Masters of American Lit (except Pynchon)

[Phillip Grayson]

I'd agree that the "post" in post-Cold War there might be a bit displaced.

One thing that seemed especially good/hard to reconcile about _Against the
Day_ was the avid fanship of terrorism displayed, a natural outgrowth of the
individualism of early P under the fighting oppression of reagan-bush-bush
jr America, a nixonian evil made strong by finally having "rogues" and lone
individuals without states in particular to blame.  No longer a massive,
Manichean opposite like the USSR, but just idealistic dudes to blame for
everything.

However real it is (and I doubt it's as real as purported, because the US
can't be that hard to invade, seems.  Seems people just like to vote
Republican when they're scared...) this new threat is a boon to Monolithic
government.

_AtD_'s anarchism seems a bit naive because it's uncompromising, even as New
York is destroyed.  It seems unfocused because its focus is a bit far off.
It refuses this new paranoia like GR did the old Cold War version.  (ie the
Soviets are not the enemy, corporations are, something now a truism)  (The
men who would kill themselves dynamically for their beliefs are not our
enemies, it's those who drive them to it, one way or the other)

The hegemony of monetary evil remains the persistent, underlying,
increasingly obfuscated enemy.

There's a nice inverted parabola of this happening from Depression to WWII
to these days, one the man might have imagined would hit ground before
reaganomics, in 1973, but which continues to plummet, and not alone.

Of course, actual politics have been Pynchon's weakness, in my humble little
opinion, because he's prolly an idealist, but his sociology seems pretty
spot on, from CoL49's hippy predictions (or, "The Lost Integration"s civil
rights retrospectively obviousnesses)  into astute observations about the
motives of racial hatred and... well, most other things in the big books.

He is very funny, and the reclusiveness that so contributed to his
popularity might be lending a hand to those who find him overrated these
days, his first book was a masterpiece so polychromatic that going beyond it
was hard to imagine, and the fact that his next two did so left him in a
tough place, so that even as he's done more, he's never made an epochleaping
leap like GR was (no one, I think, has yet, since) though _Mason and Dixon_
was a solid try.

His rep might be punished for a minute now short term for loving to write
and for doing so increasingly often, but V. Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason
and Dixon, and (I believe) Against the Day, will stand as the most
impressive post-war output of any author, none of the self-agrandizing of
Mailer (or, differently, of Updike), and none (subjectively speaking) of the
compulsion to publish, rather than to write, that did in both those, and
Roth, and most of the Beats, too.  James McEllroy has a claim, artistically,
but can't connect as well, Coover is sharp, but can't write as well, DeLillo
has a way with words, but seems to want to be a visual artist or performance
artist instead (and these shortcoming, I hasten to mention, don't stop any
of these guys from being spectacular, I really truly like them all, but they
aren't finally, Pynchon) Wallace was great, but too crippled by success to
top his first masterpiece.  Others of his generation are pretty meh,
castrated by PCism or Creative Writing courses or something, waiting for
Juno Diaz and those younger than him to step up.

Pynchon, in my opinion, was the greatest writer between 1950 and 2000, in
English and otherwise.  He can have his detective larks, he can try to just
have fun for all I care, if that's how he blows off steam between paragraphs
in the big books and scrapes together some scratch.  I'll read those before
anything else.

Can't wait 'til his next novella, if only because it foretells his next
doorstopper...







On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 7:02 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> Post Cold War is apt, even though GR preceded the end of the Cold War.
>  But many at that time saw the fallacy of the domino theory and a
> Super-Other takeover as foundations for our national and foreign
> policy.
>
> The MAD model has not completely been put to bed.  Nuclear
> proliferation via terrorist-states as suppliers of enriched juice for
> their own or others' use undercuts the threat of like retribution.
> Some kind of international policing is required for any real nuclear
> disarmament.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 9:10 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
> > David Morris wrote:
> >>
> >> Knowing nothing about this Mark Lawson, I'd only say that Pynchon
> >> might not really be in the category of "post-WWII American literary
> >> giants."  I would think the term would apply to authors coming to
> >> prominence in the close-term aftermath of that event, and thus their
> >> identities having been intimately formed by that event.  I would think
> >> that any post-modern author would not be in their ranks.  Maybe
> >> Vietnam era (and post) American literary giants would be more
> >> accurate.
> >>
> >> David Morris
> >
> > Post Cold War perhaps.
> > From "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
> > "It [science fiction]was just as important as the Beat movement going on
> at
> > the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which
> with
> > only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the
> > cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of
> the
> > Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the
> principal
> > refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.
> >
> > By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery,
> was
> > the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been
> extended
> > to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program
> and
> > the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of
> prophecy
> > to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge,
> and
> > before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons
> multiply
> > out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes,
> unlimited
> > range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to
> > seven- and eight-figure body counts has become -- among those who,
> > particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies --
> > conventional wisdom."
> >
>
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