James Wood's review

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

/
>  Against the Day/is also Pynchon's Proust-echoing yet anti-/Remembrance 
of Things Past/as well,  I would argue. All that
>  remembering is too nostalgic for Thomas Pynchon, a decadence.


You misunderstand Proust.

What you talk about is intentional "mémoire intellectuelle", which is 
colorless and merely cognitive.

But what Proust actually was interested in is "mémoire involontaire", 
which is unconscious and - think of the Madeleine and the tea! - brings 
back moments in their true color outside the regular flow of time.

Forgetting is the necessary basis for experiencing this mémoire 
involontaire.


On 15.07.2011 03:14, Mark Kohut wrote:
> 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 My unpublished letter to the editor where Woods' review ran...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 Dick/may 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 Day/should 
> 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 Day/is also Pynchon's Proust-echoing yet 
> anti-/Remembrance of Things Past/as 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 /Middlemarch/or 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 Day/may 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/20110715/ef0201b1/attachment.html>