Pynchon's Quest Narratives ...

[Campbel Morgan]

Hawthorne may be the best source: The House of the Seven Gables,
Scarlet letter:

WHEN A WRITER calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed
that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and
material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had
he professed to be writing a novel. The latter form of composition is
presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible,
but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The
former--while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to
laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside
from the truth of the human heart--has fairly a right to present that
truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own
choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his
atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen
and enrich the shadows, of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to
make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and,
especially, to mingle the marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and
evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the
dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit
a literary crime, even if he disregard this caution.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose,
at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this
particular, the author has provided himself with a moral;--the truth,
namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the
successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage,
becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief;--and he would feel it a
singular gratification, if this romance might effectually convince
mankind--or, indeed, any one man--of the folly of tumbling down an
avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate...



The old Romance vs. Novel debate

Of course, by the time TRP, whose ancestors are the bad guys in the
work and who commit the two deadly sins that percolate  from the land
of Ahab & his wife--the old testament allusions are important--- and
may answer the question, is Vinland the good? or a  haunted and cursed
land?  a question M&D addresses--that is, slavery and the
extermination of the Indians, the literary crime were no crime at all,
or only a Bartleby's reisistance or preference, to or not to, write
fiction that will sell. Ironically & hysterically the rality is, of
course, Melville is recognized as the master of this form in England
but called a madman in America. That's why we must not credit
Cervantes with Pynchon's form. For to ignore Melville and Brocken
Brown & Co. is to misread Pynchon and the tradition he springs from.
In any event, and those sins haunt the works of American literature,
essentially a Gothic literature from Irving (the most important work
is the Devil and Tom Walker, remember that the Europeans, and
expecially the British, never tired of calling the new "democracy" a
hypocite slave and backward swamp and woodland--Irving was quite
popular in Europe, his re-working of the Faust Legend, with ironies
the European didn't quite get, is re-worked by Pynchon in Lowlands) to
A Mercy, Toni Morrison's latest--students of Faulkner, she and
McCarthy, O'conner, Harper Lee ...on and on... the Gothic also a
European tradition (P distinguished the Luddite texts) has an American
form, not just the Southern ...blah blah....but hoiw one writes
Romance by yhe moonlite, a useful piece of advice from Hawthorne is
far more instructive than  Pynchon's advice, he never follows himself,
about characters and plots, sketched out in SLow Learner Introduction.

Hester Prynne's daughter, a reverse Slothrop, is a magical mystery
figure, not human, no heart, to the end when she is given one.

   It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness
held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and
rambles into the country, whenever—which was seldom and reluctantly—I
bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature, which used
to give me such freshness and activity of thought, the moment that I
stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as
regarded the capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home,
and weighed upon me, in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my
study. Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted
parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon,
striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might
flow out on the brightening page in many-hued description.   44
  If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs,
with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
book-case; the picture on the wall;—all these details, so completely
seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to
lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire
dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker
carriage; the hobby-horse;—whatever, in a word, has been used or
played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of
strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as
by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has
become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and
fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each
imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here,
without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene
to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form,
beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had
returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.   45
  The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing
the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and
ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the
moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of
human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we
behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove
farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such
an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone,
cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need
never try to write romances.




On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Dave Monroe<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> From Deborah L. Madsen, "Pynchon's Quest Narratives and the Tradition
> of American Romance," Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's The Crying of
> Lot 49 and Other Works , ed. Thomas H, Schaub (NY: MLA, 2008), pp.
> 25-30:
>
>   "Students who have never studied American literature as a coherent
> body of knowledge evaluate Pynchon's achievement in terms of their
> familiarity with the canon of British literature.  Consequently, their
> perception of what constitutes a novel in English is shaped by the
> classic nineteenth-century British novelists ....  Thus, these
> students anticipate that Pynchon's language will conform loosely to
> E.M. Forster's prescription for 'round' or 'flat' characterization and
> who will inhabit fictonal settings recognizably related to the world
> ....  The structure of the narrative, they expect, will be based on
> the interaction of characters and the development of relationships
> among them that represent significant aspects of their culture and
> society.
>   "Given these assumptions, students encounter difficulties with
> Pynchon's deployment of the quest structure, his use of language and
> symbolism, his types of characters, and their settings.  Richard
> Chase, in his classic study, The American Novel and Its Tradition
> (1957), observes that differences such as these mark American as
> opposed to English novelistic conventions.... Chase identifies what he
> calls the American 'romance-novel,' a generic classification that
> accounts for the distinctive features of the narratives that form much
> of the American literary canon: works by James Fenimore Cooper,
> Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and ... Thomas Pynchon.
>   "Chase stresses the importance of a shift in the attitude toward
> characterization: from the novelistic emphasis on comprehensive
> characterization to the romancer's interest in action and plot at the
> expense of detailed character portrayal.  'Character itself,' he
> writes, 'becomes ... somewhat abstract and ideal, so much so in some
> romances that it seems merely a function of plot' (13) [ellipsis in
> text].'  ..." (p. 25)
>
>   "The subject matter of the quest romance is abstract moral truth
> ... as opposed to more particular sociological kinds of truth that
> arise from the ordinary or probable experiences in the novel.  As a
> consequence, the romance is set not in the recognizable world of real
> life but in some neutral space where the marvelous and the ordinary,
> the imaginary events and actual locations may meet.  The laws of
> possibility are suspended ... so that the truths of human experience
> may be acted out in the narrative.... the highly stylized, fictional
> world of the romance: all is symbolic, but the symbolic meetings are
> not simple and obvious; rather, they are as ambiguous as the human
> situations being represented." (p. 26)
>
> "When a romance is read as a novel, inevitably the romancer's attempt
> to dramatize the hidden truths of the human condition becomes but a
> weak 'paint and pasteboard' representation of social reality....  Like
> Hawthorne, Pynchon creates characters to represent moral ideas, just
> as he uses social history ... as idea rather than as event." (ibid.)
>
> "Indeed, several of the features that supposedly define Lot 49 and
> other Pynchon works as postmodern are actually characteristics of the
> American quest romance: the self-conscious foregrounding of narrative,
> the infinite deferral of meaning, the self-reflexive concern with
> reading and textuality...." (p. 30)
>
> http://www.mla.org/store/CID23/PID336
>
> Citing ...
>
> Chase, Richard.  The American Novel and its Tradition.
>   London: Bell, 1957.  [Baltimore, MD: JHUP, 1980.]
>
> Forster, E.M.  Aspects of the Novel.  London: Arnold, 1927.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=vzBtSnA4rLAC
>