A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Pynchon’s difficult syntax forces students to juggle two methods of
reading: reading for language, and reading for content. That previously
quoted first sentence has a lot of noise, but it is not cacophonic.
Pynchon’s convoluted syntax mirrors Oedipa’s increasingly chaotic world.
His sentences force students to rethink their assumptions about the
purposes of not only traditional prose, but also experimental language. I
do not intend Pynchon’s work to convert them to more postmodern
interests in literature; rather, Pynchon’s fiction is like a literary
workout that forces them to build from the ground up as readers. When
students read easier works of literature, they might become deluded into
thinking that all language is employed in the service of clear
communication. Pynchon’s paradoxes make them return to other,
non-literary texts with a bit more skepticism and independent thinking.
Although Pynchon’s references and comedic timing within The Crying of Lot 49
might feel dated, the novel helps students understand mid-’60s American
fiction, particularly work from the West Coast. One might update the
curiously self-deprecating band The Paranoids for our present as Big Data, a Brooklyn-based act founded by Harvard graduate Alan Wilkis. In a recent interview
with NPR, he spoke about his “paranoid electronic pop project,” and how
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Internet.” Big Data’s great
debut album, 2.0, leads with “The Business of Emotion,” a
send-up of the “Facebook mood experiments:” “Feel good, make you feel
good / I’m looking for emotion so I know just what to show you.”
Students realize that, more and more, they are becoming Oedipa, buried
in data: “They knew her pressure points, and the ganglia of her
optimism, and one by one, pinch by precision pinch, they were
immobilizing her.”
Finally, student frustration with Pynchon evolves into curiosity.
Rather than becoming angry at Pynchon’s lack of linear progression and
profluence, students are often intrigued by his parlor tricks. For years
they have been taught to unearth and discover meaning in texts —
English educators love to use manual labor metaphors, but don’t always
want to get their hands dirty — yet The Crying of Lot 49 makes
students consider what happens when a work of art might not have any
traditional secrets to reveal. The movement toward skills-based
education in the humanities has also created an effort-return mentality:
the expectation that a text can, or should, be distilled into a single
sentence. Don’t we want students who know how to handle messes?
Perhaps now I have a better idea - plus the author calling Pynchon a "stuntman" - what troubles me by my annoyance with Pynchon, or, more accurately, his reputation. He represents a time, an idea where the noise of one's clever sentences overtakes the substance. Better, in my mind, is this:
At its worst, Pynchon’s prose is a beautiful failure. At its best,
Pynchon’s prose is revelatory. I agree with Greif that, in the end, The Crying of Lot 49
and Pynchon’s canon as a whole are concerned with data: “whether
remains are transmitted beyond each individual communication, buried in
the material facts of the founding of the system of
communication, and whether this residue may shadow and smudge the
prospect of those who join such a system, without them even knowing it.”
Not a bad lesson for students to learn, somewhere between thinking of
giants, beanstalks, and other noise.
I get onboard with that idea. It does not mean I will read more Pynchon. We can go forward with this idea, and perhaps we must go forward on this path in the coming age of AI.
Thomas Pynchon has loomed large for most of my life. I had not read him until prison, when I was past fifty. I have wrestled with him ever since. At the end of this post, I make several points about my reaction, but here I will only suggest reading him when you are younger is the better idea.
Ninety-Nine Novels: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
That is from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation has as much about Burgess as Pynchon - not something I mind, being rather fond of Burgess. Hold onto the last half, even the very ending, where they talk more about the novel and Pynchon's influence. I may have missed Pynchon's playfulness, but then I read him in prison, after a break-down and recovering from years of depression, when playfulness was not really anything I had in me. On the other, I may just not have liked his sense of humor.
This is a bit more frenetic video advocating for Pynchon. Perhaps my Pynchon problem is that I am not enough of an intellectual to appreciate Pynchon.
Not so frenetic as Write Conscious, and maybe that is why I came away feeling better about Gravity's Rainbow:
Lecture on The Crying of Lot 49 from Yale that helped me
understand the Pynchon novel I liked best, and improved my understanding
- academic and also promoting the charm of the work. Write Conscious approached Pynchon through Martin Amis:
Looking back now at my reactions to Pynchon, my problems come down to two things: 1) his concerns had become more widespread by the time I came of age, certainly by the time I hit the mid-century mark, and I found no novelty to Pynchon's treatment of our culture; and 2) my sense of humor differs from Pynchon's. I cannot deny that he is worth reading. The Yale lecturer emphasizes Pynchon's compassion - that I had not seen - and for that reason alone, he needs to be read.
I heard of Thomas Pynchon before going to prison. So when I found his books in the Fort Dix FCI leisure library, I set out to read him. I have been trying to figure out what was the deal ever since.
I subscribe to Ted Gioia's Substack, The Honest Broker, which published Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow Turns 50. Unlike me, Mr. Gioia is actually bright, so I wanted to see what he had to say about Pynchon's novel (which I did read, but without a study guide).
Only twice in my life have I a relied on a guidebook to help me
make it through a novel. I would have certainly met my doom somewhere
between Scylla and Charybdis if, in pursuit of James Joyce’s Ulysses,
I had not kept Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s 700 pages of
annotations at my side. My other literary survival manual came into play
when reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow—here my lifeline was Steve Weisenburger’s guide to the sources and contexts of this 300,000 word behemoth.
***
Even from the start, the verdicts were mixed. When a
three-member Pulitzer Prize jury recommended that Pynchon’s novel
receive the award for fiction, the Pulitzer board over-ruled them—as a
result, no fiction award was given out that year. In a strange twist—one
that might have surprised even the reclusive author—Gravity’s Rainbow
was nominated for the Nebula (those were the days, my friend), a
prestigious science fiction award, but lost out to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.
When Pynchon’s weighty novel did rack up a big honor, the National Book
Award, the author didn’t bother to show up for the ceremony, sending
comedian Irwin Corey—famous for his impersonations of a drunk
professor—on his behalf.
###
"Pynchon creates a world in which some subatomic
characteristics of reality are dealt with at the level of everyday
life," Professor Kathryn Hume has written, in defense of the sci-fi
credentials of Gravity’s Rainbow.
"Pseudo-Heisenbergian uncertainty bedevils the main characters, but even
more important it constrains the readers." Professor David Ketterer has
countered with a diametrically opposed position: "I can testify that
[Gravity’s Rainbow] is not a work of SF in any real sense," he writes.
"Furthermore in my opinion it is not a particularly good book marred as
it is by a kind of elephantiasis…."
