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

[Rich]

Perfectly understood but I go to delillo for his ideas/perceptions. Character? Plot? (For most part). U can dispense with them.  Pynchon much the same



On Apr 28, 2013, at 2:46 PM, Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:

> 
> 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/
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>