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

[Bekah]

I'll agree the voice is pretty homogenous voice,  American  I suppose.   I remember some characters -  Nick and Klara of course,   Cotter, the kid, his dad and a few others.  Who was that guy watching the Texas Highway Killer on TV?)   But I remember the characters themselves,  not their voices.   Only one stands out to me as having a somewhat different "voice,"  and that's the baseball paraphernalia dealer - a bit darker there - he may have been an immigrant?  

So yes,  I suppose the characters are a-tonal as well as a bit "flattish"  and I'm sure that detracts from the book for some, but not for me.   To me it added to the understated sense of somewhat lonely anonymity and paranoia and  the idea there was something going on under that surface.  And the words and sentences and paragraphs were just too beautiful - 

What hooked me in was the theme of aesthetics along with the structure of the book.   What is or is not art,  what is trash,  how does a trash dump compare to the structure of the book?   They both go from the newest on top or first to the oldest on the bottom or at the end.   And Nick's search: 

"Strange how he was compiling a record of the object's recent forward motion while simultaneously tracking it backwards to the distant past."  (p. 318) 

The third time I read the book I wanted to track the ownership of the ball.  This was a whole lot easier said than done.  

I'll have to get another book if I'm to read this again - my hard cover (1997 with original jacket)  has about had it.  I think it's a first edition but I'm not sure - maybe a few printings in - I bought it in October, 1997 at a small indie bookstore.  It cost more money then than I usually pay for books these days,  15 years later. 


Bekah 





On Apr 28, 2013, at 11:46 AM, 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/
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>