The Station Agent was Outtakes from Against the Day

[alice malice]

So, yeah, Hawthorne and trains, the street.

http://www.scottlothes.com/writing/lessons.htm



On Monday, April 28, 2014, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:

> One day soon, I hope, some sharp student of American Literature will
> shine light on Pynchon's debt to the great American Romance, and on
> the influence of Hawthorne. I mean, think about it...a future novelist
> interested in his puritan roots picks up this old classic, not Scarlet
> Letter but The House of the Seven Gables, only to discover that the
> novel is about the Pyncheon family, the spelling, like the spelling of
> Hawthorn, add an e, remove an e...has been altered to
> protect/dispute...and that the two families have a history. That
> history, made romance, involves one King Ahab who covets his poor
> neighbors land, accuses his neighbor of sin, executes him under the
> law and takes his property, the house he builds on it, not quite
> America, is dark, incestuous,  and haunted, falling into the
> reflection of itself, like Usher's, into the morass, where the ghosts
> of murdered peoples haunts the land. Bu the House is an old Gothic
> standard, so the Street and the Train and the Photograph...the use of
> time and light, technologies as they press on the Puritan
> typologies...and so on...and the social commentary from a
> context--distance, a fabled history romanced...
>
> In Romance, science is, at the very least, a limited and limiting
> light. Nature, though scatterbrained, and secular, is Queen of Hearts
> and Minds, and of all that stirs under the sun.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 7:13 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> > And, did not Lew's grace epiphany---in which he accepted things as they
> > were, happen with an explosion---which he,
> > magic-realism-like--survived---with grace?
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > On Apr 27, 2014, at 3:24 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> >
> > I was thinking primarily of the thematic axis of light and time, the
> book's
> > most central and sustained. (Heck, I bet you could even find it in the
> > title!) Pynchon has been reminding us since Merle's introduction to
> > photography that as the century turned the process of capturing images
> was
> > getting rapidly faster and less cumbersome than it had been for Daguerre,
> > Matthew Brady, Brady & co: e.g. the advent of the Kodak "Brownie" on p.
> 72
> > and the use of the then-new term "snapshot" (e.g. 277). That difference
> made
> > a difference in the magic of "stopping time": here he notes explicitly
> that
> > the subjects eyes' would once have looked odd because of an exposure of
> some
> > minutes, but now because of... something else.
> >
> > In the first photo, the drovers are making a joke of something that's
> deadly
> > earnest for Webb and the anarchists. (Lew's recreational consumption of
> > Cyclomite is a joke at another angle). In the second, I suspect, Deuce
> and
> > Sloat are frozen on their way out of history: the former to hell on earth
> > with Lake, the latter to Frank's bullet.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> As Markie on the plist is always sayin' , the book contains everything.
> >>
> >> Now, rereading this post, why do we think TRP wrote of/juxtaposed these
> >> two pictures ?
> >>
> >> One of eating fireworks,and, a "little clearer", the two " killers"
> caught
> >> as rigid as in an August Sander photo of two burghers.
> >>
> >> Sent from my iPad
> >>
> >> On Apr 27, 2014, at 10:59 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2014/04/the-view-from-a-pinhole.html#slide_ss_0=1
> >>
> >> p. 300, one of many quiet Big Bangs knotting explosions,light and time:
> >>
> >> From a drawer in a cabinet against the wall, Merle took more
> >> gelatin-silver prints. “Maybe these’ll be some help.” One showed a pair
> of
> >> what looked like drovers in town for the Fourth of July, one of them
> >> appearing to force the other to eat a giant firecracker, all lit and
> >> throwing bright sparks, flying, dying, filling the unmeasurable
> fragment of
> >> time the shutter was open, to the amusement of others in the background
> >> looking on from the porch of a saloon.
> >>
> >> “You’re not telling me—”
> >>
> >> “Here, this one’s a little clearer.”
> >>
> >> It was out in front of this exact same amalgamator’s office. This time
> >> Deuce and Sloat were not smiling, and the light was more proper to
> autumn,
> >> you could see dark clouds in the sky overhead, and nothing was casting
> >> shadows. The two men were posed as if for some ceremonial purpose. For
> the
> >> gray day, the exposure was a little longer, and you’d expect one at
> least to
> >> have moved and blurred the image, but no, they had stood rigid, almost
> >> defiant, allowing the collodion mixture its due measure of light, to
> record
> >> the two killers with unrelenting fidelity, as if set in front of some
> slow
> >> emulsion of an earlier day, eyes, Frank, bending close, noticed now,
> >> rendered with that same curious crazed radiance which once was an
> artifact
> >> of having to blink a couple of hundred times during the exposure, but in
> >> this more modern form due to something authentically ghostly, for which
> >> these emulsions were acting as agents, revealing what no other record up
> >> till then could’ve.
> >
> >
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20140428/bae80be4/attachment.html>