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

[Robin Landseadel]

	‘the most interesting American books are an image of the
	creation of America itself’.

Fantastic post.

On Sep 3, 2010, at 6:34 AM, Dave Williams wrote:

> 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.