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

[alice wellintown]

Tanner praises the ear of Don. Not sure nailing a town is such a great
acomplishment. Hell, there are thousands of authors who can and do nail a
town, a city, don't resort to the Baedecker. There are so many who can
write travelogue, and paint scenes and so on. In fact, there are lots who
do a finer job than either Don or Pynchon. So, it ain't nailing a town that
distinguishes a fiction-maker from countless great authors out there.


On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 9:50 PM, <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:

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