Pynchon & Dickens

[alice malice]

Of course, and there is much irony in it, after Flaubert, who,
according to Wood, is the father of the modern realist novel, Wood
truly admires Henry James, the American, the most. He sees in Austen,
Balzac, and Defoe, elements, or traces of Flaubert, but only Flaubert
brings it all together in a narrative and so earns the founder
position that Wood, with some odd stretching, from  Sentimental
Education, finds in Stephen Crane's use of the near cinematic lens in
his war novel, RBC. Again, a misreading, I think, as Wood, noting that
Crane read SE, ignores the "Naturalism" and other developments in
American fiction and in America that influenced Crane.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 10:59 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think this is SPOT ON as another refutation of Wood on
> Pynchon.
> Wood does overuse European classic authors and he has
> also accused Pynchon of not being Fielding, so to speak.
>
> Also, re his 'realism-bias' I remember vaguely some long summary
> multiple-book review, maybe in LRoB, in which he led
> by arguing, defensively, LOOK: here are lots of writers---Hrabal, I believe
> was one--I like who don't write 'realism'.....
>
> And he can change....he recently spoke of a turnaround in appreciating
> Ms. Lydia Davis.....
>
> On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 10:30 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dickens Again? Really? Two of my favorites, Pynchon and Dickens, but I
>> can't make the connection that others make here. Pynchon may have read
>> Dickens. I guess he did at Cornell, even with Nabokov, but Pynchon is
>> not Dickensian. Lots of characters, with silly names, allegory,
>> talking door knobs, satire, does not make Pynchon an imitator of
>> Dickens. If I had to connect Pynchon to a European at all, it would be
>> Orwell, but Pynchon is so American. While he dabbled in everything
>> here and across the pond, and is too encyclopedic to pigeonhole by
>> genre or any other classification, he is surely an American Author who
>> writes in a globalized period. This is one thing he does share with
>> Dickens, among others, but to favor Dickens over the American
>> development of fiction and of the ideas and experimentation that
>> Pynchon drew from seems a stretch.   His early influences are well
>> known and include, as he lists them in his SL Introduction: Henry
>> Adams and Norbert Wiener (Adams was a and may still be the most
>> important influence on P), Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Melville, Twain,
>> Mailer, Bellow, Roth, The Beats, Kerouac, Jazz, Playboy,  Barthelme,
>> Fitzgerald, Zappa....but, of course, these are but the early,
>> juvenile, though perhaps, as in the case of Adams, formative
>> influences. P has influences from all over the globe, and we should
>> include in the American influences, those Americans outside the USA,
>> Marquez for example, ao Dickens has much to contend with.
>>
>> My critique of Wood is essentially that he often misreads American
>> Fiction because he either doesn't know, which I doubt, or ignores,
>> the history of its development. He's too keen to trace American
>> Fiction to Europe, because his favorite authors are European, and this
>> is a mistake.  I like to contrast him with Tony Tanner because
>> Tannner, though also British, nails American Fiction. I do have lots
>> of praise for Mr. Wood, his Broken Estate critique of Pynchon seems
>> right on, and that he names Pynchon's true American father, Melville,
>> is also right, though Twain and Henry Adams are, though Wood doesn't
>> see it,  surely Pynchon's mothers. Speaking of Twain, critics tried
>> and  failed to connect Twain with Dickens, and this makes a lot more
>> sense than connecting Pynchon with the Victorian satirist. Though
>> recently Pynchon has added his voice to his work, I can't imagine him
>> reading GR or M&D or AGTD in the voice of his stoner California
>> novels, something that Dickens and Twain had in common, the public
>> reading of their works and a voice that was created to that end.
>>
>> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1966/jan/20/the-truth-of-mark-twain/
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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