James Wood's review

[Mark Kohut]

March 13,2007 
My unpublished letter to the editor where Woods' review ran...
All is vanity...mine....
 
 
The New Republic 
Washington, D.C. 20005 
 Dear Editor: 
It is hard to disagree with a great reader such as James Wood, the kind of reader we want to be when we grow up, even if we are already older than he is. He can make us feel we are riding above the reality of the language on the page like the Chums of Chance are floating above "reality" at the beginning of Against the Day. His brilliant essay into a narrative method of Jane Austen's astonished me, not the only time he has, and those insights informed my reading of Against the Day, I dare to say. All falling-short is my own, of course.
The Dickensian tradition out of Fielding is a great tradition in which to see Pynchon. Elaborate comic scenes, trying to embody cultural insight in his overstuffed monsters of novels are major to his fiction, along with a lifelong horror at the injustices of his world, our world, History. One ultimate judgment is whether some of those scenes/characters reach archetypal, mythic proportions. I, for one, think Captain Blicero terrifying, Ahab-like to the 6 millionth-plus power, so to speak, and unforgettable. 
 Moby Dickmay be the wrong Melville work with which to compare Against the Day. With WW2, the V-2(s) corresponding to the whale, that will probably always be Gravity's Rainbow. Against the Dayshould be seen as more akin to Melville's late masterpiece, The Confidence Man. Levels of truth--or better, lies--various avatars, and various narrative perspectives are beginning correspondences. 
Pynchon's major weakness is for unembodied ideas over felt life, as Wood indicates.  (Pynchon admitted  this in Slow Learner); but his ideas are, with a compacted lyricism, allusive encoding, musicality of expression  and some incredible extended metaphors (usually encrypted, yes, often irritating thereby, yet so often full of rich unfoldings) are a  major reason for reading him. A literate dog, whose name means “likes to fight”, reading Henry James' only novel of anarchism; Archduke Franz Ferdinand playing the dozens in South Chicago while asking to rent the Stockyards for a weekend is not just juvenile humor. Wood may be right on many canned versus life-giving japes, but he is not right on 'meaningless' jokes. Ferdinand carries lots of historic meaning for Against the Day. Pynchon means and means. Overdetermined might be a description of his “too much talent” .Why such screams on a trip under the sands? Sand, silicon, what?---there is a
 great pleasure in seeing/feeling these connections. Linking the first popular serial killer, Jack the Ripper, to the mass nationalized "serial killing" of the 20th Century seems plain brilliant to this reader. (P.S. and borrowed from Dr. Strangelove, I learn while rewatching that.)
Against the Dayis also Pynchon's Proust-echoing yet anti-Remembrance of Things Pastas well,  I would argue. All that remembering is too nostalgic for Thomas Pynchon, a decadence. I think it is a point of one passage Wood quotes. Yet, it was life when "real".  The 'longing' phrase Wood cites is, first, by a character we should not forget, and is echoed in a number of other places in Against the Day. Longing is one of the non-mediated human necessities in this novel, yet, yes, we readers have to judge whether Pynchon simply states and points to longing maybe too nakedly, compared to Eliot embodying it in Dorothea in Middlemarchor Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. But his words do often sing his values and he is not after most kinds of psychological understanding of his characters. Maybe because he can't do it James' way, but right around 1910 human nature DID change in ways even different from what Virginia Woolf knew, his work states. 
Pynchon the lefty, the anti-the-State, 60s "hippy" radical that most of the cultists and Academy see him as? I think the moral complexity of Against the Day shows that up on close reading as Wood is right to hint at.  This is a sins of the father novel as much as anything. Wood is right in essaying his possible "conservatism", I think; a conservatism that might be close to what we label libertarianism or the (non-violent) tradition of anarchism: where some say the right-left ideologies meet. Against The Daymay show this better than any work of his. But, we don't need to reduce to certainty--a Pynchon phrase from Mason & Dixon--- his political ideas, as we don't Stendhal's or Tolstoy's. Thinking of the above and Pynchon’s lifelong concern for society's victims, the luckless, hapless and discarded human beings, we might want to resurrect a label like "compassionate conservative" for him; one that might be applied looking backward to one of Pynchon’s
  intellectual heroes, Henry Adams.  
I do ask Mr. Wood to look again at the levels of narrative in a way he did with Jane Austen. There is a narrative level that is not just writing/straightforward storytelling with all events mediated. That beautiful passage he quotes full of "the dust of the day" is part of Pynchon’s vision of the non-mediated in Against the Day, something that we should try to feel daily as we can, he presents. It is no accident, I suggest,  that The Chums of Chance start as fictional characters in adventure stories and become existentially different by the end. Mimesis is pressured from the very structure—and all that “mediated reality”-- of Against the Day, I would argue. There is an authorial narrator (or two) beyond the supposed writer of the Chums' stories. The value of the non-mediated with so much of it lost by history pervades, quietly, subtly, fittingly, Against the Day. 
 Another great reader, Dr. Leavis, did not include Dickens in the first edition of the great tradition he named. But, after rereading him later in life, he changed his mind. James Wood, with his appreciation of much of the writing and effects in Pynchon is almost there, I suggest and when he rereads Pynchon's Against the Day, some day, he will be. 
Sincerely,
Mark Kohut
Jersey City, NJ 07307
646-519-1956


From: Otto <ottosell at googlemail.com>
To: Pynchon Liste <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2011 7:41 PM
Subject: James Wood's review

new url:

Against the Day: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

All Rainbow, No Gravity
A review by James Wood

http://www.powells.com/review/2007_03_01.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20110714/90e53a6f/attachment.html>