So whom do we
back in this game of dueling professors? I have no problem acknowledging
the sci-fi elements in this book. But, in all fairness, almost
everything shows up at some point in this immense novel. I remember
hearing locals describe a specific Paris café where, if you waited long
enough, anybody you wanted to see would stroll by the sidewalk tables. Gravity’s Rainbow
is the literary equivalent. If you keep pushing ahead you will find
every possible ingredient—philosophy, poetry, silly songs, puns,
equations, pop culture references of various sorts, real and distorted
historical events, and the interaction of some 400 characters.
There is more that I find very relevant to the novel, this I find relevant to my reaction:
In retrospect, Gravity’s Rainbow must be
seen as an end-of-an-era work—an ironic verdict given how its most
fervent fans embraced it, at the time of its initial release, as a
pathway to the literary future. But such disappointed expectations were
part and parcel of many things that arrived on our doorstep around the
time the promises of the 1960s gave way to the realities of the 1970s.
After Gravity's Rainbow, the rules of literary
fiction changed again, mostly in ways Pynchon could not have
anticipated. Different styles came into ascendancy—minimalism, magical
realism, postcolonial fiction, genre mashups of various sorts, trailer
park verism—in the years following its publication. In more recent
decades, an even more surprising twist, namely the avoidance of almost
any sort of ideology (you can call this the Franzen syndrome, if you
like), has begun to permeate the world of literary fiction, as more and
more novelists focus on plot, character development, pacing and plain
old fashioned storytelling.
I am not of the time of Pynchon. That I found Gravity's Rainbow as well as his other novels to be more like shaggy dog stories. Not ordinary ones, mind you, but expertly crafted ones. My reaction to all were pretty much WTF? I had a similar reaction to On the Road, except that one I more clearly understood as capturing a particular time in history. I found in neither anything for my own writing. Your mileage may vary.
Did not really turn out that way. I have a pile of papers to go through in the morning. The first problem came when the PO called and let me know he was coming up. In a way, that lit a fire under me, who had actually slept in. I ran out to get new windshield wipers for a friend. Back here, I got the bedroom into shape.
The PO showed up. He let me know that with the budget cuts/government shutdown, I might have to start paying for my polygraph exams. Well, that might put that silliness into a new perspective. I found he fished; I had always thought him a hunter. The usual silly questions about pathological issues that do not exist. He arrived around 1 pm and left a half hour later.
While waiting for him to show up, I started on my email. Then I started putting together this post.
More rejections for "No Ordinary Word";
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I fear that I have avoided The Walrus, even before my current (supposed) embargo on politics, but I do read the newsletter sent and see what is being published. When I saw the link to The Case for Reading Quebec’s Most Reclusive Author, I clicked.
Over fifty years ago,
a young Québécois writer was staring at a small pile of rejection
letters. His clutch of manuscripts had been turned down by all of the
province’s publishing houses. They deemed his writing immature,
illegible, and too enamoured with breaking convention. So the
twenty-four-year-old tried a Hail Mary: he sent a manuscript to
Gallimard, the goliath of Parisian publishing responsible for the
careers of many of French literature’s great twentieth-century figures.
The gamble paid off. Gallimard would publish Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés in 1966, as well as three more titles in quick succession
***
By the time Ducharme died on August 21, nine days after his
seventy-sixth birthday, he was a myth. His nine novels, five plays, two
screenplays, and songwriting collaborations are part of Quebec’s
cultural psyche. Ducharme has earned “a place apart from the rest of
Québécois letters, on account of his work, on account of the mystery
that surrounded his life,” wrote La Presse book critic Josée
Lapointe, after Ducharme’s death. For the rest of Canada, he is still
very much a secret. His English Wikipedia page is exceedingly brief, all
of six sentences. His French one is longer, yet nowhere near the length
of his English Canadian counterparts, such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai
Richler, and Alice Munro. Yet as the winner of three Governor General’s
Literary Awards, a finalist for France’s Prix Goncourt, and an officer
of the Order of Canada since 2000, Ducharme is a French Canadian
institution, widely taught in the province’s college and university
curriculums.
***
It would be hard to
overstate Ducharme’s revolutionary effect on Quebec writing. According
to Annabelle Moreau, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Lettres québécoises,
Ducharme “created a literature for the province centered around our use
of the language, which by extension grew into our sense of culture and
national identity.”
From the article, I get the reasons for reading him; I suggest you read that argument.
What I took away from the article were other things: the transitory nature of literary fame; the obscurity imposed by our education of other cultures, other writers; and, finally, and far from least for me, that regionalism need not be the pejorative it is always taken to be.
We all live in a place. What we write about has its roots in our places. Why aren't Joyce, or Proust, or Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann, or Alasdair Gray, or Zadie Smith, or Charles Dickens, or José Saramago, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Mishima, or Amos Oz, or Orhan Pamuk, or John Steinbeck, or Chinua Achebe, or Naguib Mahfouz, or Milan Kundera not a regional writer?
The region we need worry more about is the limits we put on our imaginations - curbing our imaginations is the truly dangerous regionalism.
I have had George Saunders and Zadie Smith Talk with Deborah Treisman (The New Yorker) playing in the background. Two brilliant people, two great writers; plenty to learn about the process of writing, and about books. Yes, I have a crush on Zadie Smith, but the root of that crush is her writing and her thoughts on writing.
On the opposite end of my literary faves is Thomas Pynchon. He fascinates me because I am not as enamored of him as seems to be the norm for American critics. Richard Beck's Thomas Pynchon Is Angry (The Yale Review) uses the phrase "stoner humor" that might explain my finding Pynchon tiresome. I was never a stoner, never appreciated stoner humor for all the Cheech and Chong movies I've seen. However, Mr. Beck finally has me understanding how Pynchon is relevant to my own ideas.
The one thing
everyone knows about Thomas Pynchon’s novels is that they are paranoid.
We’ll get to that later. The other thing everyone knows about them is
that they are overstuffed. Packed with a manic variety of subplots,
original song lyrics, scientific arcana (both real and invented),
pop-cultural detritus, zany character names, and stoner jokes, Pynchon’s
books often feel as if they are on the verge of exploding under the
pressure of their own contents.
Yet if any one Pynchon novel can seem chaotic and ramshackle,
Pynchon’s body of work is among the most unified in postwar American
fiction: all of his novels deal with Americans’ inability or
unwillingness to understand the historical forces that built and
continue to shape the world they inhabit. This has been Pynchon’s great
subject from the beginning....
Thinking over the Pynchon novel's I have read - Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Against The Day - this does make sense.
