Maxine meets Windust ("Make it literary")

[Fiona Shnapple]

Of course, not unlike Winston Smith, who is called on to unclog a
drain, simple enough (though dangerous, as B/Tuttle reminds us in
Brazil), even as those obstreperous children, snitches for the Though
Police, distract him, P gives us plenty of plungers and mental floss,
but the political fraud, the fraud of capital, the international
sewerage system stinks, bright and green spinach in the political
smile, so there is little reason to go climbing down in the muck with
a rake.

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> In his SL Intro P critiques his "first publish story",  "Small Rain",
> noting that he tied to use an ear he had yet to develop, he took his
> own bad advice and tried to make the story literary by loading it up
> with allusions to Hemingway and Eliot, and, that after decades of
> maturity, in retrospect the story contains, a powerful, though at the
> time latent, political or class theme that P would focus on through
> the rest of his career: how the preterit, the working class embody, in
> their work, the moral, and even the intellectual virtues that the
> educated class, the managerial class, the elect have claimed as their
> capital.
>
> Reading BE one may be put off by the language and the pop references,
> but the ear is quite impressive. The ear, the languages that P has
> mastered here would draw the praise of Mark Twain, who had quite an
> ear, and who famously criticized Cooper for not having one.
>
> In any event, the ear is now amazing.
>
> But he continues to make it literary. The technique that Wolfley
> describes in his essay on P and the influence of Brown, later analyzed
> in depth by critics like McHale, the technique he developed in GR,
> reversing cause and effect, to mirror the complexity of contemporary
> existence, the transition from Adams and Entropy (V.)  to Adams and
> Gravity (GR), continues in BE.
>
> So, the meeting between Windust and Maxine here, while dropping some
> bread crumbs for the conspiracy theorists, Promis and so forth, is,
> underneath, about Maxine & Sapho.  Of course, Eliot's use of the poem
> in the Wasteland, doesn't make Maxine the Hyacinth Girl, but P makes
> it literary, as usual, and to be distracted by the grand political
> chess match, at the expense of the ordinary working men and women, out
> in the evening, after work, in the rain, in a cafe for a talk, that
> seems so broken by power, so useless, such a waste....but there is, in
> the material forces, most of them on Maxine's side of the table, a
> dialogue of self and soul worth spilling into the basin. But it works
> on the "made literary" level; the political power game is a clogged
> toilet.
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