M&D first notes

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, one can realize P's prose is rooted in an older literary tradition.
Tradition and the Individual Talent, that famous essay by another great
writer TRP admired and learned from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Tradition_and_the_Individual_Talent.
Just yesterday, Michael Dirda reviewing Robert Irwin's new book in the Wa
Po wrote: "Because the Middle Ages valued tradition over originality,
erudite versifiers sometimes devised poems in which every line was borrowed
from some previous work of literature. While reading a cento, one savored
its imaginative repurposing of bits from Horace, Virgil and any number of
lesser ancients. We see the remains of this tradition in allusion-filled
modern works such as T.S.Eliot's 'The Waste Land' ". And in Pynchon, he
didn't say--although he always reviewed him exuberantly.
(I will add this PS, he was also influenced deeply by the Henry Adams who
wrote so lovingly of the Middle Ages in his Mont St. Michel and Chartres.)

I feel it most in many word choices in all the novels--as we know from
helping some translators,-- he uses many rooted in the past and rarer in
the present. Yet, his eyes and ears on his time gave him seven first
citations, I believe, in the OED for new words. Most memorable to me,
'shrink'.

The sentences and language---even beyond those CAPS--do seem very at home
in his eighteenth century-set novel. A complex structural elegance, with
balance and meaning.  With wittiness. ( I feel this most from my limited
reading in the Augustan Age, Samuel Johnson and a couple--three others, for
example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_literature. (Remember that
TRP's college paper on Johnson's *Rasselas *was judged so good by his great
teacher, M. R. Abrams, that it was one of the few he ever read--or passed
around-- in class.))

Which Augustan Age ended before the time of M & D's time and whose
elaborate sentences seem less formal and more "spontaneous" , maybe? Cf.
the dialogue. I like, esp for much of the prose in M & D, the scholar in
the wikipedia article who says it should be called the Age of Exuberance.
Wit, humor is an overflowing aspect in M & D, right?

The transition move to the Romantic Age?, he asks, pretending to be a real
scholar of literature. Anyone, anyone? Prof Krafft?, James Robertson?,
Bueller?
JT: "Pynchon observes frolic and storytelling, storytelling as
distraction,  as reflection,  as a vast exotic journey and a return to the
realities of the moment. Most would prefer to forget the realities, etc."..Yes
and nicely said and it leads me to pretentiously offer this, too, as a
meaning to P's art itself, perhaps an easy call since we have that
fictionally real embedded storytelling as motif.

This sense of tradition deepens and complicates TRP's vision of history,
society, etc. in ways worth another mini-essay sometime.


On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 7:23 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> The prose is old fashioned, elaborate, supple, easily moving between
> amusement, sentiment, the exotically strange and P's darker considerations
> of avarice and violence.  And one realizes that Pynchon’s prose has always
> had it’s roots in an older literary tradition. In fact one can distinctly
> hear strains of Hawthore, Melville, Washington Irving along with more
> recent cousins like Dickens. My own sense is that never before M&D has P’s
> writing style with those elegantly elaborate sentences been so at-home in a
> period of time.
>   It is not that his classification as experimental or post-modern is
> wrong, but that classification has much more to do with overall structure
> and his intriguing prefiguring of the age of hyper text than with the way
> he writes a sentence or a paragraph. Pynchon’s hyper text is more than info
> traveling. I t is also time traveling and builds layers of meaning that
> create a surreal depth and place him with the moderns.  What I am saying is
> probably obvious but here is a top of the head illustration. Reading any
> paragraph in GR or V in comparison to Huckleberry Finn would make Twain
> sound utterly modern by comparison in terms of a prose style which sounds
> like man on the street common sense, and is artistic but accessible, pithy,
> lucid and dramatically active.
>
> Christmas in Philadelphia
>    Philadelphia was central to the problem and raison’ etre for the M&D
> line. The 40th parallel was the original line defined by royal land grants
> but the 40th  was miscalculated to be south of Philadelphia  and would have
> cut off Philadelphia from Pennsylvania- the city that was chartered as the
> center of the colony. By the time Cherrycoke is telling his story,
> Pennsylvania had abolished slavery( 1781), so a division between slave and
> free was already in progress and Philadelphia ,that dream of brotherly
> love, was not in slaveholding Maryland.  In that sense his story is a
> celebration of elaborate compromises worked out among competing interests
> and lines that both free and enslave.
>    Christmas is not officially observed by Quakers but not judgmentally
> condemned either. Midwinter festivities seem to be part of life for all
> northern peoples. Pynchon observes frolic and storytelling, storytelling as
> distraction,  as reflection,  as a vast exotic journey and a return to the
> realities of the moment. Most would prefer to forget the realities that
> would have been the birth of a wage laborer’s son under Roman occupation
> and enjoy the distance provided by modern mass marketing, sweet hopeful
> carols  and colorfully wrapped gifts.. But the idea of incarnation , of
> divinity finding a way to walk among the living and dying  is universal.  I
> agree with Mark that it seems to have a compelling attraction for Pynchon
>  There is a correspondence in my mind between the christmas story and
> Cherrycoke’s story. Both carry the mystery of mythic doings that have
> shaped the world and both have the delicious taint of sex, distant
> violence, exotic spices and dog shit. We are diving into a world where
> Imaginary lines become real,  and real animal barns become the convergence
> of heavenly triangulations.  -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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