Wood vs. Tanner on Paranoid Plots & Camus and Conrad and James too

[alice wellintown]

In Tanner's brilliant little study of American Literature, _The American
Mystery_, in a chapter on DeLillo that is painfully squeezed between a
chapter on Fitzgerald's Gatsby and Pynchon's M&D, Tanner examines
_Underworld_. Eventually. Tanner wants to dig into DeLillo's big book, but
he can't quite get to it. Like Wood, Tanner, an academic, King's College
Cambridge, reads with an English Teacher's red pen. And, like all great
academics, Tanner is a great story teller, and so he reflect on a prior
misreading: Sitting in the airport, he reads a Time Magazine article about
DeLillo's next book, and he is disappointed, at first,  because JFK's
assassination is a bottmoless pit of conspiracy and paranoia, and he fears
the author will fall in, but Tanner is pleasently surprized with DeLillo's
_Libra_.  _ Mao II_, however, falls in the pit. And even as Tanner
apologizes for prejudging _Libra_, and for not getting to _Underworld_,  he
launches an atack on _Mao II_. The attack on DeLillo's stupid analogy, that
authors are terrorists, destroys the book. To bring the book down, all
Tanner needs to do is show that DeLillo's idea is stupid and that the idea
is not merely the absurd and stupid idea of a character, who happens to be
a novelist, but one that DeLillo expect the reader to accept, one that he,
Tanner, apparently believes. Of course, the book is packed with other
problems. What does this have to do with Wood? Well, after tearing down
_Mao II_'s idea that novelists were like terrorists but have been replaced
by them and the news, Tanner argues that while  _Libra_  turned out to be
only a continued, and perfectly legitimate  fascination with terror and
terrorists and anarchists, an interst that gave us Conrad's _SA_ and _UWE_,
the idea in _Mao II_ is simply rediculous. That Bill Gray's theme, one that
Tanner attributes in part to DeLillo's fascnation with Pynchon, is stupid
because, and here is where James is brought in, while James may be said to
have altered the inner life of a culture, to metaphorically, exploded in
the minds and guts of a reading public and altered the inner life, to make
of his impact, even metaphorically, an explosion, like a bomb in a crowd,
is rediculous. Tanner includes three essays on James in this book. There
are three chapters on Melville, one on Hawthorne, one on Emerson, one on
Pynchon, one on WD Howells, and one on DeLillo. "James and Shakespeare",
one essay, examines a short, "The Birthplace", and then looks at James's
fascination with Shakespeare's style and how it casts a spell of mystery
that keeps the man and the artist, the person and the poet, seperate, how
we fall into bottomless pit of objectivity in our search for the man. And
this brings me to Camus. Who was, of course, too much known.

http://chronicle.com/article/Camuss-Restless-Ghost/135874/
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