Nor did I pay any attention to Pynchon's take on nostalgia being the same as mine - a variety of self-delusion:
This reverie, this “fantasy of old-time Milwaukee,” continues for quite a
bit longer. The first time I read it, I thought that Pynchon was
dragging on, that he had piled detail upon detail until the larger
picture collapsed under the weight of its constituent parts. The second
time I read it, I came to believe that it’s McTaggart’s longing that is
excessive, not Pynchon’s rendering of it. Remember what Pynchon wrote in
V.—that people situated at the bottom of history’s folds
console themselves with “a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what
they were.” That’s what McTaggart is doing here. The rosy urban
landscape McTaggart paints for himself in no way corresponds to the
Milwaukee that would actually be waiting for him back home, a city at
the economic nadir of the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce,
organized crime is running amok, and terror bombings are a regular
occurrence. Life in the U.S. may not be as grim as it is in Hungary, but
it is still pretty miserable. McTaggart’s nostalgia is not just
misplaced; he is lying to himself.
And complete agreement with America's dislike of history; albeit, I acquired this idea from Gore Vidal.
Pynchon isn’t just writing
about McTaggart here. Though his novels are filled with fantastical
hijinks and science-fictional elements, Pynchon is genuinely a writer of
historical fiction, one who has spent his life investigating how
certain historical moments came to be. What gives this project a
political valence is the fact that many Americans are—and always have
been—committed to remaining ignorant of the way their country’s wealth,
culture, and geopolitical strength were, and are, founded on violence
carried out in defense of capital accumulation and white supremacy.
Pynchon has previously written characters who could be duped or
bewildered by history without losing their author’s sympathies (Slothrop
in Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind), but in his depiction of
the blank stupidity that one finds just behind the screen of Hicks
McTaggart’s energetic charm, one detects a writer who has finally lost
patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious
consequences of their own country’s actions.
A stray thought, sparked by the following paragraph, concerned Dashiell Hammett:
When he says to Boynt Crosstown, his boss back at the PI offices, that
he can’t believe the feds would bring up the old days like that,
Crosstown’s response is scathing. “Of course they’re trying to turn
you,” he says. “Back to what you never stopped being. . . . You think
you’re reformed now. Not just a normal tough guy but a saintly one. . . .
But he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla
always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to.”
Talking to a mobster-turned-anarchist-bombmaker in the course of an
investigation, McTaggart says he wouldn’t be interested in going to
Italy, due to its being “a Fascist dictatorship.” “What makes you
private dicks any different?” the bombmaker replies. “Study your
history, gabadost,
you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as
Mussolini’s boys.” Even in Europe, McTaggart can’t find anyone who will
lend him a sympathetic ear. “Have you ever really looked at your
employment history?” an Interpol agent asks him. “One high-risk
orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s
greed or fear?”
The Pinkerton Detective Agency employed Hammett. They made big bucks breaking strikes; whether Hammett was a strikebreaker seems to be unclear. However, it is not unclear that Hammett's Red Harvest shows the after effects of strikebreaking and the costs of being ignorant about history. History is a record of humanity's character.
I still have a problem with the big slabs of books rampaging off into the wilds, the stoner humor mentioned above. That bias when combined with a fleeting comparison with Theodore Dreiser and the stoner humor comment made me spend a few seconds considering what Dreiser might have done if he smoked a few spliffs.
(Regarding Dreiser, I found these items: Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site and The mystery of Theodore Dreiser by Joseph Epstein, which opens with this:
I begin by borrowing a line from Theodore Dreiser, the master himself, before setting out to consider the first of many issues that Dreiser’s extraordinary career poses—that of the relationship of style to art. It was his friend and early champion H. L. Mencken who once remarked that Dreiser had “an incurable antipathy to the mot juste” but that ain’t the half of it. Theodore Dreiser also had an aluminum ear (one down from tin), an unfailing penchant for the purple, an oafish wit, and the literary tact and lightness of touch of a rhinoceros. Who but Dreiser, in Sister Carrie, could cap a brief description of workers returning home on a winter’s night in Chicago by saying that the crowd was “a spectacle of warm-blooded humanity”? Only Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, had the innate klutziness to write, “The death house of this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensibility and stupidity for which no one was primarily responsible.” No one except Dreiser, in The “Genius,” could roll off this squib of dialogue: “‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ laughed Suzanne.” For the gracious descriptive touch, there is this from The Bulwark: “Most of them were becomingly gowned in long frocks of every hue.” By now readers who have not read Dreiser and for whom style in literature is decisive are likely to join in the sentiment of Eugene Witla, the autobiographical hero of The “Genius”: “‘Nothing doing,’ he exclaimed, in the slang of the day.” But I would caution them, before giving up on Dreiser, with a line of snappy dialogue from Jennie Gerhardt: “‘Aw, you hush up,’ was her displeased rejoinder.”
But then it is a good deal easier to make fun of Theodore Dreiser’s prose style than it is to account for his genius. A genius he was, of that there ought not to be any serious doubt. He may not always have been able to write a careful sentence or a well-shaped paragraph, but this did not stand in the way of his turning out powerful novels. To put my cards on the table early in the game, let me say that Theodore Dreiser, in my opinion, is America’s greatest novelist. Herman Melville may have written the greatest single American novel, Henry James plumped deeper into the subtleties of human motivation, Mark Twain written more lyrically about this country, but Theodore Dreiser, that clod, bumbler, yokel, creep, wrote the novels that tell more in the way of elemental truth about American life and character, and tell it in a consistently persuasive and powerful manner, than those of any other American writer before or since his time.
***
The best students react well to the novels of Dreiser.
They sense that there are big things going on in his pages. And even the
very best students have the advantage that, at eighteen, they have very
little sense of prose style, and hence no snobbery about it. I am not
arguing for the superior wisdom of the young, but rather that the
shallow sophistication of the not-so-young can present its own
obstacles. Saul Bellow, who has long written and spoken admiringly of
Dreiser’s novels, puts the point best: “I often think the criticism of
Dreiser as a stylist at times betrays a resistance to the feelings he
causes readers to suffer. If they say he can’t write, they need not
experience these feelings.”
What are these feelings? I should say that any
comprehensive list of them would include humiliation and fear of
failure, the craving for respectability, every kind of longing, and the
desolation that accompanies an unutterable loneliness in the face of a
(probably) uncaring universe. In teaching Dreiser I have always wanted
to begin—perhaps some day I shall begin—by saying, “What you must
understand about Theodore Dreiser is that he was born poor and homely
and raised in ignorance and filled with desire. Write that down and
remember it. Now get out of here and go home and read the book again.”
I cannot say I ever approached Dreiser with joy, but in those two paragraphs I think is what makes Dreiser worth reading. Power. You go along with him, grumbling and even resisting a little, until you realize that he has grabbed hold of you, and you cannot go along with him to the end.)
Giorgio de Chirico is famous as a visual artist, but less well known is his prolific career as a writer. Considered the godfather of surrealism, his trajectory as an artist proved lastingly controversial.
