Fitzgerald's TN

[Paul Mackin]

On 10/6/2012 7:40 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> So, we can see that Fitzgerald, who, consciously or unconsciously,
> employed the modern techniques, as described by Ford and put into
> perfect practice by Conrad, in his Gatsby, including the flashback,
> ran into a great deal of trouble when he set out to tell and show the
> story of Diver. The problem with the first version is, as Wayne Booth
> describes it in his brilliant study of the rehtoric of fiction, one of
> over-distancing. But the revisions make a tragedy with no catharsis.
> Still, the novel has beauty and brilliance.
>
> Now, that we have so much, from Fitzgerld's advisors and critics, some
> like th friends of Job, others like mathamaticians measuring the stars
> that burst from his brain, calculating the collapse into a black hole
> of mad debauchery, we needn't take sides. Wherein lies the beauty and
> the brilliance? For this, after all, is where young Tom Pynchon sucked
> honey. And it is was not only from the romantic phrases and the
> lyrical Irish springs, nut in the structural, flaw as they were,
> devices. And, I contend that P looked to Fitz as a model of more than
> tenderness and what georgeous in Gatsby, more than the flotsam that
> floated in his wake, more than the Myrtle mowed down by the Dynamo,
> her vitality spilled on the highway...to the use of film as plots
> within plots, of actors and actresses with one foot in the studio lot
> and one foot in the street, the green lights down old est main
> distorting the faces....

I wonder where Pynchon learned the art of cramming so much meaning into 
so few words.

"What does the War want?"

P
>