Pynchon & Swift or no Confederacy but a Union of Dunces

[alice wellintown]

So, is it OK to be a Writer?

Back to Swift where down beneath the Grubby Street, though always
there like the Priest and his congregations of Scholar Rats who argue
the finer V-Points of theology, even the blasphemus vector where Marx
mingles with the Basque Jesuit,  the Mad Women in the Sewer who never
put no stock in Reason, and though only recently the topic of
discertations, had their say and sway as they sucked down the swill
from the coffee houses and clubs of the establishment and spewed forth
steam, that rose to where men like Swift more resembled the lawyer
than his scrivener:

By the time of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (1853),
acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now
an offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robberbaron
capitalism, the title character develops what proves to be terminal
acedia. It is like one of those western tales where the desperado
keeps making choices that only herd him closer to the one disagreeable
finale. Bartleby just sits there in an office on Wall Street
repeating, "I would prefer not to." While his options go rapidly
narrowing, his employer, a man of affairs and substance, is actually
brought to question the assumptions of his own life by this miserable
scrivener -- this writer! -- who, though among the lowest of the low
in the bilges of capitalism, nevertheless refuses to go on interacting
anymore with the daily order, thus bringing up the interesting
question: who is more guilty of Sloth, a person who collaborates with
the root of all evil, accepting things-as-they-are in return for a
paycheck and a hassle-free life, or one who does nothing, finally, but
persist in sorrow? Bartleby is the first great epic of modern Sloth,
presently to be followed by work from the likes of Kafka, Hemingway,
Proust, Sartre, Musil and others-take your own favorite list of
writers after Melville and you're bound sooner or later to run into a
character bearing a sorrow recognizable as peculiarly of our own time.


Yet, if we must compare and not contrast, in Swift and in Pynchon, the
political failings of a monopoly of dunces is dead bay roasted and
drizzled with melted butter.


In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political,
a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies
and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the
1920's and 30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam
era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and
nonfiction alike are full of characters who fail to do what they
should because of the effort involved. How can we not recognize our
world? Occasions for choosing good present themselves in public and
private for us every day, and we pass them by. Acedia is the
vernacular of everyday moral life. Though it has never lost its
deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as outright
despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price, a
deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the
inconvenience faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers
and the rest. The compulsive pessimist's last defense -- stay still
enough and the blade of the scythe, somehow, will pass by -- Sloth is
our background radiation, our easy-listening station -- it is
everywhere, and no longer noticed.


On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 11:17 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> We might get more out of a contrast than out of a comparison of these
> authors. While both write about the battle of the books in the market
> place, Pynchon's Slothful mad man in Attica is a Modern or a Dunce in
> Swift's satires, an author deserving of the punishment meted out to
> Deadly Sinners, authors who, in Swift's day, spread like clap on a
> college campus during the promiscuous days when a liberating vitality
> comprable to the movement Pynchon describes in his SL Introduction,
> threatened the civilized virtues of the publishers of those we now
> call classical authors. Pynchon, in Swift's estimation, would be a
> Modern or Dunce. I've decided not to make of the Beats and the
> Post-modernists a Confederacy but a Union of Dunces because the hard
> labor, not only of Beats but of all the children of Whitman who, even
> if they never gave a minute of thought to Blake's Satanic Mills, were
> ever aware that the voices crying out in the American wilderness, were
> those of workers hamming, stitching, weaving, and digging democracy
> out the stuff that dreams were made on in the new world, where the
> secuctive appeal of the novel, the work of modern dunces needed no
> excuse or apology and no moral correctness to placate old political
> patrons.