It is hard to overstate the influence of his early artistic phase—of so-called metaphysical aesthetics—upon 20th-century modernism. In the early 20th century, we read again and again that the two pillars of modernism were on the one hand Picasso and on the other de Chirico. De Chirico was taken up and lionized and became in many ways the touchstone for surrealist paintings. The paintings of Magritte and Dalí, with which we’re so familiar, were essentially unthinkable without de Chirico’s figurative cityscapes, particularly deserted cityscapes, of which MoMA is the biggest owner in the world.
But other than the following section, I found little that struck my fancy:
SH: To respond super quickly to
de Chirico’s bilious and cantankerous bits, I want to mention that one
thing that is quite strikingly different between the two novels is the
structure of these screeds.
I’m so glad you mentioned the Memoirs because this gets at
another way he plays with form. In both novels de Chirico ends up making
what I find to be a documentary move. The documentary practice of
taking research materials or tangible language from elsewhere and
putting it into a creative text is super vibrant in poetry currently and
a pretty radical thing to do at the time. People often locate its roots
in 1930s leftist movements, with writers like Muriel Rukeyser and
Charles Reznikoff.
There’s a single moment like this in Hebdomeros where he drops in language from political posters. In Mr. Dudron,
he weaves his own writing with extensive quoting from an existing
19th-century tract on painting. The structure of the novel incorporates
this kind of external material, and I started noticing how when he does
this in Dudron the formal move is happening in the same moment
that he’s talking about material in visual art. He uses the documentary
move to highlight, in a different form, what he is critiquing about the
lack of materiality in painting. In both cases I think maybe he wants to
underscore the physical and tangible.
Some of the stuff he’s mad about is definitely bonkers, but some of
it is quite moving and convincing—like that people have moved away from
working with their hands and they’re not making their tools with their
hands and so they’ve lost a relationship with the materiality of that
which they make.
This feels echoed in the double voice you mention. He has this
interlocutor named Isabella Far which is also the name of his second
wife, or the name that he gave her, and he makes her a character in this
novel and he calls her “she of the philosophical spirit.” She’s the
greatest thinker about art and he places his own screeds in her mouth.
Dudron, who’s the autobiographical character is sitting around when
she walks in. He asks her questions, and she lectures him. Then, in real
life, in his 1945 essay collection Commedia dell’arte moderna,
he publishes some of these very same essays that are quoted in the
novel under her name, even though we now know that he wrote them.
YMMV.
I have not read enough of Thomas Mann, and Doctor Faustus is one of those i have not read. Ignorance of the novel does not mean I lack curiosity. Which is why why I spent time this afternoon with Jeffrey Meyers and his Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus’. The opening whetted my interest.
It’s unusual for an author to create a great novel and then, fearing
readers would not understand it, to write another book that explains
it. Thomas Mann’s The Genesis of a Novel (1949) describes how he composed Doctor Faustus (1947) and provides valuable insights into that difficult book. After working on Joseph and His Brothers for
16 years, the 69-year-old author finally completed that tetralogy in
January 1944. He first thought of finishing his early satiric novel Confessions of Felix Krull (1922), but decided to take up the challenge of writing the far more ambitious Faust novel.
***
The musical, military, pathological and political themes
magnificently merge at the end of the novel as the four stages of
Adrian’s disease—migraines, infection, remission and collapse—tragically
fuse with Germany’s predisposition to Reformation-inspired demonology,
deliberate choice of Nazism, decade of military conquest and apocalyptic
destruction.
Jeffrey Meyers published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern, 2014).
"Thomas Kemp" received another rejection:
Thank you for submitting your story to Electric Spec. Unfortunately,
your story does not meet our needs at this time. Yours is one of many
high-quality submissions we received, and we encourage you to try us
again if you have another story that you think would be a good fit.
I read Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day in prison. I will repeat what I say in every post on this blog about Pynchon: his sense of humor and mine do not match; I recognize the work he has accomplished, but it leaves me cold.
Listening to the following video from Write Conscious, I had to disagree with most of what it contains. Then the presenter got onto the idea that our spiritual/social breakdown started with the loss of the frontier. The frontier gave us something spiritual to rub up against.
I have been thinking much on the division of the Northwest Territories into townships; where surveyors forced the land into grids. That was long before the frontier was gone. Even before the frontier left Indiana., surveyors were going forth to make the land fall into rationality.
Also, my reading of the Desert Fathers was triggered. It can be said that they went out into the wilderness, the frontier in a way, to decrease the influence of the world on their spirituality. However, I take from the Desert Fathers that there is in all of us a spiritual frontier.
However, I agree with the argument about the need for spirituality in our literature. That agreement comes out of my experience with depression. That is a disease of the spirit as much as of physiology and psychology. The spirit has been neglected by the vast amount of American literature since Nathaniel Hawthorne, if not further back. I cannot think of anything in English or American literature comparable to Dostoevsky's The Brother Karamazov.
Using the Night (n+1, Mark Iosifescu) has this to say about Pynchon, and Against the Day.
A growing comfort with sentimentality feels, too, like the primary carryover from Vineland into Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, even if much of the critical interest in those latter and longer novels was confined, at least initially, to rejoicing over the return they represented to the author’s vaunted maximalist epic mode. (T.C. Boyle re M&D in the NYTBR: “This is the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all.”) But beyond the page counts and the inducements to crowdsource a reference or cameo, the stories and styles—even Mason & Dixon’s giddy facsimile of 18th-century English—are deceptively simple, characterized by a mixture of sumptuous but irreverent historical action and naked emotion. Is there a more affecting entanglement with heartbreak in all of Pynchon than Charles Mason’s grief over his dead wife Rebekah? Is there a neater throughline across Against the Day’s multiversal infinities than the characters’ dogged, decades-spanning searches for lost loved ones?
There’s something instructive, as well, about these later books’ explicit turn toward the tropes and textures of genre fiction. If there were any remaining doubt about the insufficiency of the author’s reputation as a schematic and paranoid mystic-crank, this surge of goofy genre conventions ought to have finished the job. In addition to suggesting, gratifyingly, that Pynchon was finally allowing himself to indulge the pulpy forms he’s obviously loved since before V., his strategy of running Mason & Dixon and Against the Day’s historical and sociopolitical concerns (the Enlightenment’s colonial hypocrisies and mounting corporatocratic rule, the Gilded Age’s capitalist violence and doomed anarchist counterattacks) through the style filters of the popular fiction of their respective days (frame stories, Sternean comic novels, 19th-century boys’ adventure books, dimestore Westerns, etc. etc.) results in some rollickingly enjoyable vernacular storytelling. It also allows Pynchon to move away from the apparent omniscience of the classically maximalist voice, even to disempower it. These later novels contain no shortage of conspiratorial overtures and world-systems theorizing—but, having been unhesitatingly pastiche-ified and, as often, offloaded to characters who wear a conspicuous genre wackiness on their sleeves, those elements go down smooth, even as the plots they delineate multiply and interpenetrate beyond anything seen in the early novels.
