And NOWHERE is Pynchon mentioned!

[Mark Kohut]

Paul,

Yes, P is so lyrical poets envy him. P is such a storyteller, he hooks
readers before they fully 'get' it.
But, as P said about "entropy', heavy-handed as symbolic rain can be.
(and maybe--SPECULATIVE--why
he disses The Crying of Lot 49?). But from GR on, he has so learned to
take ideas into his bones and eyes,
that he enriches scene after scene with multiple meanings as naturally
as Ms. Dickinson used dashes and
quick phrases. As Monte writes, and as I just did THIS is what I mean
when I see him as a 'novelist of ideas".
Look at how Mason & Dixon finds patterns....ideas about America barely
changed between 18th Century and 20th
Centuries; look at how math and physics and photography, ideas about
and of, are so densely packed and laughed
with--and sometimes at---in Against the Day...
There's Weber, Adams, Weiner, Norman O. Brown and too many more to
count infusing his vision and therefore every
word on the page....



On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 1:10 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l