The Lost Treasure
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING The Lost Treasure By Raymond Rosenthal Cute Gothic would be a mild, good-humored way of describing Thomas Pynchon's literary manner. Certain critics have compared him to S....
...Dying America wants a thirteen-year-old Abishag to warm its bed...
...Pynchon, to use his own argot, is hung up ideologically and can't openly admit that he likes some of the things he execrates...
...And D. H. Lawrence sketched the selfsame program: "It is not your brain that you must trust to, nor your will-but to that fundamental pathetic faculty for receiving the hidden waves that come from the depths of life, and for transferring them to the unreceptive world.' Henry Green, too, though less concerned with the prophetic stance than with the pulse of life as it expressed itself through the nerves of syntax, put it memorably: "Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can go...
...Down with genital imperalism...
...He manages it himself every once in a while, in the miraculous escapes from his own generational strait-jacket...
...His night's walk away into that vast sink of primal blood the Pacific" is his arch way of describing suicide, thus ineptly combing the literary lore of the seminar and an overfamiliar movie fade-out...
...Oedipa Mass, should find the secret password to an underground American existence in an "ill Jacobean Revenge play," since Pynchon is really looking for the lost treasure of immediacy and verve that modernism bequeathed him and a generation of phoney literary scholars have contrived to mislay...
...You can't beat the electronic age at its own game...
...In his Beautiful Losers (Viking, 243 pp., $5.75) he writes almost as gorgeously as D'Annunzio, and in fact is pretty much the same sort of spellbinder...
...All flesh can come...
...America, Oedipa, "the drunks, bums, pedestrians, pederasts, and hookers" may be caught in the "cold and sweatless meathooks of a psychosis," but Pynchon is in a much worse spot-he is entangled in a boring footnote to real literature...
...one can only surmise them...
...He has a touch of talent, every once in a while an energetic phrase leaps out of the over-styled gibberish-"the greenish dead eye of the TV tube"-but on his chosen path he can never find what he himself describes as, that "alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie...
...The truth is that he does not know...
...Pynchon is trying to be funny and most often stumbles into bathos...
...Yet, through the cracks of ideology a flash of lived life so'mehow spurts forth: "I am always startled when a pay phone rings...
...it is simply a capitulation to the situation as it is, disguised paradoxically as an attack on that situation...
...The saving of this novel is that Cohen is better than the madness-and-desperate-sex ideology on which he hangs his plot and metaphors...
...An orator with an orotund, often slick delivery, he has the usual shopworn apocalyptic message to deliver...
...1 have fallen, by a process of contagion, into Pynchon's most prized accent and style...
...Certain critics have compared him to S. J. Perelman, Joyce and Djuna Barnes...
...What Bellow also leaves out is perhaps even more important...
...The main line of modern literary tradition was formulated by Ford Madox Ford when he said that the novelist's chief aim was "above all, to make you see...
...The rags and tatters of a thousand dead movies are looted for his dialogue and characters...
...Leonard Cohen is, in terms of sheer talent, vastly superior to Pynchon...
...Parody, to come off, must tread the narrow line of attraction and repulsion...
...Saddled almost ludicrously with every cliché of modernism taught in the graduate seminars, his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (Lippincott, 183 pp., $3.95), is a kind of working model of all that is wrong with the contemporary novel when it has been filtered through the gauze of fashion and fashionable ideas...
...When Saul Bellow spoke about "a conventional unearned bitterness, a bitterness about experience which is mere fashion," he was referring with deadly accuracy to writers of the Pynchon persuasion...
...Do they cry over them...
...S. J. Perelman is funny and elegant...
...No characters, no emotions, no plot, no styleit is all too understandable that his heroine, appropriately named Mrs...
...The tones are strident and imperative...
...Draw tears out of the stone...
...Nevertheless, he has an eye for fact that even his preconceptions cannot entirely smother: "Her kisses were loose, somehow unspecific, as if her mouth couldn't choose where to stay...
...It doesn't work, at least in the S. J. Perelman manner, since we can too clearly discern his indulgent pleasure in the purple phrase -"that vast sink of primal blood...
...Perelman was never guilty of that kind of sentimentality...
...Absurdity is a literary subject for Pynchon, not the meat and drink it is for real comedians...
...All parts of the body are erotogenic...