I will put more on the difficulties of love than the loss of the frontier as the root of humankind's loss of Western civilization. Your mileage might vary.
I think I will schedule this for next month. There might be more to add, or second thoughts might come.
Dear Reader, I write here often about the slippage between literature and genre. I am not good at respecting the distinction. I like following Joan Jett on blurring lines. This may not be so much a brave stance as much as proof of me not knowing what I am talking about.
If Charles Dickens is literature, then what about the detective story of The Mystery of Edwin Drood? Isn't William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, a detective story also? Do I discount Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Fivefor its science fiction elements?
One more item as a preamble: I just do not get Thomas Pynchon. I got to read him in prison after hearing about him for years. Not that I do not want to understand what is all the hoopla, which is why I read something like “Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and Thomas Pynchon’s Hardboiled.". Yes, it is an academic paper, albeit one that is not completely buried under incestuous jargon:
A consensus seems to be emerging that the dominant literary develop- ment of the 21st century is exactly the sort of process outlined by Formal - ism and polysystem theory. Elements of marginal, non-canonized genres have been adopted by canonical writers, and embraced by the institutions involved in policing literary boundaries, while whole genres, previously considered to be beyond the pale, have begun to migrate towards the center(s) of the literary polysystem. Tim Lanzendörfer has recently pro- posed the term “‘détente’ fiction” to describe the results of this process, a form of contemporary literary writing that rejects a sterile bifurcation between high and low culture (3). Similarly, Theodore Martin has identi- fied an earnest engagement with genre as a key feature of 21st-century lit- erature (7–8). Examples abound, such as Colson Whitehead’s 2016 The Underground Railway, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, but also the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best SF novel by combining a realistic slave narrative with elements of fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history.4 Similarly, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent works include a dystopian science fiction novel (Never Let Me Go, 2005) and a piece of historical fantasy (The Buried Giant, 2015). It seems that we are now prepared to recognize that serious works of literature, worthy of popular and critical attention and our most prestigious accolades, can involve or even rely on substantial elements of genre fiction.
We live in a corrupted world - unless one is Pangloss and this is the best of all possible worlds - which means crime should exist in our fiction. Hester Prynne committed a crime that led to her wearing a scarlet A. Oliver Twist meets several criminals, witnesses several crimes. Early on I had an idea born out of exposure to the 1898 lynching in Versailles, Indiana, I set it aside when I felt unable to compete with William Faulkner, only to take it up much to my surprise when I was in prison, and it is a two-fold crime story: the gang terrorizing the county and the county's refusal to indict anyone for the gang's lynching. These crimes tell us about ourselves and our society.
The investigator lets us into the different strata of society, exposes us to a range of characters. I am drawn to this discussion of Pynchon for that very reason:
Jameson has argued that one of the main achievements of the hard- boiled is its ability to “to bring us up short, without warning, against the reality of death itself, stale death, reaching out to remind the living of its own moldering resting place” (87). In Pynchon’s hardboiled we are brought up short not only by the presence of death, but by a fundamen- tal, inescapable wrongness, against which the investigator is powerless. Bleeding Edge ends as Tarnow watches her children go to school, leav- ing behind the “precarious light” of childhood’s grace and entering “the indexed world” (476). For all her investigative talents, for all her quiet heroism, there is nothing she can do about what is going to happen to them and the world they live in. The last line of the novel (and what may come to stand as the last line of Pynchon’s published body of work) is an open admission of this powerlessness: “She can watch them into the ele - vator at least” (477). The conclusion of Inherent Vice similarly confronts readers with the limits of investigation. Sportello has solved a series of interconnected mysteries, and deflected the attention of the Golden Fang from a number of vulnerable people. Yet the novel ends not with triumph but with Sportello driving through the fog, waiting for it “to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead” (369). Both Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge offer their readers a hardboiled vi- sion of a fallen world in which the persistence of hope, however tenuous and unjustified, is the only recourse — even for a private eye.
I may have a better idea of the attraction others find in Pynchon having read this article. It may be he and I see the world differently, that what concerns him I have come to through others and find him less a novelty. Still, he points the way for incorporating the popular and the literary. I do not see how, if literature is to have relevance to reality, it can ignore the concerns of genre fiction. Justice and guilt are part of our real world.
...But along the way he has learned that in modern society guilt is pervasive and diffuse: he can’t defeat it all: no one can. The Grail he pursues can’t be fully realized. The modern urban Wasteland and its ailing potentates can’t be decisively healed or revivified. Thus, as George Grella concludes, in effect “the hard-boiled novel inverts the conventions of both the whodunnit and the romance.” The hero’s victory is compromised, the state of “innocence” is not restored, and guilt persists: Eden is irrevocably lost, or if not lost, it is merely internalized in one lone figure whose code enables him to walk down mean streets without being himself mean, in search of a truth that he alone knows and values. He is, we might say, a romance hero inhabiting a world devoid of romance. His stance toward this world is thus tenuous and elegiac. His only real victories are inner ones, and even these are often rendered hollow, fruitless, gained at too great a cost. And yet he persists in the arduous search for hidden truth.
Seems to me, the form presents a dialectic between society and the individual. Which is a very American dialectic.
This may be the place to point out an earlier interest in pulp fiction as literature, Is it a Crime?
Stein delves into the pulp genre in her essay, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,”
while ruminating on literature and its aims. Or rather, she gives the
reader a sampling of her theory in support of the crime story as
literature; as a subset of something new awakening in American culture:
whether it—the country, the populace—was aware of it, or not.
###
We might consider how this relates to writers such as Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon,
who straddles the line between literature and pulp fiction. In “Making
‘Literature’ of It: Hammett and High Culture,” Mark McGurl makes the
case for Hammett’s literary situation—
as in where his work is situated in relation to “highbrow” literature
and crime fiction. Hammett’s writerly efforts elevated pulp fiction to
an art, in conversation with modernism. McGurl posits:
Admired by such [writers] as André Gide, André Malraux
and Stein, Hammett’s fiction echoes the more obviously elite modernism
whose central texts he appreciated and discussed even as he continued to
sell his work to the pulp audience. His work shows us both what
modernism looks like to mass culture and what mass culture looks like to
modernism, without canceling the relative autonomy of these two
discourses.
