And NOWHERE is Pynchon mentioned!

[Monte Davis]

Pynchon may well not loom as large among "writers the NY Times thinks of
calling for a quick 'fiction today' thumbsucker" as he does among readers
on the P-list. Shock horror! Neither Mishra nor Moser happened to cite him
-- but assuming I read them aright, I'm pretty sure they'd both say "oh
yeah, novelist of ideas, most definitely." My answer to your first question
is: Mark Kohut likes to stir things up with faux-indignant titles :-)

That P's work keeps professors busy doesn't mean "he writes it *to* keep
them busy," any more than "he writes it to foster the P-List." Same
addiction either way: the writing (1) draws on many domains of knowledge
and interest, and (2) keeps delivering bursts of additional meaning (and
thus pleasure, for a certain kind of reader) as you trace those
connections, see meta-connections across the various kinds of connections,
usw.

"Show-off-y".....? Jeez, once you accept the profession/avocation of "sit
alone in a room long enough to produce 50,000 to 200,000 words about
imagined people and events, then ask others to devote hours to reading
those words from beginning to end," aren't the *degrees* of show-off-iness
relatively minor?

On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com> wrote:

> I wouldn't want to deny any of what Monte and Mark say. Yet, in the two
> discussions presented earlier in the thread Pynchon is ignored.  Does
> anyone have an answer to this. If they don't think he writes novels of
> ideas and his characters are flat and unloving, does this mean his work
> isn't to be taken seriously? Is he writing campus novels, to keep assistant
> professors busy? Or for our god-hungry youth, as Gore Vidal sez.  Also,
> I'm wondered if he doesn't come across as too show-off-y. Please advise.
>
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 1:42 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> >>>>>>
>> >>>>>>
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >
>>
>
>
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