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Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Literature in the News & Abstractalous
[Hat tip: Google Alerts.]
Thanks to the passage of time, terrorism is now an acceptable novelistic subject. Just don’t make it Middle Eastern terrorism, because according to Brad Thor, “We’re getting Islamic terrorist fatigue.”
Harper Lee, 80, returns to the public eye old: “[In] an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.”
Film novelization is a dying art, and that’s a shame, because “Quadrophenia [was] surprisingly good.”
Realism must embrace fundamentalism or risk losing its license.
The remains Sophia, Nathaniel and Una Hawthorne all repose now in Concord. “It’s very emotional,” explains Imogen Howe, “They know now in spirit that everyone is reunited.” Being dead, Sophia, Nathaniel and Una were unavailable for comment.
Few in Macondo Aracataca care about Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Or they’re unpersuaded that a town he hasn’t visited in 20 years can bank on his name.
Finally, the announcement of my new project, an attempt to create an abstract database for literary scholars.
Comments
Someone might tell Theo Hobson that a good deal of American “postmodern” and “ethnic” fiction is all about religious awakening. From Pynchon’s *Vineland*, which is really a series of William-James-framed religious experiences to DeLillo’s late capitalist sublime to Toni Morrison’s and Ishmael Reed’s adaptations of black folk religion to Leslie Silko’s racist indian awakenings to Barry Gifford’s investigation into the relationship between religious awakening and violence to Marilyn Robinson’s so-unpostmodern-that-it’s-gotta-be-postmodern novels, it’s all religion all the time. (See John McClure’s articles on postmodernism and postsecularism from a decade ago.)
I myself could do with a little less religion in my fiction.
Scott, I like my databases as concrete as possible!
But Rodney, bits are physically embodied! They come pre-concretized, now.
LB, I found that article a little off, too, but enough about that. I want you to flesh out your description of Vineland as “a series of William-James-framed religious experiences.” (No obligation, I just found the intriguing but can’t connect-the-dots myself.)
Scott, my comment about *Vineland* should be attributed to John McClure, who framed the novel in these terms when I took a graduate seminar with him at Rutgers back in 1999. Each of the characters undergoes a quasi-religious conversion:
The Wayvonne family from mobsters to executives
Billy Barf and the Barftones from metal band to Italian wedding band (with the help of Deleuze and Guattari’s Italian Wedding Fakebook)
The Kunoichi retreat turns from monastic order to tourist resort
Hector from DEA agent to addict
Moody Chastain turns from rounder to MP
DL Chastain turns from rounder to ninjette (to activist)
Mucho Maas transforms from Count Drugula to “on the Natch”
Zoyd himself transforms from wastoid to family man
Frenesi transforms from activist to informant
Takeshi transforms from insurance investigator to karmic claim adjustor
I don’t remember the details of William James’ *The Varieties of Religious Experience*, but McClure showed how many of these transformations of self follow the patterns laid out by James. I recall that James discusses two types of conversion, voluntary and unconscious, and how the former type is often sudden and creates a total breech between past identity and future identity. McClure also discussed how political consciousness raising in the novel is itself represented as a type of conversion narrative.
I’d add to McClure’s discussion that many, if not all, of the novel’s conversions reveal Pynchon’s belief that we secretly desire what we define ourselves against. Sasha and Frenesi uncontrollably desire men in uniforms; Zoyd secretly desires square life; Hector secretly desires freak life. Young Moody Chastain secretly desires authority (as does Prairie at the novel’s end, when she longs to be abducted by Brock), while Brock desires rebels.
And what do all those conversions have in common?
None of them end with belief in God.
Which would kind of prove Hobson’s point, wouldn’t it?
Actually, “prefer not to say,” (if that is your real name), DL, Takeshi, and Zoyd all end with a belief in karma and cosmic justice that is probably akin to many Americans’ sense of the divine. The problem with Hobson is that his limits his sense of what belief is to something very orthodox. *Vineland* deals with religious issues, even if the characters don’t go to church or pray at their bedsides.