Hammett even says in a letter to Blanche Knopf: “Some day somebody’s
going to make ‘literature’ of it,” referring to the detective story, and
its nascent, yet-to-be-revealed potential. Indeed, Stein not only
admired the genre from afar, she made her own attempts at the detective
story. According to Brooks Landon, Stein wrote “a short play, ‘Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters,’ a curious 80-page short novel, Blood On the Dining-Room Floor,
an impenetrable thirty-page piece enigmatically titled ‘Subject Cases:
The Background of a Detective Story,’ and several other short works with
detective themes or subjects.”
I read two of Martin Amis's novels, but I know he had the reputation as a bad boy of English writers. Seeing him paired with Elmore Leonard lit the fuse of my curiosity mixed with fear. It is a little shocking to hear Amis's respect for Leonard. A very good discussion of writing that raised my opinion of Amis.
Why Martin Amis Hated David Foster Wallace & Thomas Pynchon - Write Conscious
I think I have made it clear here what I think of David Foster Wallace, but if I heard the presenter correctly, he ranks Wallace a better writer than Amis. He also gets down Zadie Smith, who I adore.
One pedagogical tactic that desperate teachers might employ is to direct the attention of their students to the novels of Ross Macdonald, for there are few better, more concrete examples of a writer who went quietly and artfully about the business of showing his readers the souls of his characters. Even more artfully, Macdonald kept authorial comment to a minimum while allowing the characters in his novels to strip themselves—or one another—bare with the words they hurled or simply let drop inattentively.
***
Show the location, show the
location, the huddled students are told. Well, how’s this for showing?
‘We trekked to the far side of a big central room.’ Then there is Mrs
Biemeyer’s explanation for her delay in noticing the absence of the
painting: ‘I don’t come into this room every day.’ Just in case Archer
hasn’t grasped the wealth of the people who are going to hire him,
Biemeyer laments that ‘There ought to be some place in a
four-hundred-thousand-dollar building where a man can sit down in
peace.’ This in 1976, when that sum bought a lot more house than it does
today. And notice that Biemeyer refers to his own home as a ‘building’.
Write Conscious again with Harold Bloom on Gravity's Rainbow
I remain a Pynchon skeptic, but I will let you make up your own mind. It may be that I do not get his sense of humor.
The theme that ties all essays in this book together is creativity and the act of keeping a healthy fountain of ideas flowing. Bradbury shares his wisdom on this topic not by preaching to aspiring writers about what they should be doing but by explaining what he did. He explains that he started writing a thousand words a day every day at the age of twelve. My personal daily goal as a writer is also a thousand words per day, although I didn’t start when I was twelve, and I often don’t hit my goal, especially when a project moves into editing, publishing, and marketing.
I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.
The hallmark of Portis’s work is farce delivered with a straight face in
successions of tightly choreographed set pieces, splitting the
difference between the picaresque and the grotesque. He draws on a
tradition established by Melville in Moby-Dick, and sustained across the
generations by writers as varied as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John
Kennedy Toole, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Don DeLillo, Thomas
Pynchon, Denis Johnson, Donald Antrim, Mary Robison, Paul Beatty,
Percival Everett and Nell Zink.
“Anything I set out to do
degenerates pretty quickly into farce,” Portis told Newsweek in 1985. “I
can’t seem to control that.” But one should not mistake lightness for
slightness. Portis is a comedian of the highest order, but he is
finally—as all comedians must be—a moral philosopher, because comedy,
like prophecy, is always grounded in a critique of the world as it is
based on a vision of the world as it ought to be. I’m reminded of a
remark of Flannery O’Connor’s, made in a brief preface to the second
edition of Wise Blood, published in 1962, two years before the end of
her life and four years before Portis’s debut. “All comic novels that
are any good must be about matters of life and death,” O’Connor wrote. A
few lines down, she poses a question: “Does one’s integrity ever lie in
what he is not able to do?” For O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, the answer is
yes: his inability to refuse Christ is the bedrock of his integrity and
the path to his salvation, brutal as it is when it arrives. For Portis’s
schemers, dreamers, dropouts, road-trippers, scammers and pilgrims, the
answer varies based on who is driving the given story and what it is
they’re after. But Portis, unlike O’Connor, has a baseline level of
respect for anyone stubborn enough to sustain whatever quest they may
happen to be on, separate from the question of whether said quest is
worth completing or if it ought to have been undertaken in the first
place.
Such pioneer spirit is a distinctly American quality, and
nobody embodied it more fully while also mocking it more ruthlessly than
Portis in his five peerless novels. A new Library of America Collected
Works gathers them together in one volume, supplemented by a judicious
selection of “Stories & Other Writings”—all told 1,100 pages of
handsomely bound bible-paper well worth your $45 and the mild eye
strain. What comes into focus as you make your way through is a
worldview that favors that old Emersonian notion of self-reliance, as
well as the observation made by the man in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
that “good fences make good neighbors.” These are loquacious,
peripatetic novels written by a guy who thought that people ought to
stay home and keep to themselves. Exactly none of his characters are
able to do this, and it is from their extravagant failures of silence
and stillness that Portis’s comedy derive.
Folks, you can find the collected works here. Do yourself a favor and get it. Learn what is great about America.
Trump thought the people of Chicago—and Washington, D.C. where he
already sent the troops—were going to cower in fear. But that’s because
Trump doesn’t know what it means to be an American. Period.
Trump
must have been shocked to see massive protests in both cities on
Saturday as the people made it clear they will not bow down to Trump. In
fact, they punched Trump in the face!
In Washington, D.C.,
we saw a glorious display of people showing Trump that Americans are
ready to fight for freedom. As the Associated Press put
it: “Thousands of protesters marched across Washington, D.C., on
Saturday in one of the largest demonstrations against President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of policing in the nation’s capital.” Below You can see a video of a small part of the protest...
The danger isn’t just these specific moves. It’s the trajectory they create. The more Americans hear phrases like “civil unrest” and “domestic conflict,” the more plausible it sounds to suggest elections should be delayed “for safety.” History shows how this works. In Turkey, a state of emergency after a coup attempt stretched into years, consolidating power at the top. In Russia, unrest has been a convenient excuse to tighten control over opposition. Even here at home, fear after 9/11 opened the door to surveillance powers most Americans never would have accepted earlier. Fear reshapes what people are willing to tolerate.
Yes, the Constitution fixes the timing of elections. But words on paper only work if leaders respect them and citizens demand they be upheld. If an administration argues that unrest makes elections unsafe, the courts might eventually push back—but the disruption alone could erode confidence in the process. That’s how democratic norms crumble: not with a declaration, but with doubt, confusion, and fatigue.
This is why normalization is so dangerous. If troops in our capital feel ordinary, then so do other abuses. If the independence of the Federal Reserve can be undermined without outrage, the next breach is easier to justify. What’s shocking today feels routine tomorrow, and by then the guardrails are already gone.
