M&D Chapter 12 - pages 118-119

Mark Kohut mark.kohut at gmail.com
Sat Feb 28 12:09:03 CST 2015 

Monte writes: But notice the special pleading Wood has to do w/r/t
Dickens -- Micawber as caricature who makes us feel -- and think of
all the other great pre- or proto- or flatly non-realist caricatures
(in Cervantes, in Rabelais, in Voltaire, in Fielding, in Sterne, in
Dumas, in Hugo, in Twain... the list goes on and on) that he would
have to argue around if he made his premises explicit. ...Game Set
Match to Davis over Wood.

I will say: Forster and Leavis THEN did NOT believe he was a creative
innovator but ONLY a melodramatic entertainer...THAT word I do think I
remember Leavis using. ...Wood should know 'better' but he must not
quite believe it.

On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Point taken. But notice the special pleading Wood has to do w/r/t Dickens --
> Micawber as caricature who makes us feel -- and think of all the other great
> pre- or proto- or flatly non-realist caricatures (in Cervantes, in Rabelais,
> in Voltaire, in Fielding, in Sterne, in Dumas, in Hugo, in Twain... the list
> goes on and on) that he would have to argue around if he made his premises
> explicit.
>
> It's not coincidental that Forster and Leavis both had to tap-dance a lot
> when it came to Dickens: like Wood, they knew very well that he wasn't just
> hugely popular and hugely influential, but a great innovative creator... one
> who didn't just awkwardly stretch the value schemata they were building, but
> threatened to blow it wide open.
>
> On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 12:23 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>> >
>> >
>
>
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