Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[alice wellintown]

Michael Bailey  wrote:

> alice wellintown  wrote:
>>
>> That Po-Mo has ended, and indeed it has exhausted itself, matters
>> little, since we now know that it was yet another ISM of us Moderns.
>
> a lot of interesting stuff seems to fall under that rubric...

My Definition of Modernism

Modernism: diverse cross-fertilization between cultures, between art
forms and between disciplines---the need to confront violence,
nihilism, and despair; the fascination with, but fear of, the
unconscious; the centrality of a dramatized narrator who is not
omniscient but rather himself searching for understanding; a symbolic
richness which invites multiple interpretations (influence of French
Symbolism), radical redefinition of the real (W and H James, Freud,
Bergson) Colonial programs, ruthless exploitation, journey (up the
Congo) or Modern (T.S. Eliot secularized) quest or symbolic
exploration into the darkest heart (consciousness) of Man,
manipulation of the reader's experience of time and space by means of
disruption of narrative chronology and ontological/epistemological
differentiation and the representation of consciousness (stream and
multiple) by the description of events, and the use of the
reflexivity and self-consciousness.

 Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

        --W. B. Yeats

Pynchon reminds me of Jonathan Edwards, the so-called "Last American
Puritan," who has one foot in the TULIP and one foot on the Train. In
the final assessment, forced to make one of course, I would say that P
is a Modernist, a Satirist, and author of American Romance. The PO-MO
is clearly an important movement and,  P is, while not its high
priest, certainly an adept practitioner.


> But I remain skeptical that Pynchon's texts
> can be described fully satisfingly with those critical tools.

Well, they are only tools, extensions of our human faculties. We use
them to get the job done. If we want to describe fully and
satisfactorily, I doubt we can make a jig for the job. What are we to
do? Sit silently like Quakers? Of perhaps we should all shut our
mouths and wiggle our little fingers like Cratylus. ;-)

It's not easy to describe Apocalypse Now & Jungleland:


Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
Between flesh and what's fantasy and the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland


>
> Some (but not all) of this is doubtless due to my incomplete knowledge
> of them...

>>
>> ANd, while the direct and at times interesting parody of the hard
>> boiled novel/film holds our attention in a few scenes, his
>> postmodernist experimentation are no longer novel
>
> ah, but it's not a novel, it's a romance...

Yes! So we expect to meet characters like Krook — a rag and bottle
merchant and collector of papers. He is the landlord of the house
where Nemo and Miss Flite live and where Nemo dies. Krook dies from a
case of spontaneous human combustion.  Ironically, amongst the stacks
of papers obsessively hoarded by the illiterate Krook is the key to
resolving the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.



>> Moreover, P's tropes are worn out and tired, his ideas float on the
>> surface of a filthy and ugly pool of poisoned and polluted
>> prose-landscapes where zombies and manikins and thanatoids and
>> subversive stereotypes zap in and out of Tube-lands and Movie Sets and
>> drug induced trips down lost highways where the spilled and broken
>> battle the blind and all end up in the ditch.
>>
>
> 3 responses, none of which is completely responsive, but taken together,
> also don't completely answer your objection:
>
> a) exactly!  what's not to like about that?

I need the picturesque sublime aesthetic Diamonds;  they are, after
all, a girl's best friend. It's not beauty or beast that kills this
book, it's the lack of both.



> b) it holds the mirror up to life!

Too often, it hold the mirror up to and exhausted Pynchon.


> c) tropes worn out and tired? nah - his tropes keep
> changing.  I don't find him guilty of stylistic stop-loss a-tall.

IV is VL with a couple few jigsaw pieces missing, Willie McCoy and Leroy Brown.