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

[rich]

I'm not sure but seems to me Tanner as u describe it missed the point
of Mao II--novelists altering the inner life has nothing really much
to do with terrorism. Ive read that book a few times and that famous
phrase never gave me the impression that Bill Gray felt what he was
doing as a writer was some equivalent act of political terror that was
usurped by the real thing, goaded on by technology and happily served
up by the mass media. Just that writing once had a power to embrace
culture on a wide scale, to garner the notice of majorities, easily
done nowadays sadly by terrorists. as an artist, the envy if you will,
to have such a powerful language, language to misquote DeLillo, the
language of being noticed, which is what essentially, down its bare
essence, terrorism is, be it for politics, outsider despair, mental
illness, boredom, suicide, what have you. Did leterature ever have
such power? probably not. but as an artist/writer, people like Bill
Gray can only be, along with their revulsion, envious.

'What has happened is - now you all have to turn your brains around -
the greatest work of art there has ever been. That minds could achieve
something in one act, which we in music cannot even dream of, that
people rehearse like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for one
concert, and then die. This is the greatest possible work of art in
the entire cosmos. Imagine what happened there. There are people who
are so concentrated on one performance, and then 5000 people are
chased into the Afterlife, in one moment. This I could not do.
Compared to this, we are nothing as composers... Imagine this, that I
could create a work of art now and you all were not only surprised,
but you would fall down immediately, you would be dead and you would
be reborn, because it is simply too insane. Some artists also try to
cross the boundaries of what could ever be possible or imagined, to
wake us up, to open another world for us.'
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hamburg, September 2001.

rich

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 9:26 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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/
>