M&D Chapter 12 - pages 118-119

Sat Feb 28 11:23:55 CST 2015

I might say: Round about Sometime (shortly after 1910, Woolf's Year of
Human Nature change), reality changed. Again.

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Becky, your reference tent me back to re-read for the fifth or sixth time
> Wood's 2001 "Human, All Too Inhuman" (the "hysterical realism" review of
> Zadie Smith's White Teeth). I'm finally getting a handle on what has
> bothered me about it all along. A sample follows, although I commend the
> entire piece to anyone who hasn't read it (or re-read it lately in the
> context of M&D)
> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
>
> --
> "A genre is hardening...
>
> The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to
> have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness,
> as if ashamed of silence--as it were, a criminal running endless charity
> marathons. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels
> continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this
> culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs.
> Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned...
>
> ...Recent novels--veritable relics of St. Vitus--by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo,
> Foster Wallace, and others, have featured a great rock musician who, when
> born, began immediately to play air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking
> dog, a mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese, and two clocks having a
> conversation (Pynchon); a nun called Sister Edgar who is obsessed with germs
> and who may be a reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover, and a conceptual artist
> painting retired B-52 bombers in the New Mexico desert (DeLillo); a
> terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec called the Wheelchair
> Assassins, and a film so compelling that anyone who sees it dies (Foster
> Wallace). Zadie Smith's novel features, among other things: a terrorist
> Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (kevin), an
> animal-rights group called fate, a Jewish scientist who is genetically
> engineering a mouse, a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica,
> in 1907; a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world is ending
> on December 31, 1992; and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who
> both break their noses at about the same time.
>
> This is not magical realism. It is hysterical realism. Storytelling has
> become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive
> themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on
> the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are
> not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this
> style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality--the usual
> charge against botched realism--but because it seems evasive of reality while
> borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up..."
>
> --
>
> I respect and admire Wood greatly as one of the best critics of our time
> (even at book-review depth, or rather enforced shallowness). I think he's
> entirely right in tracing much of the fiction he's talking about, directly
> or indirectly, to Dickens: he quotes E.M. Forster on Dickens' "caricatures"
> from the "flat and round characters" passage in Aspects of the Novel, which
> also comes up often here on the P-list:
>
> https://catalyst.uw.edu/workspace/file/download/b3babc90fd75d98bc0147d086ad3068f6aeced8b2f8b089e9d5a4036700810c5.
>
> What I noticed much more this time around was Woods'strongly (but usually
> implied, tacit) *normative* stance. Literary realism of the non-hysterical
> kind is not simply credited but *identified*  with engaging reality... with
> the capability of expressing tragedy or anguish... with real human
> experience, real human connection... with life, with depth... in short, with
> almost every Good Thing one could want from narrative art. Well, jeez... who
> wouldn't want all those those?
>
> But, jeez... do I really believe that the realist novel -- more
> specifically, novels broadly descended from  the 19th-century English core
> (Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad) identified as "The Great Tradition" by F. R.
> Leavis -- is now and forever the only, or the best, way to get them? Nope.
> The label "realism" has always been a lousy one, quietly implying vast
> philosophical claims. Writers were getting at trad=gedy, connection, depth
> and All That (and at other aspects of experience that character- and
> relationship- and individual-consciousness-centered realist novels *don't*
> get at very well) long before realism developed, and have been doing so
> right through the realist reign. They aren't "exhausting" or "overworking"
> or "evading" anything -- they're doing something else. And often enough, in
