Steven Douglas Maloney

Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

I am writing this from the lobby of the Palmer House. The hotel is the setting for the MPSA conference. The hotel is also the setting of an early scene of Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day.”. Industrialist Scarsdale Vibe meets Inventer Extrordinaire, Heino Vanderjuice and offers him a massive amount of money to eliminate the usefulness of inventions of colleague Nikola Tesla.
This theme of cancelling out runs through the book as Pynchon’s fictional world spirals towards the cancelling out of humanity – which we call World War I in modern parlance. As I look around the lobby one hundred years after the fictional encounter in Pynchon’s story, I see so many colleagues, and I wonder how much we cancel one another out for money in similar, more subtle ways. I wonder what the proportion is, in terms of new ideas, between what gets built and what gets destroyed.

I am taking the Volokh Conspiracy off of my feed.  This post is the reason.  It is NOT acceptable for a Professor to talk in such casually degrading terms about academic colleagues.  Professor Zywicki’s comments, if they were at a job talk, or at a dissertation defense, or were makng the comment in print during an exam — it would be a disqualifying statement about his fitness to be a professional academic.

For the record, I have taken the course that Professor Zywicki thinks is so baffling, and I can assure you that if the course is baffling to Professor Zywicki, the fault lies not in the course.

Happy Saint Crispin’s day.  Here’s what it means to Kenneth Branagh:

I’m now past where I have read before in Against the Day. Only 900 pages to go. Something I think I have noticed so far. I remember reviews saying that ATD is Pynchon’s “most accessible” book. I think I know why. Pynchon’s usual MO is to tell traditional stories in ways that completely obscure their form so that we may see something substantive that form hides. Pynchon is on to something different here. Rather than disguising form, he is forcing several explicit and distinct storytelling forms to coexist in the same narrative. Even though it is still unusual, the explicit tropes of the forms make it feel more familiar in it’s narrative pattern, and thus, more readable.

I’m on my third attempt at Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.  I have never ventured much past page 100, but I blame my dissertatin on that.  Free of such bonds, I am making a new effort, and I am struck by the role that history and science plays in the novel.  I found this blog post, which goes much deeper into the book than I have, but it seems to be thinking the same sort of thoughts.  Critics accuse Pynchon’s characters of being flat, and his books to full of trivial references that make his writing more a game than a novel… I think that so far, Against the Day is a fine answer to such complaints.

History IS a character for Pynchon, and his novels are about people who live in worlds that are so clearly larger than they can possibly understand.  Antigone is about “being human amongst humans” and zooms into these very personal tragic stories.  Pynchon never really zooms in.  The omnipresence of light, history, culture, the vast, spectacular, incomprehensible universe pervade his stories.  In The Crying of Lot 49, it is the dulling of our awareness of these things that generates the great anxiety of the novel.  In as much as I have read in Against the Day, the chracters inhabit that which is missing from Lot 49.  Pynchon — in his numerous referneces to real life works of art, scientific discoveries, historical figures, the world’s fair, random storytelling genres — is his own Tristero in this novel.  I really enjoyed this passage on Aether from an early part of the novel (page 58 in hardcover).

the Aether has always been a religious question.  Some don’t believe in it, some do, neither will convince the other, it’s all faith at the moment. Lord Salisbury said it was only a noun for the verb ‘to undulate.’ Sir Oliver Lodge defined it as ‘one continuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate light… be sheared into positive and negative electricity,’ and so on in a lengthy list, almost like the Apostle’s Creed…

…Mr. Rideout, we wander at the present moment through a sort of vorticalist twighlight, holding up the lantern of the Maxwell Field Equations and squinting to find our way.

All of this in the response to whether all the arguing over Aether was in any way important.  But it also made me think of Steve Kroft’s questions on 60 Minutes as to whether the Large Hadron Collider is worth the money and attention.

I have not yet read Blindness by Jose Saramango, nor have I seen the film.  But I am pretty sure that the protest I read about in The New York Times about the depiction of the blind misses the point of the stories imagery.  I would like to read the book (all the talk of Nobel Laureates, I suppose).  Who’s read it?  Without giving anything away, is it any good?

Yesterday I posted about the drought of the United States in the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The comment by Skates raises an interesting follow up:  If we take Pynchon off the table, and we take Toni Morrison off the table (for already winning) – what is the most important literary work of the last twenty years written by an American?  I really have no idea.  I confess that I do not get the appeal of Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and Joce Carol Oates.  Though I think them all fantastic essayists, and Oates is one of my favorite reads in the New York Review of Books. Don Dellilo’s White Noise and Mao II are masterpieces, but I think the rest of his work is not of the same standard.  I like Sandra Cisneros, but Nobel Prize good?  Unclear.  Who would you say if not Pynchon?  I’m interested in comments and suggeted reading.

I think it may be possible that the best fiction writing is quite possibly coming from people too young to win the award for decades still.

The biggest non-surprise story of the day: Americans were again shut out of the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Since Mr. Engdahl, the permanent Secretary for the Nobel Comittee went on a tirade against American fiction, it is no surprise that we are quickly approaching two decades since an American was honored (Toni Morrison, in 1993).  I was a sophomore in high school when Morrison won, and I remember that it was a big deal when she won it, particularly in my high school English Department.   It is not unusual for so much time to pass between American writers being recognized, it’s a big world and the committee rightly makes an effort to recognize global literary accomplishment.  But to say that American authors are “too insular” to be considered seriously is, in itself, a very anti-cosmopolitan position.

PS – I do have to wonder if they would give it to Thomas Pynchon if they thought he would show up.

While many of the great writers and thinkers of the middle twentieth-century defended the Soviet Union, or gazed upon it with hope, one of the most important figures who effectively killed all of that type of talking once and for all was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn’s stories, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, gave Western audiences a clear look behind the so-called “iron curtain,” ending any speculation that USSR was a regime that any reasonable person could possibly endorse. He was, as Christohper Hitchens once said of George Orwell, a poweful writer because he “had the courage to tell the truth.” Solzhenitsyn passed away over the weekend. I have on occassion explained to classes of mine who have never heard of him who he was and why I think it i important that we rememebr him. Solzhenitsyn is a symbol of the importance of telling the truth in dark times, and in the power of language in its ability to reach people. I hope one day to have a way to wedge him into my teaching for years in the future. Many criticize the idea of their being a literary canon and worry about its flaws – but I hope that in on hundred years there is such thing as a literary canon – and I hope very much that Denisov, The First Circle, and Gulag are in that canon, still being read by future generations of young Americans.

Rest in Peace

“In America there are no boundaries, only mazes.  No one knows how to draw them, though they are indeed drawn, whether randomly or conspiratorially into binary systems of mutual exclusion or permissive inclusion that deflates all differences and distinction.  Here no one seems sure of the border between fact and fiction, animate and inanimate, the projected and the perceived.”

-Peter Euben on Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49  (in The Tragedy of Political Theory)