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

[Robin Landseadel]

"If I'm pushing an agenda, it's an insight. If someone else is pushing  
another agenda, it's an imbecility."

Incredible Dialogues.

Something the author gets better at as he grows up.

On Aug 28, 2010, at 7:04 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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.