Meet the New Boss (Pynchon's THEY or The Firm is Dead)

[alice wellintown]

Mark Kohut:
> Even the reader/critics who exist via the template of James Wood's deep
> but not broad lens of literature, loved Mason & Dixon for the characters,
> reflected
> in their dialogue mostly...............
>
> He did get better----again, imho, when it was what the fictional
> vision required---at character via dialogue
> later in his career......

Yes, Pynchon writes better at a distance, an historical distance
allows for the kinds of dialogues he excells at and hides some of his
weaknesses--deaf spots. However,  these, and the other "offenses" of
romance, as described by critics like Twain (see Twain on Cooper) and
Wood, while clearly offenses authors like Twain would never be found
guilty of, are common to the romance. Like the Shaggy Dog tale, it
comes with the romances Pynchon writes. Twain, of course, is the
father of American naturalism/realism/regionalism (I know these terms
are questionable), so he comes after the high water mark in American
Literature, the so-called American Renaissance, and he rejects the
romance hook line and sinker. So, while Cooper, often credited with
giving us the American Romantic Hero type, is mocked by Twain in that
famous essay, it is the romance that Twain really objects to. This is
a bit unfair since a Romance never features the langauge as Twain does
in his works. Could Melville write like Twain? I doubt it. Is it fair
to expect Hawthorne to write like Henry James? Absolutely not. A quick
study of the history of American Langauge--focusing on oration (from
the Pulpit to the Political debate) and contrasting Twain with
Shakespeare is helpful here because it's not easy to write dialogue in
any language and, a good argument has been made--D. Boorstein, for
example, provides an synopsis with an extensive bibliography of this
topic in one of his American History books) about just how difficult
it is to write American Dialog (American spelling is also difficult).
So, to argue P is hard on V., even though he says nothing negative
about it in that Introduction we've all read soooo many times we seem
to have forgetted what the darn thing sez, becaue he critiques his bad
ear exemplified in an slow learning tale, that is not simply folded
into the novel, it is re-worked from the dialogue down, is to begin at
the tail of the shaggy dog and chase his head round after it. Yes, M&D
is a better novel than GR if we measure it with an anti-romance and
anti-allegory measuring stick as James Wood does and close our eyes to
the talking dog and clock and the duck and so on, but this is like
Twain complaining about Cooper. If, however, we turn to Tanner's
reading in that great volume on American Langauge--the Introduction is
key so don't skip it--and read what he says about the subjunctive and
the langauge of M&D, and how the langauge, while perhaps not as
professorial as Sot Weed, while not as inventive as other more
"academic" authors (Heaney, just to give an example beyond dispute) or
dare I say, more talented with the langauge, not in the Foster Wallace
sense, but in the Henry James sense, but how the language, often
ponderous and shaggy, extends the American Romance, the possible, the
probable, the chances for, the perhaps and maybe of a land that clangs
and bangs and whispers with ghosts, then, perhaps, once we have
situated M&D in the tradition of Melville, the so-called "broken
estate" that James Wood, not an American and I mean no jingo by this,
then we begin to appreciate, not Pynchon's incredible dialogues or
characters, for these are not great, but his romance.