Back to V., MB's structure post cont.

[Dave Williams]

Throughout his writings Tanner clung to an unshakeable conviction that there was something special about American writing. In The Reign of Wonder (1965) he expressed this perception as a desire in American literature for a ‘new naivety of response’ which both privileges and draws on the vision of a child. In his later criticism Tanner shifted his emphasis more on to style and narrative structures, being particularly influenced by Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere (1966) which opens with the challenging assertion that ‘the most interesting American books are an image of the creation of America itself’. This means that America is written into being, or even performed; and it is no coincidence that one of the most important essays in Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men (1987) should be called ‘Games American Writers Play’.
The recurring difficulty which Tanner finds in American writers could be put like this. If they reject discredited European ways of positioning the self according to hierarchies of class or rank, how do they avoid the dangers of either a loss of identity or, as Tanner puts it in relation to Melville’s The Confidence-Man, a ‘self-sealing solitude’? Individuality becomes an elusive aim rather than a clearly achievable state for the self. Social identity becomes problematised in that masquerade extends through so many aspects of The Confidence-Man that, as in The Blithedale Romance, nothing can be authenticated. Once again, an avenue to independence—self-parenting—confuses identity with a whole series of guises.
 
Three twentieth-century topics close The American Mystery on Fitzgerald, DeLillo, and Pynchon. In the first of these Tanner explores dimensions of theatricality in The Great Gatsby. For him Nick Carraway is a ‘spectator in search of a performer’. This yearning for spectacle explains why the novel contains so many magical moments where objects or characters seem transfigured and Tanner rightly notes how Nick’s narration is peppered with phrases (‘I suppose’, ‘I have an idea that’, etc.) which testify to his appropriation of material into his story. These are the stylistic signs of Nick’s search for wonder and Tanner once again brings out the typicality of his instances by proposing a whole tradition from the Puritans up to contemporary writers like Thomas Pynchon where writers are searching for some special dimension to America. This almost visionary impulse is ironically reified in the famous hoarding of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg whose
 commercial gaze confronts Nick in the Valley of Ashes. The materiality of modern American culture provides us with a strong link between The Great Gatsby and DeLillo’s Underworld. When he discusses the latter novel a certain tension emerges between Tanner’s obvious respect for DeLillo’s craftsmanship and reservations about aspects of his method. He is , for example, suspicious of DeLillo’s use of cataloguing and shows some ambivalence over one central aspect of Underworld: its close relation to the cinema. At one point in the novel we are told: ‘The world is lurking in the camera, already framed’; and there are many allusions to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Goddard, and other aspects of the movies. For Tanner this technique converts every image of human misfortune into spectacle, into what he calls ‘atrocity tourism’. He has fewer reservations about DeLillo’s evocation of paranoid voices and about the displacement of human protagonists
 by the rubbish of contemporary American life. Here again contrasts emerge and Tanner locates a greater sensitivity in Pynchon towards the lives lying behind this detritus. In his 1982 introduction to Pynchon Tanner paused over two related notions: ‘rubbish’ and ‘codes’. These two notions overlap in the communicability of the whole environment which induces a fascinated state of panic in Oedipa Maas, the protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49. In his 1987 study of DeLillo, In The Loop, Tom LeClair describes him as a ‘systems novelist’ and Tanner would be entirely sympathetic with that as a description of Pynchon also. In his final essay Tanner considers how Mason and Dixon fits into Pynchon’s and characteristically focuses in on how America is conceptualized. It is at once a ‘symbol for boundlessness; historically boundaried’. It is impossible to overestimate the importance in this novel of surveying. As Tanner points out, it is a far from
 innocent act but rather signals the appropriation of the terrain for commercial and imperial purposes. To use Tanner’s own phrases, surveying imposes the most dominant set of human signs on the scene of Nature. He reflects on the associated symbolism of lines and boundaries here, showing a continuity between Pynchon’s concerns and those of Fenimore Cooper, among other American predecessors. Boundaries imply oppositions between what lies on either side and also open up the possibility of transgression in its most literal meaning of going across. Tanner recognizes the special historical moment of Mason and Dixon, the moment just before the Declaration of Independence. Just as the term ‘preterite’ occupies a special position in Gravity’s Rainbow denoting the human casualties of power groups, so in Pynchon’s latest novel ‘subjunctive’ privileges the imagined or the speculative over empirical fact. Thus as America shades into material being
 away from dream and myth, it gradually ceases to be subjunctive.
 


--- On Fri, 9/3/10, Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Back to V., MB's structure post cont.
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Friday, September 3, 2010, 2:18 AM







Zoyd & Benny are interesting, but are not protagonists. They, like Larry, are parodies. 
 
Of what? 
 

The American Male is driven by something quite
deep in AMERICAN HISTORY to be a Hero (James Fenimore Cooper AND Davey Crocket). He is not only a boy inside, refusing to pay the price of any real relationship with
a real grown up person--have a family,  or grow up and get over
his losses, but also in love with being young and having
youthful qualities, with being innocent and pure of purpose, with
having a set of principles higher than the honor code of the society
at large, with having knowledge of his world that has been earned not
at college but on a whale ship or through deep intuition or from what
he has learned from the "Other", and a love of off-the-grid nature and
a distrust of life in the town or city, and with a quest to find
higher truths in TREES or NATURE or In The WOODS. In short, the
American male is a Romantic and yearns to remain so--singing the song
of myself.
 



--- On Fri, 9/3/10, Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Back to V., MB's structure post cont.
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Date: Friday, September 3, 2010, 1:56 AM







or this one: 
 
Pynchon’s entire project of elucidating the allegory of the V is genre-related, as he places himself in the mythic and symbolic tradition of the romance-novel.  The novel as romance pursues “truth” in the surreal and at the edges of human experience.  Pynchon finds his insights at the interface between disciplines and the coming together of symbolic seams in the universe.  He looks for obscure incidents in history formed at the “interfaces” between cultures to find clues to the workings of the V.  Pynchon’s allegorical method fits well the conventions of the romance-novel that allow the novelist to go beyond the realm of ordinary reality in search of “truth.”
Pynchon hints in both V and Gravity’s Rainbow that he sees himself as continuing the tradition of Hawthorne and Melville.5  He may have Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Melville’s Moby Dick in mind as intertexts for his early novels.  As allegory, The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick offer problems of interpretation for characters and reader of what appear to be allegorical signs, opening a dialectic in which differing “readings” are available.  I would suggest that Thomas Pynchon found the allegorical complexity of Hawthorne useful as a model for his own allegory of the V6.
 
http://allegoriaparanoia.com/pynchon/early_stories/chapter1.html