And so, in Indignity, Ypi sets off to find out exactly who her grandmother was. It is, she writes, partly out of a sense of duty, to defend her family member from the trolls – a kind of 21st-century version of EP Thompson’s famous call for history to rescue the dead from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. But partly, Ypi admits, it is because she finds the photo unsettling. How to reconcile her beloved, compassionate grandmother with this glamorous young woman living it up in Mussolini’s Italy?
Did the region’s lost diversity and Germanophone high culture amount to a civilisation? Perhaps it is better to say that between 1815 and 1914, the Habsburg monarchy mostly managed to keep a lid on irreconcilable social, political, and cultural forces without offering a satisfactory arrangement that would bridge the deepest rifts between them. This is particularly evident when surveying the competing nationalist movements. True, before the First World War few among them could imagine a future outside of the multiethnic empires that ruled them or countenance the wholesale removal of rival groups. But even their sagest leaders espoused solutions that were liable, if implemented, to undermine the whole central European ‘community of fate’. The liberal German nationalist Friedrich Naumann’s 1915 proposal for democratic economic-political union in Mitteleuropa aroused sympathy from the liberal Hungarian nationalist Oszkár Jászi but only indignation in liberal Czech nationalist Tomáš Masaryk, later the first president of Czechoslovakia, who saw in it a blueprint for German domination. Central Europe appears then, as Jukic writes in another memorable formulation, as ‘a novel historical situation whose existence was tied to specific circumstances whose disappearance it did not survive’.
The precarity of that situation seems to have been lost on the region’s communist-era literati who yearned to escape Leninist one-party states and ‘return’ to a central Europe from which their societies had been ‘kidnapped’ – as the Czech novelist Milan Kundera put it in the early 1980s. To those who hailed their deliverance from captivity in 1989 and after Jukic retorts: ‘What emerged from the ruins of communist Eastern Europe was not a suppressed cosmopolitan Central Europe, but a series of nation-states forged in the upheavals of the twentieth century that had destroyed that very same Central European world.’ Glaring differences between the past and a present shaped by Western international institutions and a preoccupation with Russia have not dampened enthusiasm for the ‘idea of Central Europe’.
Thank you so much for considering your story, Lessons Learned from a Green Meadow, for inclusion in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.
Thank you also for your patience. This was a very long initial reading period as we received several hundred submissions this year.
Unfortunately, your story was not selected on this occasion to move onto the next stage, and although I understand your disappointment I hope this does not deter you from submitting to us again in the future.
Monday was busy and wore me out. Middletown Properties called last week with the news that they had shredded the cashier's check with which I paid my rent. This morning, I overslept and went off to the bank to find out what I needed to do. This was about 9. I talked to the same cashier as I did last week when I cashed from check from Kokomo. He is not a good communicator. Then I made it to Middletown Properties at 10, and got the customer's copy. Back to the bank, where I found out the 90 days the cashier had been nattering about was not when they could cut a new check, but when I needed to put in for a lost check. I walked from the bank home.
I had two appointments to look at apartments. The first was at 1 PM. Of course, I miss the bus and have to walk. No problem. I think I am only a minute late, except I am at the wrong address because I misplace Queen Street. That place was too small.
The next appointment was at 3 pm. I decided to run over to Ball State's Bracken Library to get something to read and kill time. I wanted Alasdair Gray, and had no luck finding any. Instead, I got an Edna O'Brien collection. Back to wait for the appointment on the bus. I read the first chapter and think it was brilliant.
I looked at the apartment and walked back to the apartment. By the time I got here, I was tired. The afternoon was a nap and lethargic. After a shower restored me enough to submit, "No Ordinary Word".
What is gone is gone always. Or so we tell ourselves, melancholy materialists who have seen the disappearance of so many things we loved: people, objects, eras, ideas. Waldo, of course, was less certain about these matters. It was in “Nominalist and Realist” that he seemed to deny the reality of death itself. “Nothing is dead,” he insisted. “Men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.”
I suppose, like John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Raintree Countywas too long, too complicated to teach in the schools.There is also a Dos Passos connection with how Lockridge uses imaginary news reports as a counter-voice to his narrator. Also like Dos Passos, I cannot imagine anyone following in Lockridge's footsteps. The Great American Novel died as a genre, or so I believe. Gore Vidal covered some of the same territory in Lincolnand in 1876, but to my recollection, those novels feel cramped in comparison to Raintree County. For a historical novel, the only historical characters given speaking parts are Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant - and they only appear in cameos.
On the other hand, I think there might a Lockridge influence in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but I cannot point to anything specific. Tonally, they are quite different.
Lockridge's achievement does not deserve to be forgotten.
Putting together this post on Don DeLillo, I was struck by his age: 88 years old as of the time I write this. Thomas Pynchon is about the same age. And so is Joyce Carol Oates. They were in their mid-twenties when JFK died, and this shows in their writing. Both were a little too old for the hippies, or in the range of those likely to be drafted for Vietnam. I feel so old right now. As if watching the edge of oblivion approaching. I came late to so much of American literature that I want to drag these writers closer to me. Read them while you can, get yourself writing while you are young enough to have time to do good work, make me feel like oblivion is not around the bend.
Where Not to Start with Don DeLillo! Of course, I started in the wrong place. I agree with him on starting with Libra.
Don DeLillo's Libra - this seems a bit on the surrealistic side; a short film with DeLillo narrating from his novel.
The same fellow reviewing Libra, and although it has now been many years since I read the novel, I think this fellow understood the novel better than I did, and so give him a listen:
A Conversation with Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen:
This conversation will be of more interest to any writers finding this post. Franzen goes deep into DeLillo's techniques and purposes of his writing. It is long, but I found it worth my time. YMMV.
If you’ve read any DeLillo then you’ll probably know that plot is not his primary driver or something that features that heavily in his books. He’s a writer of ideas and concepts, he likes to explore the boundaries of language; he’s interested in motivation and influence, the swell of mass-thought and how it can be manipulated and stretched. All this is very present in Libra, but it is all spun around a much more conventional plot – perhaps because it is based on real-life events which give specific counterpoints which DeLillo has to touch in with. That being said, there’s still plenty of scope for imaginative exploration and speculation. This makes it one of DeLillo’s easier books to read, or in my opinion at least, because there’s something quite concrete to hang on to. How concrete is a question which I think is very much left to the reader’s own judgement. I am not that familiar with the facts of the events that led to the assassination of Kennedy, I guess I have seen my fair share of media on the subject but all I’ve learned from it is the basics and that there’s a lot of speculation. There’s a lot of speculation in Libra too, but I don’t think DeLillo is presenting a factual case for what he believes happened. Instead he posits an idea and explores it, explores how such a chain of events could result in that terrible day in Dallas. What might cause that chain of events to occur, the minds that might control it, want to bring it about, what they might gain and how Oswald, an outsider, might figure in those designs. How independent was he, how much a product of his upbringing and society, the era and the events and the ideas that were swilling around him? The inescapable clutch of history. It all makes for a fascinating read.