> ways that matter to me,  something more.
>
> --
>
> PS - Encountered along the way, an article on the novel that reminds us of
> its, uh, parochial origins and probable transience:
>
>
> http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2015/marapr/novel-as-protestant-art.html
>
> If you can't keep all those murderous Near Eastern sects straight and prefer
> to Weberize the title as "The Novel as Post- Enlightenment  Fast-Urbanizing
> Individualist Commercial/Industrial/Capitalist Art", that works too.
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
>>
>> Another day,  another couple pages:
>>
>> Maskalyne likens St. Helena to a gothic novel and says
>>
>> "Six months I've been here - too many idle Minutes soon pile up, topple
>> and overwhelm the Healthiest Mind."
>>
>> (A little foreshadowing there? -  Suspicions that Mason might go
>> completely mad?  Pynchon doesn't really go in for a lot of foreshadowing to
>> keep up suspense or whatever - just as well,  it would take the whole thing
>> overboard, overdone, too much.)
>>
>> ** "Sirius Business," cackles the Proprietor. -  another groaner gag.
>>
>> This novel has some very serious themes, but told with a LOT of humor -
>> not just humor to lighten the atmosphere -there's actually a comic tone.
>>
>> "But I also noticed that the book's  (M&D's) humor was more thoroughly
>> interwoven with melancholy and a sense of mortality than ever before in
>> Pynchon's work."
>> http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason.html
>>
>> "Mason & Dixon represents an impulse to write history through the
>> imaginary field, to crosshatch its narrative with a realization of culture's
>> desire to find its identity in the realm of the imagination. It thus argues,
>> implicitly, for the importance of artistic imagination alongside scientific
>> and historical work. Pynchon rejects the harsh realism and more cynical
>> parodies employed by many contemporary authors, using HUMOR (my caps)  and
>> even magic as modes of transformation.[17] Talking dogs, sexually aroused
>> mechanical ducks, and nighttime apparitions and ghosts haunt Mason and Dixon
>> in America; perhaps the country that combines technical invention with
>> capitalistic enterprise might be equallymythologic in Pynchon's ambivalent
>> history."
>> http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html
>>
>> Thoughts on the humor and how it adds to the mix of history, themes,
>> story, whatever -  do you laugh? Why?
>>
>> **********
>> And then, ta-da - it's Maskelyne's birthday - (which would tell us it's
>> October 6, 1761 and that he's 29 years old - born Oct. 1732) and he makes a
>> big deal of impending doom (age 30 is coming).
>>
>> The phrase "Stygian mists"  is from "To Chloris"  in "Madrigals and
>> Epigrams" by William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) Scottish poet.   a
>> little chunk of the poem -  http://www.bartleby.com/337/285.html
>>
>> Mason:  (but 30 is)  "... a Number divisible,- penetrable! - by 6 numbers!"
>> (eeks?  why?  - numerology of some kind I guess.)
>>
>> ***  Narrator:    "...dismal apostrophes..."    -
>>  And in this case the word apostrophe means exclamations,  not the
>> punctuation symbol.
>>
>> **** Now Dixon is leaving for South Africa to take care of Maskelyne's
>> "Sisson instrument"  which is probably a quadrant of some sort,  a device
>> for measuring angles.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sisson
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(instrument)
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mural_instrument
>>
>>         If the measurement device is off by a hair - then that slight
>> error is multiplied exponentially and Maskelyne has invested more than time
>> and his career in the instrument ($$?) .  Dixon is the field rep for Johnny
>> Bird's instruments?  -  lol - but ...
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bird_(astronomer)
>>
>> Why are the various measurements of time and space inaccurate?   Errors in
>> measurement - 1.  human error - the time of the Transit (because M&D
>> started/ stopped at different places) and, 2.  device error (plumb line
>> screwed up on quadrant).
>> **********
>> Is there really so little on these two pages?    Or is this "so little?"
>>
>> So here's an added little morsel for the Learn'd Dogs amongst us - James
>> Wood, in a now "classic" essay soundly criticized Zadie Smith's White Teeth
>> for it's "hysterical realism" and lambasted a few others in the process
>> (M&D, etc).
>> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
>>
>> And this is a rather interesting little Wiki article on the subject:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism
>> (interesting little piece)
>>
>> Becky
>> the humor bit reminded me of hysterical and that took me on the little
>> semi-side trip to Wood and Wiki -
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l