Saunders on TRP

[alice malice]

This guy is either full of it, trying to pull our legs, high on
Pynchon-dust. The America he knew? When? After the mushrooms, right?

In Pynchon, if its not in the world, not on the map, not of the landscape,
not reflected out there or even in here, it is fair game(s). To a man who
thinks he has been enlightened everything looks like it has something
Buddhist in it. Great literature doesn't makes us humble. It can, I guess,
get some people off their high horses, or get some to pay attention to the
vastness, to the cluttered and broken boulevards, to the insanity....but
novels are not sacred reflections on a world we've lost, are not the
messages of gods.

This kind of drivel is bad for literature, for art, and doesn't do much for
Buddhism or Pynchon either.

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just ran across it again, Bookforum 2005:
>
> George Saunders I don't think anyone has gotten closer than Thomas
> Pynchon to summoning the real audacity and insanity and scope of the
> American mind, as reflected in the American landscape. I read Pynchon all
> out of order, starting with *Vineland*, and I still remember the shock of
> pleasure I got at finally seeing the America I knew--strange shops and
> boulevards, built over former strange shops and former boulevards, all laid
> out there in valleys and dead-end forests, heaped on top of Indian
> cemeteries, peopled with nut jobs and hustlers and moral purists--actually
> present in a novel, and present not only in substance but in structure and
> language that both used and evoked the unruly, muscular complexity of the
> world itself.
>
> In Pynchon, anything is fair game--if it is in the world, it can go in the
> book. To me there is something Buddhist about this approach, which seems to
> say that since the world is capable of producing an infinity of forms, the
> novel must be capable of accommodating an infinite number of forms. All
> aesthetic concerns (style, form, structure) answer this purpose: Let in the
> world.
>
> This is why Pynchon is our biggest writer, the gold standard of that
> overused word *inclusiveness*: No dogma or tidy aesthetic rule or
> literary fashion is allowed to prefilter the beautiful data streaming in.
> Everything is included. No inclination of the mind is too small or large or
> frightening. The result is gorgeous madness, which does what great
> literature has always done--reminds us that there is a world out there that
> is bigger than us and worthy of our utmost humility and attention.
>
> I have often felt that we read to gain some idea of what God would say
> about us if someone were to ask Him what we're like. Pynchon says, through
> the vast loving catalogue he has made, that we are Excellent but need to be
> watched closely. He says there is no higher form of worship than the loving
> (i.e., madly attentive) observation of that-which-is, a form of prayer of
> which Pynchon's work is our highest example.
>
> http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_05/pynchon.html
>
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