Fw: P defends V.: more break-dancing (from an unathletic old man)

[Mark Kohut]

As I do some Shake sceneing, I am reminded of his near contemporary, Edmund 
Spenser, of Faerie Queen fame, not that there's anything
wrong with that. Spenser, romance in poetry with (at least) semi-allegorical 
characters and actions full of meanings in the plurals.....Reminds me
of an American writer I've read. 

No one ever seemed to accuse ole Spence of character creation via single 
speeches and, sometimes, extended tropes and a bit more for them characters
so much rounder than even flabby Benny and Slothrop, like that ununiversitied 
Stratford player who 'created the human "being of the world
beyond the Middle Ages on the stage and in the white folio, what a visitation, 
some say, like Bloom. Character ripeness isn't all all the time, ole Spence
probably said and Milton echoed, perhaps divinely. 

Which is just to segue into: categorization comes after creation, ask Aristotle 
who wrote his Poetics to lay down his sword and shield and the patterns
of them great Greek scene makers, who did not even know they were writing 
tragedies via the unities....

I've read me some Chase once upon a time and i kept remembering that whatever 
it was that Melville was writing  only his first exotic "travel" novels, books, 
romances 

ever sold and Chase woudda had nuthin to categorize if HM's genius had not 
been belatedly recognized like the deferral of infinite meaning, thanks Deborah, 

can i call you that?  and I also remember Chase wanted some high belated 
recognition for Twain's-------------Puddinhead Wilson(!), a courageous 
fence-painting attempt I guess but he did not get this muttonhead to read it 
nor, I think, many of his leadheaded colleagues, who were not him.

I guess I fall on Robin's swordside when I most like Mendelsohn's "encyclopedic' 

categorization of Pynchon who transcends even romance and that satiric 
group known as menippean, as it always sounds like to me, although I apologize 
to any descendants of Mr. Menippean if it is his one and only family
name but anyway, is "encyclopedic" any kind of defining characteristic anyway 
when it seems to mean mucho pagination and full of about everything which
is where we are always starting with TRP, yes?  


 


----- Original Message ----
From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tue, August 31, 2010 1:07:12 AM
Subject: Re: P defends V.

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.
>