Mortality & Mercy in Vienna

Sun Jan 10 19:08:33 CST 2016

Very well put!
On 11 Jan 2016 11:57 am, "ish mailian" <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> The story suffers from all the weaknesses Pynchon points out in his SL
> Introduction to the shorts he re-published in that book. Like the Small
> Rain, this story suffers under the cloud of too much rain, rain that is
> supposed to do something that Hemingway or Eliot did brilliantly, but young
> P doesn't really know what those great authors did with the rain and so he
> doesn't even know how how to copy them. It's the smart ass tone that's most
> embarrassing and although P admits to his juvenile and proto-fascist
> attitudes toward Others, including women, this story, because like The
> Small Rain, features a narrative that is essentially the author, and
> exposes, without irony or distance the author's attitudes, his smugness and
> immaturity, is a good one to omit from the collection.
>
> On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 7:30 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It feels like an undergrad story because the engagement with the
>> intertexts seems so superficial. "I've read Conrad and Joyce and
>> Shakespeare! They're the greats, right?" Later on he does really
>> complex and fascinating stuff with allusions and referents but he's
>> only just starting down that track, here.
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 11:25 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > One question is How much of the play and the line matters to the story.
>> Mackin has reminded
>> > That TRP has said he only uses as little as he needs; Jochen points
>> right to the major meaning of the line, used when the Duke turns over
>> Vienna to Angelo.   DC is as corrupt as Vienna.
>> >
>> > MfM plot is different. In detail. Thematically?
>> >
>> > We 've got to account for the anti-religion, anti-Christian religion in
>> this story. Pervades. Some Interpreters of MfM have spoken of Shakespeare's
>> almost-sacrilegious anti-Christianity. all " Christian" values gone from
>> Vienna. No Christian cultural values ala Eliot.
>> >
>> > What about sex/love? Rachel doesn't show to the party. But they talk
>> okay. The woman on the Ojibway's lap?
>> >
>> > Nihilistic terrorism because God, all values, even native ones, gone,
>> dead in the entropic wasteland--that party? Metaphorically speaking--ending
>> in the shooting as complicit Siegel gets away?
>> >
>> > Sent from my iPad
>> >
>> >> On Jan 10, 2016, at 5:37 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Tanner:
>> >>
>> >> "The problem, in both works, is how do you - can you, can anyone? -
>> >> cure or heal a degenerate and, as it were, 'damned' society?...
>> >>
>> >> The possibility of any real healing and prophecy recurs throughout
>> >> Pynchon. More generally, the problem becomes nothing less than how to
>> >> be in the contemporary world, particularly if it is as infernal as the
>> >> Washington party implies. One way is to cultivate disengagement,
>> >> emotional immunity; keeping 'cool', to use a term deployed by Pynchon.
>> >> But that, of course, can lead to paralysis and inhumanity. The other
>> >> extreme is to want to be a great healer and prophet, but that can lead
>> >> to a different kind of inhumanity - and madness. Pynchon's work is
>> >> constantly seeking to discover something in between these two
>> >> extremes....
>> >>
>> >> Irving Siegel is not just an example of a failed healer, a false
>> >> prophet. He is both a product and a representative of a society that
>> >> has accepted - indeed, eagerly embraced - 'mortality' on an
>> >> ever-increasing scale, and has forgotten the 'mercy'."
>> >>
>> >> I can see why Pynchon might not have wanted to include M&M in Slow
>> >> Learner. Casting the native American as a murderous cannibal is lame,
>> >> and the "kill 'em all" sentiment underriding the narrative is a
>> >> cop-out for the Pynchon who connects one's literary approach to death
>> >> as a marker of maturity (and in whose works characters die very, very
>> >> infrequently).
>> >>
>> >>> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 7:45 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >>> yes, very worryingly claustrophobic.
>> >>>
>> >>> I have been trying to write something that says other than your other
>> >>> critical voice. My mind stops there, except to think it can't mean
>> >>> that, can it? I might suggest it shows the nihilism of said
>> >>> liberalism, and of native American revenge (justice) as well?
>> >>> The complicity of them, of the native and the liberal bureaucrat.
