Modern world and paranoia

[Monte Davis]

By "what we've learned about psychology since Henry James" I intended
neither the Freudian frisson (it's naughty/dangerous/antisocial Down There)
nor the Jungian frisson (our true timeless shared essence is Down There). I
meant that that a very large fraction of what we are and do simply doesn't
need or involve  consciousness. We operate much more by instinct, habit,
imitation and environmental cues than we believe, and rationalize -- no
deprecatory connotation intended, just "come up with an articulable story
line of reasoning and choice" -- on the fly or after the fact. 

I am looking across the room at a window. Consciousness assures me I'm
seeing countless limbs, branches, twigs and buds outside, wood grain in the
molding around the window, a light switch on the wall, grout lines between
slate-ish tiles on the floor inside, bookshelves in the periphery, usw.

But only the fovea - a patch of retina about 1.5mm wide -- can deliver such
detail. The eye/brain/attention loop is so quick at flicking it around to
points of interest that I can go through life thinking I have a large,
detailed visual field when in fact I have a very small detailed one
surrounded by a whole lot of blurs, memory, interpolation, and "nothing's
changed much since the last time I trained foveal vision over there."

Consciousness is like that: a shell game, a highly stylized user interface
(or "user illusion" as Tor Norretranders calls it in his superb book of that
title) with little more claim to ontological primacy than the "folders" on
the"desktop" of this computer. It's a recent evolutionary add-on, shiny and
fun, and I'd hate to give it up -- but lordgodamighty, must it take itself
so seriously as to anoint *one* literary tradition as "psychological
realism"?

----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Markekohut
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 2:32 PM
To: Monte Davis
Cc: Tom Beshear; Bekah; Matthew Cissell; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: Modern world and paranoia

Yes. Like.

It has occurred to me that another of Wood's--and most--faves Jane Austen's
first novel Northanger Abbey could serve as an allegory of Wood's position,
so to speak. 
Austen's young heroine's perceptions--seeing the " real world" aright---are
all distorted by the reading of Gothic Romances, specifically The Castle of
Otranto....Wood wants the world seen aright.....

Which leads me to add this addendum to Monte's words: yes, the narrator sees
what the characters cannot articulate and is real not least because of the "
discovery" the awareness of the Subconscious, the unconscious ala Freud,
Jung ---made semi-articulate by them for use by the mind of the
writer---(yes, yes, those hidden aspects of us might have been seen by
earlier writers as well but.....round about 1910 human nature
changed--v.Woolf.) 

Can one see the Giant Adenoid in GR as a kind of metaphor for the devouring
Dark Side of the mind? ( I do not really mean TRP intended it so baldly but
that given the truths Monte gets to, then why not such a half-conscious
symbol? 

Sent from my iPad

On Apr 24, 2013, at 1:00 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> What is meant by "realism" is a moving window. I esteem James very 
> highly, too, but he wanted to articulate every last velleity, to bring 
> It All up into focused light -- and if the intervening century of 
> psychology (including not least William James)  has taught us 
> anything, it's how much goes on in the penumbra and the shadows and the
pitch dark.
> 
> Compare Isabel Archer realizing what Osmond and Madame Merle had been up
to:
> 
> "Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so 
> much concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an 
> attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of 
> things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part 
> their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. 
> She remembered a thousand trifles; they started to life with the
spontaneity of a shiver..."
> 
> ... with Tyrone apprehending in bursts the vastness of the horrors at 
> play in the casino:
> 
> "Around the tables, Empire chairs are lined up precise and playerless. 
> But some are taller than the rest. These are no longer quite outward 
> and visible signs of a game of chance. There is another enterprise 
> here, more real than that, less merciful, and systematically hidden from
the likes of Slothrop.
> Who sits in the taller chairs? Do They have names? What lies on Their 
> smooth baize surfaces?...[Penguin pb 202]
> 
> "Voices, music, the shuffling of cards all grow louder, more 
> oppressive, till he stands looking into the Himmler-Spielsaal again, 
> crowded now, jewels flashing, leather gleaming, roulette spokes 
> whirling blurring-it's here that saturation hits him, it's all this 
> playing games, too much of it, too many
> games: the nasal, obsessive voice of a croupier he can't 
> see-messieurs, mesdames, les jeux sont faits-is suddenly speaking out 
> of the Forbidden Wing directly to him, and about what Slothrop has 
> been playing against the invisible House, perhaps after all for his 
> soul, all day-terrified he turns, turns out into the rain again where 
> the electric lights of the Casino, in full holocaust, are glaring off 
> the glazed cobbles..." [205]
> 
> There's a lot to say (and admire) about how the narrative voice in the 
> first passage represents Isabel's consciousness, but for now my point 
> is that it does so *stably*, with consistent rules for seeing what she 
> sees and knowing what she knows. In  the second passage, not so much: 
> the voice dips in and out, telling us things -- even  drawing 
> attention to the telling of things
> -- explicitly "hidden from the likes of Slothrop."
> 
> Could Tyrone explain the weight and connotations of "outward and 
> visible signs"? of "holocaust"? No way. Are they legitimate parts of 
> the world of a descendant of Constant Slothrop, a soldier in the wake 
> of Hitler? Yes. Do they give *me* a shiver at least as chill and 
> penetrating as the one I got through the more precisely controlled 
> channel from Isabel? Damn straight they do. Wood thinks that's 
> clownish Tom playing without a net, breaking the rules; I think Tom is 
> expanding "psychological realism" to take in more of what we are, but
don't/can't know or say.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On 
> Behalf Of Tom Beshear
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 11:04 AM
> To: Bekah; Matthew Cissell
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Modern world and paranoia
> 
> Judging from How Fiction Works, Wood's ideal is Henry James, which 
> means he prizes psychological realism above all else. And that's not 
> what Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace, Vollmann, etc. etc., are doing.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bekah" <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
> To: "Matthew Cissell" <macissell at yahoo.es>
> Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 10:08 AM
> Subject: Re: Modern world and paranoia
> 
> 
> Sounds to me like Wood gets confused between what he likes and what is
good.
> 
> Just because a reader doesn't personally like a book doesn't mean it's not

> fine lit.   Paranoia could be a part of 21st century realism the way 
> religion was often a part of Victorian lit.  I tend to appreciate 
> Wood, too - but I think he's stuck in the early 20th century about some
things.
> 
> Bekah
> 
> 
> On Apr 24, 2013, at 2:29 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
> 
>> Nowadays it doesn't take anytime at all to form a conspiracy theory. 
>> Go ask Gene Rosen who helped some kids on his driveway the day of the 
>> Newtown
> 
>> masacre, poor man.
>> And now we have Boston. Several witnesses have identified the supect 
>> as the perp, video footage, and now an admission of guilt - and 
>> people claim it is a conspiracy; check out the movement to protect 
>> poor little Dzokhar from THEM.
>> So given all this we must address James Wood's claim (in his essay on 
>> DeLillo from the Broken Estate): "Indeed, Underworld proves, once and 
>> for all, or so I must hope, the incompatability of the political 
>> paranoid vision with great fiction." Further along he says that 
>> paranoia is bad for
> 
>> the novel. Hmm.
>> 
>> I readily admit my admiration for Wood's erudition and critical 
>> prose, however, my admiration ends there. In trying to advance his 
>> mission (reshaping the view of literature through his choice of lens) 
>> he goes too far out on a limb that will not support the weight of his 
>> ego or inflated ideas.
>> 
>> Now I suppose Alice might bring me up on all that but I can handle it. 
>> Waddayathink AL? Is Jimmy Wood right about paranoia and the novel?
>> 
>> ciao
>> mc otis
>