After listening to a Library of America podcast arguing that novelist, playwright, screenwriter and essayist Don DeLillo deserves to be awarded a Nobel prize for his body of work, I went to my shelves and pulled Libra from a half dozen DeLillo novels. In my early 30s I read DeLillo in the same immersive way I read Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and Philip Roth — one volume after another. DeLillo puzzled me because his novels present familiar elements that often seem alien. What Delillo does, I realized this time around, is slip the reader into the world inside the world. The world of Libra is that of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, current and former members of the CIA, mob figures who want their piece of Cuba back, John F. Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald, a misguided idealist. This world exists inside the paranoid imaginings of the John Birch Society, the Cold War, and the New Frontier. Undercurrents of America: even in the age of Camelot, the country is deeply divided
It's in those commonplace moments that Mr. DeLillo reveals his genius. After all, he must have had the same source materials available to anyone else - the Warren Commission report, the usual newspaper articles and court proceedings. But he takes the stale facts and weaves them into something altogether new, largely by means of inventing, with what seems uncanny perception, the interior voice that each character might use to describe his own activities. Here, for instance, is a summary of Jack Ruby's movements just before he killed Oswald - a matter of public record, no doubt, but the passage displays a verve all its own:
''He was running late. If I don't get there in time, it's decreed I wasn't meant to do it. He drove through Dealey Plaza, slightly out of the way, to look at the wreaths again. He talked to [ his dog ] Sheba about was she hungry, did she want her Alpo. He parked in a lot across the street from the Western Union office. He opened the trunk, got out the dog food and a can opener and fixed the dog her meal, which he left on the front seat. He took two thousand dollars out of the moneybag and stuffed it in his pockets because this is how a club owner walks into a room. He put the gun in his right hip pocket. His name was stamped in gold inside his hat.'' At what point exactly does fact drift over into fiction? The book is so seamlessly written that perhaps not even those people who own both upstairs and downstairs copies of the Warren report could say for certain. Oswald's mother, for instance, with her nonstop, plaintive, sometimes unwittingly comic stream of talk, was probably willing to speak to any newsman who poked a microphone in her face; and therefore Mr. DeLillo had merely to transcribe her long-ago monologues. Or did he? Other voices are equally convincing, and yet obviously not all of those could have been taped. ''Jack,'' Jack Ruby's roommate tells him, ''for me to express a facial nature, you know it's hard with words, but I don't think you look so good.'' A young black marine explains his presence in the brig to a cellmate: ''There was a fire to my rack, which they accused me. But in my own mind I could like verbalize it either way. In other way of saying it, the evidence was weak.'' Both of these remarks were uttered in private - not recorded, we have to assume, but created, or at least re-created from hearsay, by a writer with a merciless ear for language.
At its core, Underworld is a meditation on concealment—on the things hidden or pushed out of sight, both literally and metaphorically. DeLillo takes the notion of trash, an object of societal disdain, and elevates it to a central motif in his examination of American life. In this novel, trash is more than refuse; it’s a reflection of who we are as individuals and as a society. What we throw away, ignore, or neglect reveals the underlying structures of our lives—the hierarchy of values we hold, the transience of our existence, and the things we deem unworthy of preservation.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its ability to expose those elements of human experience that often remain in the shadows. DeLillo’s exploration of trash isn’t just about the physical objects we discard. It’s a broader critique of how we treat people, relationships, and even ideas with a similar disregard. The interconnectedness of trash and lives moving through time and space is a recurring theme, reminding us that what society casts aside often holds profound meaning when examined closely.
Underworld is a novel, quite simply, about what was experienced in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. An era shaped by the advent and then cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement. Nuclear proliferation. The withering away and relocation of American manufacturing, and the rise of global capitalism. Jazz. The Cuban missile crisis (through the voice, as DeLillo has it, of Lenny Bruce). Civil rights. The CIA. Bombs on university campuses. Artists on New York rooftops, and around them, the old industrial framework of bygone city life, something aesthetic and exotic, either marvelled at or ignored.
***
Some authors go for sweep, others for sentences, and yet Underworld is both. Sentence by sentence, it may have the highest density of great sentences of all DeLillo’s novels, at two or three times as long as the rest. How did he sustain it? I have no idea, and the how is not for me to wonder. The book exists. It raises the bar on what can be done. Its 827 pages are filled with hell-bent ambition, and yet also a deep reserve of uncommon, even egoless humility: DeLillo never insists, never veers into showy knowledge or egregious or paranoid plot. He merely goes to the horizon-line of his furthest understanding, and plumbs his love of, and respect for, the great mysteries inside us, between us, among us.
Don DeLillo, Underworld(John Pistelli). I never heard of Mr. Pistelli until today, but his essay on Underworld knocked me out. Plenty there to think about besides and beyond the novel itself. And I suggest you read it all. Just go there now. If you balk at following the link, consider the following:
For Underworld is, first of all, in the high tradition of the American novel, which, as umpteenth observers from Nathaniel Hawthorne forward have told us, has never been a novel at all, not a sober realist social survey, but a weird symbolic prose-poem, an inward voyage projected out onto the national landscape. Underworld places itself in this tradition with its first sentence: “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” The first thing to say about this sentence is that it pays tribute to two sentences from the Great American Novels of the early 1950s, the period when Underworld begins: the first sentence of Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (“I am an American, Chicago born”) and the last sentence of Ellison’s Invisible Man (“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”). The second thing to say is that, like a line of poetry, the sentence admits of two readings, with “American” as either a noun, which makes the sentence a direct address to the American reader, or an adjective modifying “voice,” declaring a national origin and destiny for the novel’s style. So this is an American romance, and you have to read it like a poem; and, as in Bellow’s and Ellison’s novels, or Faulkner’s and Melville’s before them, the sensibility and suffering that emerges is less the sojourning protagonists’ and more that of the organizing and presiding consciousness. As in a book of poems or in a long poem, it’s the poet you get to know best, and not for nothing does Underworld, in its final one-word sentence, echo no novel at all but the century’s most famous poem, The Waste Land. “Shantih shantih shantih,” Eliot chants in Sanskrit, which DeLillo puts into plain American: “Peace.”
Hopefully, I have left you with enough reasons to read DeLillo.
sch 10/9
A lecture and interview with DeLillo about Underworld:
I have become more and more convinced that the point (well, the point relevant to me) I missed about DeLillo is finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.
