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

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Yea, well, part of that might be because you're not a New Yorker, at least not officially. You're more than welcome to claim to be a part of the greatest city in the world (sorry, Allonby), we welcome all comers. Just ask The Lady in the harbor. Therefore, you might have missed some of the beauty of DeLillo's better efforts in Underworld.
 
Tanner might be right about that "tonal invariance" and such, and maybe it was intentional. I can't remember many of the "fictional" characters from my single read, either, but DeLillo nailed this town. For example, I remember being at Yankee Stadium when the NY (Football) Giants still played there, and sneaking a few brewsky's out by the bleachers, purchased by the boy amongst us who looked the oldest- we called him "Pooch"- when all of a sudden, all hell broke loose, and 20-30 non-ticket holders jumped the gait, simultaneously, and blew past security. It's called the "Bum's Rush." It happened. That was about '66-'67.

Then, in the early Summer of '69- I was home from my first year of college in Chicago, and we (same posse) would sometimes follow my sister- who was a few years older, and a bit of a groupie- up to the original Fridays on the upper East Side. She and her girlfriends were chasing after the likes of Art Shamsky, who used to hang out there with some of the other Met's from the legendary '69 Team. She never landed Shamsky- as far as I was told- but one of her girlfriends, Rhonda, did land Rory, Toots Schor's son. Rhonda was from Pompton Lakes, N.J., and wore her platinum hair in a behive. When she wasn't hanging out with my sister, she worked as a waitress at the Tick Tock Diner, on Route 3, in Clifton, N.J. I remember driving with my sister and Rhonda over to Rory's, on Park Ave, and dropping her off for the weekend. I never made it upstairs, but my sister informed me that the decor was very "Orthodox." Whatever that was supposed to mean.
 
Rory, however, did make it to my (parents) house in N.J. one time. I'm not sure what the occassion was, but I remember waking up late one Saturday one morning after we had dropped off Rhonda at his place. I walked out into the dining room in my bathrobe, mildly hung over, and there was Rory. It was one of those hot  N.J. June days. He was wearing a tortoise shell sweater that matched his close cropped, curly, light brown hair. I thought, why aren't you sweating, and said "Hi."
 
Somehow we all ended up at a diner- not the Tick Tock, and had breakfast/lunch. Rory preceded to tell us tales of Toots and his famous tavern(s). He related the infamous drinking contest between Toots and Jackie Gleason, including the part about patrons stepping over a comatose Gleason in the doorway, and some others which I can't remember. I have no idea whatever happened to him (or Rhonda, for that matter). I never saw either one of them again, and my sister moved on to professors at the local community college, but I've got to tell you, twenty years later, when I read Underworld, it rang true.  And that's the thing that I find most striking about DeLillo, he rings true. He may suffer somewhat from Pynchon envy, but his ear is uncanny, and when it comes to dialogue, Pynchon has nothing on DeLillo.
 
 
 

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Heikki Ra.udaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, Apr 28, 2013 2:46 pm
Subject: Re: Wood vs. Tanner on Paranoid Plots & Camus and Conrad and James too



n a somewhat different note, I agree with what Tanner writes about the
ertain homogeneity of Underworld:
"[I]n Underworld, the many voices start to seem just part of one, tonally
nvariant, American Voice. There are hundreds of names in the book, but I
ould be prepared to bet that - apart from the real figures such as
inatra, Hoover, Lenny Bruce, Mick Jagger - none will be remembered six
onths after reading the novel. As I find, for instance, are Pynchon's
tencil and Benny Profane; Oedipa Maas (!); Tyrone Slothrop and Roger
exico; and - I predict - Mason and Dixon. It is not a question of
nything so old-fashioned as 'well-rounded characters'; rather I'm
hinking of memorably differentiated consciousnesses."

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

eikki
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/
 > >
 >



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