For Joseph (from Group W Bench & the Romantics); why Alice closed the dump on Thanksgving and other Komspiracies from the Left

[Joseph Tracy]

> "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.)

I find her language  to be imprecise and really to suffer from the  
weakness which it is applying to  Pynchon and to what is being termed  
romance. She is defining romance in terms of a perceived weakness and  
is using reductive ideas and generalities , while criticizing the use  
of "idea rather than event". This is particularly weak when applied  
to the complex,  layered and cumulatively large narrative works of T  
Pynchon.


> 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

One might argue with equal force that when an author's mythologizing  
of  complex social realities is  put forth in fictional form by  
reducing it to the personal    narratives we favor in novels  it is  
equally likely to become " but a weak 'paint and pasteboard'  
representation of social reality "  .    This is a philosophical  
argument about the relation of the particular to the universal.  
Different artists will put the fulcrum of their focus at different  
spots  but  the power of important art is not dependent on where that  
lens is situated but on the ability of the work to expose and reflect  
the human condition in ways that wake us, stir us, challenge us, make  
us feel and think and cry and laugh and marvel. Form( satire, novel,  
historic fiction, short story,  magic realism,  science fiction,  
detective story...) follows function and the creative interests of  
the artist and all great art transcends the limits of its form.  
Hawthorne may have characters that  represent "moral ideas",   
characters that are pasteboard representations of social reality,   
but Hester Prynne is , in my mind and memory as a reader,   vividly  
and credibly  real, her inner life complex and personal and bigger  
than any gender or social stereotype.