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

Sun Apr 28 13:46:31 CDT 2013

On a somewhat different note, I agree with what Tanner writes about the
certain homogeneity of Underworld:

"[I]n Underworld, the many voices start to seem just part of one, tonally
invariant, American Voice. There are hundreds of names in the book, but I
would be prepared to bet that - apart from the real figures such as
Sinatra, Hoover, Lenny Bruce, Mick Jagger - none will be remembered six
months after reading the novel. As I find, for instance, are Pynchon's
Stencil and Benny Profane; Oedipa Maas (!); Tyrone Slothrop and Roger
Mexico; and - I predict - Mason and Dixon. It is not a question of
anything so old-fashioned as 'well-rounded characters'; rather I'm
thinking of memorably differentiated consciousnesses."

The invariance of voice which according to Tanner permeates Underworld
may be deliberate. [And let me add: not only of voice but of mood too.]
Whatever the case, it doesn't work for me.

Heikki

On Sun, 28 Apr 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

> It's possible that Tanner missed the point, and missed out on the use of
> chronology or reverse or non-linear arrangement of news in Underworld, and
> it is certainly possible that he doesn't get Don's piles of bad news, the
> atrocity tourism...but he doesn't resort to misquoting, he uses quotes
> judiciously, includes long quotes and context. We might say that he
> conflates author and character, but Tanner selects quotes from several Don
> novels to support his readings. Tanner agrees with your analysis. He takes
> it a step too far, maybe, when he attributes these ideas to he author. I
> still love Underworld. I wonder too, why, in a collection of essays that
> celebrate American authors, Tanner choice to include this one on Don. He
> does, with a swipe, dismiss Vineland as a bad novel by a great author, but
> he is, and I admire Tanner, way too tough on Don.
>
> On Saturday, April 27, 2013, rich 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 <javascript:;>> 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/
> > >
> >
>