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

[rich]

p.s. read the section about the wedding in the ruins of beirut. beautiful

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 9:32 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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/
>>