Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[alice wellintown]

Herman Melville seems to have articulated and hoped for this kind of
possibility.  Writing 30 years before Nietzsche, in his great novel
“Moby Dick,” the canonical American author encourages us to “lower the
conceit of attainable felicity”; to find happiness and meaning, in
other words, not in some universal religious account of the order of
the universe that holds for everyone at all times, but rather in the
local and small-scale commitments that animate a life well-lived.  The
meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart,
the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are
genuine meanings.  They are, in other words, completely sufficient to
hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve
into a sequence of meaningless events.  But they are nothing like the
kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of
Christianity had hoped.  Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way,
the commitments that animate the meanings in one person’s life ─ to
family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community ─
become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else
with radically different commitments might nevertheless be living in a
way that deserves one’s admiration.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/navigating-past-nihilism/

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In the link to the Cambridge Companion to Pynchon that I believe
> Kai posted, one could read a part of Ms. Hume's essay in it, opinions
> from which she may be summarizing in the esssay we have been commenting
> on.
>
> It is in there I believe as I skimmed it, that she argues for the 'anarchist
> destruction' theme of Against the Day specifically and only, it seems.
>
> An generally very smart and good reviewer, Adam Kirsch, was the first (and
> only, I beleive) major early reviewer to denounce Against the Day for this
> theme
> as well. His review is linked on wikipedia and the Pynchon wiki I am pretty
> sure
> without checking again.
>
> I still think it is a misreading too.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc:
> Sent: Saturday, September 8, 2012 7:03 AM
> Subject: Re: Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover
>
>> wouldn't one be better served by a statement that GR makes a point of
>> mentioning previously unmentionable facts that tend to "undercut a
>> complete
>> trust" in those organizations, rather than 'exhibit a complete distrust'?
>> and that, like much good war fiction, it shows some of the many ways
>> that reality differs from the happy horsecrap of the jingoistic propaganda
>> churned out by ever so many warmongers and their ilk
>
>
> Well, to be fair to Hume, we are yet working with a very tiny excerpt
> here, but sure. But what attracts me to the excerpt is the description
> of the author/text as one that celebrates anarchist destruction. This
> is a very poor reading of the novel. And, given what comes after GR,
> works that continue to question anarchist destruction, even as they
> continue to fly towards Grace-land, a poor reading of the career of
> this author. Not that P is static. But his works never celebrated
> anarchist destruction.
>
> Form the start, and, again, we should look first to The Secret
> Integration and to V., because there we have the sick crew of  boys
> and girls, then college kids, and international idiots, bent on
> anarchist destruction who abandon their more noble project, for the
> boys and girls in TSI, it is racial integration, after failing to blow
> up the system. school system etc.
>
> Then to GR.
>
> In all of his works, fanatics, and violent ones are given the harshes
> treatment, are ridiculed. In GR, for example, the scientists are
> described in religious terms, as knights in search of an un-holy grail
> and so forth. This search for a center, for pure new beginning, be it
> after the bombs in Germany and Japan, or after all the Indians are
> exterminated in America....this anarchists destruction that will allow
> for a new utopia, is ridiculed.
>
> At the same time, of course, the novels do distrust systems and
> organizations, including, the family.