Maxine meets Windust ("Make it literary")
Thomas Eckhardt
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de
Tue Dec 24 13:44:03 CST 2013
This is about how to read BE. If pear trees turn up in a book that deals
with September 11, and a pear tree called the Survivor Tree commemorates
the victims in the real world, one needs to take this into consideration
if one wishes to understand the book.
Pynchon's use of the pear tree also does not necessarily point to
sentimentality on the part of the author. It may be, as I believe Fiona
is saying, about the author trying to reclaim the symbolism of the pear
tree (which would in this reading represent nature, of course; if it
does so, it does so quite subtly). I wouldn't know, but I like to think
about such things.
Do you know Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism", Rich? It is a
comprehensive structuralist approach to literature, not a sentimental book:
"The fire-world of heavenly bodies presents us with three important
cyclical rhythms. Most obvious is the daily journey of the sun-god
across the sky, often thought of as guiding a boat or chariot, followed
by a mysterious passage through a dark underworld, sometimes conceived
as the belly of a devouring monster, back to the starting point.The
solstitial cycle of the solar year supplies an extension of the same
symbolism, incorporated in our Christmas literature."
Happy X-mas to all of you!
Thomas
Am 24.12.2013 15:20, schrieb rich:
> not to shit on anyone's porridge but isn't this the kinda sentimental
> stuff we all got all too quickly buried in after 9/11
>
> a church near home. jesus and the twin towers, anyone?
>
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/gkjarvis/285835579/
>
> rich
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Thomas Eckhardt
> <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de <mailto:thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>> wrote:
>
> I did not know about the Survivor Tree. Highly relevant indeed for a
> reading of BE based on Northrop Frye's notions of spring, comedy and
> "Life Returning" -- which I hope to hear more about.
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
> Am 21.12.2013 14:53, schrieb Fiona Shnapple:
>
> The Life Force is not quite exhausted or extinguished. Maxine
> has only
> sons, but the Pear Tree, it's magical magnetic force holds the boys
> and Maxine if only for a brief moment as the novel begins, its
> blossom
> petals strewn in the gutter, waste, at the end of the novel, is
> still
> a source of Life Returning, a confirmation of the Body and the here
> and now, a force against linear conspiracy that seeks to connect the
> dots and discover the causes, and the tree, a made literary and
> mythical symbol. is also as an allusion to the September 11 callery
> pear tree that came to be known as the Survivor Tree after
> sustaining
> but living through the September 11, 2001, terror attacks at the
> World
> Trade Center.
>
> In any event, in the meeting in the restaurant P wants to get
> The Book
> of Leviticus in. It seems an awkward blurting on Maxine's part, she
> seems ignorant of the text, though she has been slipping in and
> out of
> a defensive posture, having something to do with her Jewish roots,
> though she has not real conscious understanding of them, they return
> here with her dietary habit of avoiding pork, though none is
> offered.
> She says, "don't ask", though it's obvious enough she's never asked,
> or understood the book. But P must get it in with Sappho here.
>
> On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 8:09 AM, Markekohut
> <markekohut at yahoo.com <mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
> " the return of the repressed" observation and " the "its
> politics is on its sleeve" line are so fine....
> One might argue, given some textual clues----I especially
> like how Maxine, unlike her activist parents, can't like
> opera----the form of outsize emotions dramatized and she,
> who has an impoverished fantasy life.....typifies NYC's
> final killing of the repressed ( in her generation)
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Dec 21, 2013, at 7:53 AM, Fiona Shnapple
> <fionashnapple at gmail.com <mailto:fionashnapple at gmail.com>>
> wrote:
>
> One could argue that Pynchon is trying to expiate our if
> not his own
> sins, Sloth primarily, as described in his essay on that
> Deadly Sin,
> and to offer, if not a cure, at least a treatment for
> addiction to
> Sherwood Schwartz sitcoms, Law & Order, Friends,
> Seinfeld, cartoons,
> jingles.... and so on, but, despite the fact that we
> have yet another
> character addicted to the Brady Bunch (Hector in VL,
> Shawn in BE),
> this kind of argument doesn't make much sense. There
> must be another
> reason why P continues to "make it literary" even as he
> floods the
> narrative with pop references. The making it literary,
> with
> allusions and references can't be helped. Neither can
> pop punctuation
> that flood the narrative, the dialogue, the thoughts and
> feelings of
> characters, especially Maxine because, as protagonist,
> she at the
> center of most of the free indirect narration, and
> because of where
> and when she was born and how she was raised. As McHale
> explains in
> his essay, "Zapping, the art of switching channels: on
> Vineland",
> Pynchon is still working with Brown and plumbing his
> favorite topic,
> the Big D. Mediated Lives and Mediated Deaths are the
> effects, the
> return of the repressed.
>
> To return to the meeting of Maxine and Windust, where I
> contend the
> talk of PROMIS and the like is beside the point, mere
> conspiracy talk
> that will drive the quest, the detective genre into dead
> end, and is
> satirized at every turn, and only distracts us from the
> mythological
> and psychological themes. The mixing of Sappho and the
> Strangers in
> the Night (the film it was first produced for), the
> umbrellas
> touching, Heidi's comments, the madness of Maxine, of
> all of the
> characters as they are viewed by the other characters,
> these are the
> making it literary things we need to pay attention to
> and not the
> conspiracy about September 11. The politics of the novel
> is on its
> sleeve. Pynchon doesn't bury his anger or condemnation
> of the
> politics, the media, the sad and disgusting behavior of
> the people
> after their initial acts of magnanimity, philanthropy
> and brotherhood.
> He names Madoff. He names the Mayor. The President. he
> exposes the
> Neo-Liberal, Friedman economics of greed etc. There is
> no smoking gun
> to be found in this work of fiction. Simply isn't there.
> Hell, Wired
> Magazine, or better The Guardian that March reads will
> ask and answer
> more questions than P poses.
>
> On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Mark Kohut
> <markekohut at yahoo.com <mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
> 'Making it literary' seems almost effortless here in
> his free & easy pop
> culture style....
> He is playing/using his lit notions almost as if
> quoting himself...at
> times.....
>
>
>
> On Friday, December 20, 2013 8:52 AM, Fiona Shnapple
> <fionashnapple at gmail.com
> <mailto: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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