>> >>>
>> >>> I want to reread Measure for Measure before saying more. It IS
>> >>> claustrophobic and even the resolution contains bad shit.
>> >>>
>> >>> I have both Tanner books but still in boxes since recent move.
>> >>>
>> >>>> On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 1:27 PM, Jochen Stremmel <
>> jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>>> Significantly, Tony Tanner begins his preface for Measure for
>> Measure with
>> >>>> the sentence: "This is a worryingly claustrophobic play." Is that
>> not true
>> >>>> for Pynchon's short story as well? He then muses about the word
>> >>>> "circummured" that Shakespeare invented for this play and never used
>> again.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Perhaps somebody who reads this post has Tanner's book about Pynchon
>> at
>> >>>> hand: Apparently he deals on the pages 26-29 with M&M in Vienna.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Meanwhile here's another critical voice:
>> >>>>
>> >>>> "Any political critique of Pynchon should begin there: the shrugging
>> off of
>> >>>> murder. ... The poignancy of 'Mortality and mercy in Vienna' is
>> revealed in
>> >>>> that shrug, which is the real centre to the story. It indexes
>> perfectly an
>> >>>> inability and unwillingness to intervene in a world in which mercy
>> and
>> >>>> mortality appear inseparable. and terrorism a kind of unfathomable
>> justice.
>> >>>> The shrug shows up the fine limits of Pynchon's story at the same
>> time as
>> >>>> revealing the moment (so often repeated in recent American history)
>> when
>> >>>> America's confused liberalism emerges as scandalously self-conscious
>> >>>> indifference."
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Terrorism a kind of unfathomable justice, indeed.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> 2016-01-09 9:22 GMT+01:00 Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>:
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> You said that now at lest twice, David. The high schooler who can
>> put out
>> >>>>> sth like Mortality and Mercy would have a bright future as a
>> writer, I
>> >>>>> think. And I don't think it has much morality. I think it's better
>> than
>> >>>>> Entropy, that one is really charged with symbols. You all know the
>> scene
>> >>>>> where the parting Duke delegates his power to Angelo with those
>> words, it's
>> >>>>> the first. And Siegel is no hypocrite – what he does, given the
>> choice
>> >>>>> between M&M, is quite cool, don't you think.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> What I thought after Slow Learner came out: that P didn't republish
>> that
>> >>>>> short story because he didn't like to see that name again,
>> associated with
>> >>>>> his own, the name of that asshole who broke the silence about him.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>>> 2016-01-09 2:00 GMT+01:00 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>> >>>>>>
>> >>>>>> Too much morality for my taste, and so clunky to boot!  This feels
>> like
>> >>>>>> it was written by a high schooler.
>> >>>>>>
>> >>>>>>
>> >>>>>>> On Friday, January 8, 2016, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>> The more I 'analyze' this story, the more problematic it is to me.
>> >>>>>>> Some over the top
>> >>>>>>> symbols and allusions and symbolic motivation I don't think I
>> get.....
>> >>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>> Yes, the motivation does not seem 'earned', right?....but wha is
>> it?
>> >>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>> Siegel is Mercy?....the Ojibway is Mortality? .......I cannot
>> >>>>>>> think the influence of the play into this story.......so
>> different..
>> >>>>>>> ---- Vienna is absolutely corrupt, known.......and I guess DC is
>> >>>>>>> supposed to be too.....
>> >>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 3:11 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >>>>>>>> http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/vienna.html
>> >>>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> Starts in rain. (see Small Rain and P on that symbolism borrowed
>> from
>> >>>>>>>> Hem)
>> >>>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> a party. like Entropy.
>> >>>>>>>> music   like Entropy
>> >>>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> girl named Rachel. Like V. Who doesn't show.(absent)
>> >>>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> Zeit [Time] as in V. a doctor here.
>> >>>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> P-like crazy names.
>> >>>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> very overt Catholicism imagery. and a mother who refutes it at
>> 19.
>> >>>>>>>>
>> >>>>>>>> what else?
>> >>>>>>> -
>> >>>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> >>> -
>> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>>
>
>
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