out stupid.

Did you actually READ "Gravity's Rainbow?" Or are you just riffing off  
of James Wood's Cliff Notes to GR?


> . . . is limited here,
> although I'm still astounded by the resistance to a discussion of
> literature on a listserve that purports to be an open discussion of
> the most important author writing in English, certainly in America,
> that is, if we measure importance with a critical yard stick.

Do you always  measure "importance" with somebody else's critical  
yardstick? And if so, if you were using your own critical yardstick  
instead of someone else's— just say what 's on your mind by expressing  
your own thoughts without the cover of Mr. Wood, choosing your own  
examples, making illustrative examples from the texts themselves—then  
what would you be saying?

> In any
> event, so it goes.
>
> This article sums it up better than I can so ...you can find it
> online.

Maybe, but if that's the case, then where's the links? I'm not saying  
that providing links to online resources is absolutely required at the  
P-list but it is pretty much de-rigueur. Kinda like taking off your  
shoes before entering a Japanese home.

> Excellent points on HJ and how Pynchon "copies" HJ in AGTD.

And about 150 other, vastly different, prose styles including various  
emergent pulp fictions from the turn of the previous century,  
children's novels like "Tom Swift" and articles from the New York  
Times, circa 1907.

> Fascinating factoid: HJ was writing a novel about time travel when
> time ran out on him.

Too bad we don't have that book.

> Well, I hear he's hanging with his Chum Santos
> Dumont in a heavenly harbor just outside of Grace.

Please be so kind as to cite the source of this mythoid.

> PS I still find reading of American fiction, Wood is a Brit living in
> the US, as evolving from Brithish novels (Fielding, Dickens) absurd.
> While our declearation of literary independence was delayed, we did
> win independence. And, while we also had the exchange authors HJ,
> Eliot, the lost gen and so on, we can trace Pynchon through American
> Literature. The argument, and it's not mine, it has been around since
> GR was published, and I was just a little kid then, that GR is
> indebted to Moby-Dick is solid. That M&D, not AGTD, is Pynchon's
> Confidence Man is also in the academic literature.
>
> PPPPPSSSSS  Now I'm pissing, but the ironies in this battle between
> Pynchon and Wood are wonderful; both are compassionate conservative
> types

Whoa, dude. Calling Pynchon a "compassionate conservative" makes the  
bile rise in my throat. The imbecile who came up with that deathless  
Oxymoron is given a devastating satirical portrait in Against the Day:

	They all lived in fear of the Governor, forever to and fro in
	Jeshimon and apt to arrive anywhere in town without warning.
	What impressed a first-time viewer was not any natural
	charisma, for he had none, but rather a keen sense of
	something wrong in his appearance, something pre-human in
	the face, the sloping forehead and clean-shaven upper lip,
	which for any reason, or none, would start back into a simian
	grin which was suppressed immediately, producing a kind of
	dangerous smirk that often lingered for hours, and which, when
	combined with his glistening stare, was enough to unnerve  the
	boldest of desperadoes. Though he believed that the power
	that God had allowed to find its way to him required a confident
	swagger, his gait was neither earned nor, despite years of
	practice, authentic, having progressed in fact little beyond an
	apelike trudge. The reason he styled himself Governor and not
	President or King was the matter of executive clemency. The
	absolute power of life and death enjoyed by a Governor within
	his territory had its appeal. He traveled always with his
	"clemency secretary," a cringing weasel named Flagg, whose
	job was to review each day's population of identified
	malefactors and point with his groomed little head at those to be
	summarily put to death, often by the Governor himself, though,
	being a notoriously bad shot, he preferred not to have a crowd
	around for that. "Clemency" was allowing some to wait a day or
	two before they were executed, the number of buzzards and
	amount of tower space being finite.
	AtD, 212

	Texas Executions:
	GW Bush Has Defined Himself, Unforgettably, As Shallow And
	Callous
	by Anthony Lewis

	BOSTON-There have been questions all along about the depth
	and seriousness of George W. Bush. They have been brought
	into sharp focus now by a surprising issue: the way the death
	penalty is administered in Texas. In his comments on that
	subject Governor Bush has defined himself, unforgettably, as
	shallow and callous. . .

The rest of the article is at:

http://www.commondreams.org/views/061700-102.htm

My posting on the subject during our group read of Against the Day:

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0703&msg=116345&keywords=governor%20of%20jeshimon

> who distrust nostalgia and religion, but are nearly reactionary
> in their need to defy the gnostic machine of numbing dehumaization.

Please explain what a "gnostic machine" is.