`To Be Moving As Well As to Be Ingenious'

Over the weekend I talked at length with my oldest friend, now a German teacher in Denver. We met as sophomores in high school and roomed together in college. One of our shared enthusiasms – virtually a hobby for non-athletes like us -- was the work of Thomas Pynchon. When we came to know each other Gravity’s Rainbow was still years away but both of us had read V. and The Crying of Lot 49. Mike called to tell me, a little sheepishly, that he hasn’t yet read Against the Day, though it was published almost two years ago. Without sheepishness I told him I hadn’t read it either and didn’t expect to any time soon.

Fortunately, tastes and priorities change. Pynchon is a young person’s writer. By that I mean little life experience – as opposed to intelligence and an elastic sense of humor – is needed to read and appreciate his fiction. In contrast, few teens and young adults are emotionally equipped to comprehend, enjoy and learn from What Maisie Knew and The Ambassadors. Pynchon’s early books happened to coincide with my early reading years. I was ready for him and now I have outgrown him. Pynchon is not a “bad” writer. Mike and I laughed over favorite bits from V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, just as we might have recalled choice skits by Monty Python.

When I reviewed Gravity’s Rainbow for an “underground” magazine 35 years ago, I noted that I had reveled in Pynchon’s “sheer word-walls.” I still have a taste for richly metaphorical prose – in Moby-Dick, for instance, and Gilead – but Pynchon no longer supplies the other qualities I expect of fiction – life knowledge, recognition of moral complexity and seriousness (not the same as the absence of humor). Like much so-called postmodern fiction, Pynchon’s novels ultimately represent an evasion and a cul-de-sac, albeit a sometimes brilliant and amusing cul-de-sac.

On Sunday I started reading The Things that Matter (2006) by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and editor of the poet’s work. Mendelson’s subtitle – What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life – and his core assumptions about literature clarify some of my feelings about Pynchon and how my tastes in fiction have changed. In his introduction Mendelson writes:

“Anyone, I think, who reads a novel for pleasure or instruction takes an interest both in the closed fictional world of that novel and in the ways the book provides models or examples of the kinds of life that a reader might or might not choose to live. Most novels of the past two centuries that are still worth reading were written to respond to both these interests, They were not written to be read objectively or dispassionately, as if by some nonhuman intelligence, and they can be understood most fully if they are interpreted and understood from a personal point of view, not only from historical, thematic, or analytical perspectives. A reader who identifies with the characters in a novel is not reacting in a naïve way that ought to be outgrown or transcended, but is performing one of the central acts of literary understanding.”

Few serious common readers – the truest arbiters of literature – could argue with this, and I’m not certain any non-sociopathic reader experiences a novel “objectively or dispassionately.” Mendelson’s argument grows more provocative and inspired:

“The standard map of modern literature, taught in schools and taken for granted everywhere, places Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce on the highest slopes, with other writers arrayed in lesser and outlying positions. This account is based on the intellectual prejudice, shared by its three heroes , that archetypes are more real than individuals, that myths are more true than observations, that a vision of grand patterns matters more than any attempt to integrate the local particulars of individual lives. Hidden within this account is a deeper prejudice, which is that the shape and complexity of a work is the test of its greatness, that a work of art need not be emotionally moving except to the degree that its structure and patterns inspire inarticulate awe.”

That final sentence sums up the critical/academic championing of Pynchon and many of his postmodern contemporaries. Does anyone find Tyrone Slothrop “emotionally moving?” Isolated moments in Gravity’s Rainbow can be read with feeling, but Pynchon isn’t interested in delineating human characters, and might even deny their existence: Slothrop dissolves and scatters. “Grand patterns” virtually defines Pynchon’s aesthetic – and ruined Joyce’s late work. Mendelson continues:

“Museums and concert halls and anthologies are filled with the unfortunate consequences of this assumption, but that does not make it any less mistaken. When you remember that all the great art of the past seems to have been created to be moving as well as to be ingenious, and that the same measure of greatness can still be applied to modern literature, the map of modern literature begins to look different from the version taught in schools. Virginia Woolf, who understood human life in terms of its changes through time, rather than in terms of permanent archetypal states, takes the central place in modern fiction, as W.H. Auden takes the central place in modern poetry, and Samuel Beckett – far more of a defender of individuality, far more of a moralist, than almost anyone other than his biographers recognizes – takes the central place in modern drama.”

That’s breathtaking, and Mendelson invites us to disagree with his reshuffling of literary Modernism. I can’t abide Woolf’s fiction, and would substitute Proust – or Joyce, whose Ulysses remains unsullied by the inspired botch of Finnegans Wake. Auden’s inclusion is arguable but I wouldn’t argue too hard. Beckett’s place is uncontested. In fact, if he had written more poetry you could make a case for awarding him Mendelson’s Triple Crown. He concludes his introduction by writing:

“And I don’t expect you to agree with everything I say about books, but I hope our disagreements, when they occur, can provide the comforts of both heat and light.”