Pynchon & Dickens

[Mark Kohut]

And James is surely one of the most European [English] Americans.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 11:30 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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