TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

[Matthew Cissell]

"Teach anything and you will discover that most people take the class
because they need the credit." This strikes me as an oversimplified explanation of something as complex as the series of decisions that go into one's educational career. Why would "most" (and how many is most?) agents take this approach? I didn't and I know others that didn't. And I have spent time on both sides of the desk or podium.


"Why would anyone read Joyce?" Good question, but we could apply it to TP as well. I can't see any answer to your Why's. But maybe I can offer something.
I used to be a bit of a Joycean, even went to the Bloomsday 100th anniverrsary while some of you were in Malta. So dedicated was I that I even had my own membership to various Joycean journals. You might check out "Who 'Curls Up' with Ulysses? A Study of Non-conscripted Readers of Joyce" JJQ vol 41, no 3 Spring 2004.
I'll just summarize it. Frances Devlin-Glass asked the question you have (more or less) and tried to answer it by surveying participants at the Bloomsday in Melbourne 2003- 2004. Mind you it is a limited survey with faults but it does yeild some information. 

I quote:  "One described himself as an 'engineer wishing to see the other side of the hill'"  "One respondant  commented, 'I decided to become pretentious.'"  Later Devlin writes: "That Joyce's texts are seen as cultural capital independant of its literariness was indicated in the reasons give by Trish Ni Ivor... but clearly her motivations had much to do with her experience of her Irish-Australian childhood"

Cultural capital is a key term here. Some may read it to feel more Irish or to feel more intellectual, or some may have a background that draws them in that direction - we pick the books as much as they pick us. I think this is applicable to TP as well. Perhaps in my own case my university played no small role, So IL U has a truly remarkable collection of Joyce material that Richard Ellman used in his classic bio.

As for genre, it is a category term and agents contend for the power that legitmates the naming they put foward. Your argument for formalism, though aglow with your usual rhetorical charm and colorful prose, doesn't help me much. I was also suckled on the tit of formalism from early 20th c. to those later day textualists (il n'ya pas de hors-texte) but I think I've mostly cleaned it from my system, and I only let bacteria dwell in my guts. I don't see how literary formalism helps us with biology, nobody in the lab i worked in was concerned about it.

 "We just need to keep them in their own genres or classification systems or whatever." First, no we don't. If we follow your example of science we clearly see that is nto the case: planets lose planethood, diseases get reclassified, classification systems change in response to new information. Whatsmore, as you say genre is a classification system and as such is more of a typology than a scheme based on form.

I know I won't change your mind (& I would be disappointed if I could - you're too tough for that) but I thought I might point out an alternate view.

cheers

mc otis

ps sorry for the long post.


----- Original Message -----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: 
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2012 6:43 PM
Subject: Re: TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

Mark,

Teach anything and you will discover that most people take the class
because they need the credit.  Why would anyone read Joyce? Or
Melville? Or Under the Volcano or Middlemarch or countless other works
most people find boring or impossible or too difficult or too long or
too whatever? Why read Pride and Prejudice with Zombies or Sense and
Sensibility with Aliens? Why are many reading these classics with
monsters before or in lieu of the canonical work? My first Dante was a
graphic novel. I got round to the original, eventually. So, I'm not
knocking these books or popular trends. Hell, I read all of Bertrand
Russell and it didn't help nor hurt my reading of that graphic novel,
Logicomix.

But, genre, for those of us with some formalism left in our old
brains, or maybe its in our guts, is worth something; it helps us see
how we evolved from sea creatures and grew necks that turn and noses
we follow. We are animals, but we are not sponges. And, while we may
not want to go back to square and Aristotle's four causes, his
rhetoric, his poetics, his logic, and, as we have inherited the wind,
and progress that put gasoline in the clouds, well, we can have our
darwin and our bible too. We just need to keep them in their own
genres or classification systems or whatever. Because, if we don't, we
can't communicate about these works. If Freud write science fiction
and Marx is a poet...well...I'm the mad mad mad maud mad....