A sort of thesis

[Steven Koteff]

I think there are probably very reasonable reasons why the size and scope of a novel--if they don't dictate real vitality and life affirmation and craft and greatness--might correlate with some like Greatness Frequency Index. A billion caveats, most of which you can easily imagine and which I grant.

I started becoming a Pynchon devotee when I was in college. He was a gradual progression on a reading arc of mine that lent me to ever (you might call)excessive/(I might call)expansive novels. Preceding Pynchon for me were, like, DFW (I am one of the people around here who thinks Infinite Jest is Great but I haven't read it in like five years so who knows; and I'd consider adding Pale King even in its published form, with its phantom bits, to the list, like The Castle), Tolstoy (Karenina also big and Great), Joyce (I have read only bits of it Mark but I at least entertain the idea that it's Greater than Ulysses even if I don't necessarily agree; a smart reader of Ulysses can reasonably read it smoothly enough or submit to it enough that there is active real-time investment in the story and characters that offers that magical/primitive pleasure of self-transcendence by caring about an unreal world, to the point that you forget you exist in a different one, or exist at all; I have read a few bits of Finnegans Wake but not enough to know if that can be experienced in FW; and if that pleasure is sacrificed, I'm not saying it can't be made up for in the other Great things created by the same extremer density of FW that allows for its other/Greater qualities; just that I haven't read enough of FW to know if that's the case; fuck Ulysses is so good).

I then went to grad school to study fiction writing at a program that was basically three years of living in an arts colony that consisted of a lot of very close but personally and interpersonally tumultuous people who spent abnormal amounts of time discussing the art and practice of crafting the perfect story. Often on a level that was so elemental, conceptual, informed, sophisticated, and yet concerned with primality, that you could've read it as spiritual. And from that perspective, the scope of something like GR, it's wildness, excesses (on the level of language, size, plot, etc.) are not only rebellious but also deeply connected to the spirit/uality/philosophy/life-affirmativeness (as you might call it) of the book that also makes it Great, I think. To the extent that the size and scope are actually a part of the spirit and the Greatness. Now, I don't think a book has to have a similar size and Scope to be Great. I think what's more true is that the size and scope be perfectly attuned to the particular requirements of the perspective the book is taking. Maybe when spirit, craft, talent, and vision all combine to create something Great, it even slightly more often requires a book huge in size. 




> On Jan 16, 2016, at 9:42 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> As I went on to say, size and scope matters in making my case...
> 
> yeah, just a so what discussion to have.
> 
> A feeling about Ambition of theme re all.
> 
> 
>> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 10:35 AM, john bove <malignd at gmx.com> wrote:
>> In what way is Finnegans Wake greater than Ulysses or ATD than GR?  My
>> answer would be in no ways.
>> 
>> I prefer Faustus to Magic Mountain and Dog Years to Tin Drum.  Bt so what?
>> 
>> And have you actually "read" Finnegans Wake?  NOt doubting, only curious.
>> 
>> 
>> Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2016 at 6:13 AM
>> From: "Mark Kohut" <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Subject: A sort of thesis
>> There are a few "big" books that have the status
>> of great novels that all cluster in my head in the same
>> place.
>> 
>> Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, The Man Without
>> Qualities, The Tin Drum, The Golden Notebook, Gravity's
>> Rainbow, Portrait of a Lady, Middlemarch, Cairo Trilogy, Radetzky March
>> and like that.
>> Swap out or add others, we can do.
>> 
>> Proust in seven volumes is in a class by itself because of length.
>> (Some say first three volumes equivalent to the above bracketing?)
>> 
>> But I think the two most ambitious novels in English, perhaps, the only ones
>> I can think of this morning, that might be 'great' in even larger ways
>> than the above
>> are Finnegan's Wake and Against the Day.
>> 
>> Argue with me. Find others?
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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