...Throughout this novel Cohen is haranguing us at the top of his lungs, preaching, exhorting, cursing, pleading, and yet he has only a feeble grasp on what he wants to tell us to do...
...But Pynchon's solution, among the many that are available, is no solution at all...
...Of course, I must admit that writers like Green and Joyce have made the writing of fiction very difficult for those who come after them...
...He has a thesis, a sort of ideological plot, and a complete lack of interest in sensuous experience or actual, living human beings...
...what started out so brilliantly winds up weakly...
...Cohen's call is for magic, God, a break with routine...
...They aye life in a sense, and Pynchon's parody is always being undermined by his own cloying love for the things he has been taught and pretends to detest...
...after all, they have more power and life for writers like Pynchon...
...like a character in D'Annunzio they are pawns of his passion for highflown, extravagant, passionate speech...
...Do people laugh at Pynchon's spavined jokes...
...His prose is a mixture of up-to-date slang, television jargon and the learned chatter of the graduate schools -a perfectly neutral substance that shouts from the housetops and blares from every street corner...
...Does anyone, besides those who like myself do it for professional reasons, ever manage to get through all these licked, finicky, rather dumb and utterly dead pages...
...Reality, those feelings obliquely expressed, is continually bursting through the mask of complacent avant-gardism-"the light like holes in dead floating minnows, and one had the sensation that all the toilets were blocked shadows striped the dirty walls like a wild chalk eraser on a black board...
...There is more of a resemblance to the early, mannered Truman Capote and his many imitators, particularly in Pynchon's snide, rather shallow assault on the diseased and distorted aspects of American life...
...The parable he is telling has been told before by better, finer hands...
...He is really an orator, and he has an orator's practical purpose: He wants to move us to some immediate action...
...Men who shave want little girls to ravish but sell them high heels instead"-about mechanical sex, about politics that turns into sex, about poetry that damps down in sex...
...It is a shame that Croce is not one of the favorites in the going literary seminars, for Pynchon might have been spared a great deal of ornate prose and might even have tried to write a real novel instead of the murky tract he has turned out here...
...In this unequal contest, whatever art Pynchon attempts is bound to lose...
...His elegance is superimposed on essentially commonplace matter-"'Mucho, baby,' she cried in an access of helplessness"-while the unflagging cuteness of his approach to experience only sets one's teeth on edge...
...Pynchon has decided beforehand that the stone is so congealed with alienation that tears cannot possibly be drawn from it...
...It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone...
...Another search for authenticity and experience, strangely akin to Pynchon's, but here carried out with much more vigor and crazy ebullience...
...If he did, a little lived life might have intruded its irreverent scrawl in his neat pages...
...It slipped over my body like a novice on roller skates.' There are four characters in his novel: himself, his scholarly friend who died horribly of syphilis, his Indian bride Edith who, after submitting to all of his outrageous sexual demands, commits suicide by letting their apartment elevator crush her, and the central, mysterious figure of an Indian woman saint whom the protagonist is busy tracking down in the pages of musty volumes...
...But you never see any of the characters as people free of the surrounding rhetoric...
...Sex will deliver us from banality and evil...
...There is a lot of talk about history and its frightful dominion...
...The unabated brutality he depicts bespeaks untold universes of hidden sentiment and sentimentality, but Cohen is a careful fellow and never shows the underside of his emotions...
...Set-pieces of corruscating élan about advertising-"Madison Avenue is thronged with humming birds who want to drink from those barely haired crevices...
...The movies, in fact, always win over the seminar...
...They are all members in good standing of the Established Literary Church of Doom and Despair, and although they are ready to criticize and interpret all of American life in the most violently damaging terms, the last thing that occurs to them to do is criticize and interpret the presuppositions on which their own literary practice rests...
...It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet, like King Michael saying goodbye to Communist Romania, like a message in a floating bottle As one will observe, Cohen's freeswinging rhetoric weakens even in that single sentence...
...If he had read his Joyce and Henry Green with a trifle more discernment that would have been the first lesson he would have learned...
...As Croce has explained, oratory is an art too, but it should never be confused with truly free esthetic expression...
...His sex, however, is carefully bisected and bisexual and in that lamentable state nobody seems to have much fun at it...
...Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known...
Vol. 49 • May 1966 • No. 11
