And NOWHERE is Pynchon mentioned!

[Monte Davis]

In the Times piece, Pankaj Mishra mostly follows Rahv's lead, defining the
novel of ideas first by contrast to those "obsessed with private
experience." The novel of ideas should engage with "the pressures of
history and politics on private experience"....it should take part in
literature's "customary reckoning with the acute problems of the modern
epoch."

Moser goes farther back to a 1670 dictum: “'Novels . . . have love as their
principal subject; they deal only incidentally with politics and war.'
Three and a half centuries on, Huet’s observation mostly holds. Despite
their dazzling variety, most novels [i.e. those that are not novels of
ideas] are still about relationships between people: about love."

It's hard to deny that from "Under the Rose" and Stencil pere's journal to
Maxine accepting that her boys have to face a changed Street on their own,
"the pressures of history and politics on private experience" play a much
larger role in Pynchon's work than in most American fiction since 1950. And
part of the "flat characters" rap against Pynchon is surely that he doesn't
foreground private experience and love as much as [or, when he does, in the
way that] many other novelists do. Indeed, finding out that
historical/political agencies have brought about or crucially shaped what
you thought was your love / private experience -- even the penis you
thought was your own -- is  quintessential Pynchon.

So unless "novel of ideas" is a shorthand, straw-man putdown -- "characters
sit around discussing the future of the proletariat or how to optimize
Walden Two [and no reader who isn't already engaged in that domain cares]"
-- I don't see how the label doesn't fit Pynchon very well.

On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com> wrote:

> Describing the disorder and unpredictability at Meatball Mulligan's party
> as increasing entropy in the system IS making use of an idea.  But does
> this make "Entropy" a story of ideas? The author is merely using a
> highfalutin idea to tell a story. He's not advocating or expressing
> disapproval of disorder and unpredictability at a party. He doesn't want
> to, and if he did he wouldn't need to, do it in disguise, via a short
> story.
>
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 9:05 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What's more, we bring to tales ideas of our own, like justice and cause
>> and effect. So when Raskolnikov, though the poetic genius of Dostoevsky, is
>> made sympathetic, our ideas clash with the poetry.
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 8:52 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe I'm not applying the strict definition of "novel of ideas", as
>>> subgenre, apparently, of the so-called philosophical novel.
>>>
>>> As a kid, I loved novels of ideas, and though I didn't ever appreciate,
>>> Dostoevsky, _Crime and Punishment_, with the battle of ideas, philosophical
>>> and religious, excited me.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 8:38 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Are there novels, plays, poems...is there a literature without ideas? I
>>>> don't want anything, other than money and beautiful men, thrown at me. But
>>>> when it comes to tales I love yarn threaded through with ideas, allegorical
>>>> figures and microcosms even. Take P's Entropy. Not a bad tale all in all. A
>>>> youthful exploration in an idea story. So many of the so-called set-pieces
>>>> in the novels are stories built on, from, and around ideas. I think it was
>>>> Nabokov who admonished that weak readers love to see their own ideas
>>>> dressed up in clever disguises.  Something like that. Call me weak. Ideas
>>>> make me swoon, like raining men, I just can't get enough of them.
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> What's so great about a novel of ideas? Who wants to have a bunch of
>>>>> ideas and ideals thrown at them, in a novel anyway? Do ideas make the world
>>>>> go round? Well, maybe, but I can form my own ideas, at least for the
>>>>> purpose of novel reading. Pynchon is a novelist of historical events,
>>>>> invention and language.
>>>>>
>>>>> Or maybe not.
>>>>>
>>>>> P
>>>>>
>>>>> P
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/books/review/whatever-happened-to-the-novel-of-ideas.html?ref=review&_r=1
>>>>>> -
>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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