Book Log - July 10 - Aug. 26


V. - Thomas Pynchon - Where to start? Pynchon is constantly cited as a reference point for personal hero David Foster Wallace, so I had to plunge in at some point; I read The Crying Of Lot 49 a long time ago because it was the shortest, but didn't retain anything beyond a vague sense of amusement. Vague doesn't even begin to describe this.

V.'s plainest element is its condemnation of the colonial experiment; Pynchon was post-colonialist before it was even a fashionable field of study, but that's the least interesting part of the novel. Straightforward moral condemnation is...praiseworthy and well-integrated into the overall balance of the novel (you thought I was going to condemn earnestness, didn't you? I like to mix it up). Invocations of Israel's instability keep floating in and out — which, if you're anti-Zionist, is arguably the last moral field of occupation and colonialization left — but Pynchon seems vaguely in sympathy with Israel, insofar as one of the most brutal, graphic bits is his excruciatingly detailed account of plastic surgery for a Jewish girl who has her nose redone to be more WASPy. In short: the bluntness of the condemnation is neither uncalled for nor over-the-top, but it's the least interesting element on display. Once you accept that history has buried far more massacres than an unerudite man like myself can remember, and that Pynchon can do it for me, there's not much to say.

What I definitely didn't expect was for large parts of this to be so grounded as to be almost realist. In his evocations of NYC (down to his geographical accuracy regarding the subway lines), Pynchon churns out huge sections that could probably be stitched together to make a Novel of its Time: Down And Out On 81st St. or something. Main protagonist (I use both those words cautiously) Benny Profane is the empty vessel for a considerable portrait of self-sabotaging loserdom, and his friends are an evocation of mid-'50s bohemia in all its smug glory ("The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.").

Chapter 11: "Confessions of Fausto Mijistral." In this chapter - the hardest to read, aside from the Epilogue, by which point I was just burned out - unless I'm vastly mistaken, Pynchon tackles the limits of youthful poetic frenzy, the kind of emotional overwriting that believes, a la Joyce, that it can "[transmute] the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life"; this is wrong, an inadequate response to Life During Wartime (David Byrne knew this too). Fausto berates his youthful self for emotional retreat disguised as rarefied wisdom ("Abstractions even in the midst of bombing") or for creating metaphors ("womb of rock") where none are needed ("What subterranean confessions we wandered into!" he sarcastically appends that with). At least that's the only way I know of to approach this chapter; otherwise it's kind of insufferable.

So yes, I finished V. Don't even think of asking me when I'm going to try Gravity's Rainbow. [Sorry, I had to leave town — and my copy of V. - before I could string together any more disconnected observations.]
(July 10 - 25)

The Name Of The Rose/Postscript To The Name Of The Rose - Umberto Eco - I read this for the first time when I was 14 or 15; at the time, the formidable barrage of references and Latin quotes were a reminder that I wasn't educated, and certainly wasn't going to get there in public school. My dad knew pretty much all of the citations I threw at him, and I aspired to that level of knowledge. I'm 20 now, with 5 years of Latin in me, and know with reasonable certainty that I'll never master this material (it's not my field of study) and, perhaps more importantly, that I'm not meant to, necessarily. Because when I was 14/15, I didn't know about postmodernism, nor that this is filed under that category.

Armed with that knowledge, I picked up a copy of The Key To The Name Of The Rose, the product of three fascinated academics, which, among other things, provides bios for all the namechecked historical figures and translations of all the foreign bits. "Eco," they note, "pointedly refuses to clarify the sources of his quotations and allusions. That task, he feels, belongs to others like us." Where does this leave the million+ who bought it in hardcover in the US, the half-million+ who bought it in Italy, etc. — or, as Eco prefers to label them, "unsophisticated readers"? Wondering why these lost souls fell into his project, he theorizes that "they identified with the innocence of the narrator, and felt exonerated even when they did not understand everything. I gave them back their fear and trembling in the face of sex, unknown languages, difficulties of thought, mysteries of political life...." And so the rude shock of awakening: Eco conflates education with knowledge, unable to conceive of readers who could appreciate his work on his terms without the appropriate frame of reference. All of which I find at least as troublesome as the Barth passage Eco cites in his Postscript which states that postmodernist authors should not even try to reach "the lobotomized mass-media illiterates," but instead "professional devotees of high art." How to reconcile that statement with Eco's interest in semiotics — the study of signs arguably reaches its apex in the hyper-referential mass-media market — beggars my mind.

Oh right: the book. Sorry, I got distracted by "the project." I almost gave up about halfway through re-reading, staggered by the sheer weight of its lists, religious reveries, dream sequences, etc. This is less a novel than a compendium of thoughts regarding an ancient world and everything Eco had absorbed about medieval times and more, uncomfortably stuffed into the framework of a detective novel. My favorite scene from the first reading — the fraternal debate regarding the poverty of Jesus — still stands as fantastic, as do passages I copied down the first time through ("His gaze was really fixed on the accused, and it was a gaze in which hypocritical indulgence (as if to say: Never fear, you are in the hands of a fraternal assembly that can only want your good) mixed with icy irony (as if to say: You do not yet know what your good is, and I will shortly tell you) and merciless severity (as if to say: But in any case I am your judge here, and you are in my power)."). Despite Eco's protestations that all the seemingly modern ideas were in fact extant, or at least nascent, in the 14th-century, I'm less than convinced when, say, William of Baskerville rises to predict representative democracy. Nor am as I fascinated as I was at 14/15 by the intricacies of medieval religious debate; back then, it was kind of a revelation that the world of religion was tied up in something less black-and-white than, say, for and against gay ministers. Now (as if V. wasn't enough) I'm acutely aware that shit, to put it mildly, is always more complex than how it's represented to us. Mostly I'm fascinated by the ephemera on the fringes, as when William and Adso rummage through library texts: "I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of 'ego,' and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons." The stuff that makes a world (rather than its monolithic representation or appropriation, like the "Cadfael" series) is here, with all the feedback and irrelevant background chatter of an Altman film to boot.

Honestly, I have no idea what to make of this fucking thing.

[The "Postscript" also contains one of the best definitions of post-modern I've seen, as follows: "I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same."]
(Aug. 1 - 26)