P defends V.

[Joseph Tracy]

Thank you . That really allows me to understand what you are talking  
about and why. The concept as presented here is easily understood. I  
think you probably could have even managed an explanation yourself,  
but part of what this is about is authority and Chase , apparently,  
and Madsen confers authority.  I have not read Chase and I am not  
convinced his term has caught on enough to be a commonly shared  
concept. Nevertheless I apologize for thinking that you were flying  
solo here. You appear to have a co-pilot of some renown.

  I am also not convinced that this fundamental structure is in any  
sense uniquely American. I see it in a great deal of European  
literature including English literature  and going back to the Greek  
plays and mythology and beyond.  At any rate the noun romance and the  
adjective romantic   have been used in several and varied ways to  
such a degree that the term does not convey to most educated readers  
the particular meaning imparted by Chase. Also it sounds like he is  
calling it a romance-novel and Madsen a  quest romance.  You are just  
saying Pynchon's novels are romances, as though that alone is  
powerfully explanatory.  However, once one understands what you mean  
by  Chase's use of the term  romance-novel  we can compare it to  
other terms  that have been put forth. In fact the romance-novel,  
thus defined  has much in common with the defining characteristics of  
the Mannipean Satire.   Once we admit that P writes satire as  
Fenimore Cooper does not, the Mannipean Satire and the romance-quest-  
novel  become kissing cousins rather than Punch and Judy. Would that  
we could find similar  shared ground. Well , perhaps not to kiss, but  
to shake hands and argue more amiably.






On Aug 30, 2010, at 10:46 PM, alice wellintown 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)
>
> see  ya, Josesph...not that I expect you to understand any of this
> either, but I'm sure Robin will exaplin it all tpo ya.
>