Mindless Pleasures

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

Hi Marshall,

I read your "mindless pleasures" yesterday and couldn't think of a way to 
reply.  Not because I disagree with almost everything you said, but 
because I could barely comprehend your complaints.  Sorry, I have a 
bias.  I wish I could spend more than spare time studying GR.  I'm on my 
second read (the first time was for a SUMMER session course) and it's 
even more fascinating now.

Let me suggests a couple of reasons for studying GR that Andrew didn't 
mention.  It is a great novel, really, in my view, undeniably one of the 
best of the 20th century.  At that, _V._ is still in contention with GR 
for that title, again in my economy.  If autobiography is worth anything, 
I'll tell you what got me.  Because I tried to read GR three times before 
my coursework demanded it of me (I hope TRP never knows that it was they 
system that "made me do it," but then, it is a kind of circular logic 
that guides that imperative.) I just couldn't see it as anything more 
than a tr[i]p.  Until I got to page 37.  This was the moment when I 
realized how carefully Pynchon was working and that his work was to rival 
my until then favorite Dostoevsky's as the best I'd ever known.  If 
you've ever been caught in a rainstorm, say, in a car, fixating on the 
formation of raindrops on the glass, watching them roll across and down 
the pane, using the images to help you drown out the sound of your mother 
lamenting the size of your thighs, or your sisters fighting in the back 
seat, you might think about how fascinating it is that they remain in 
tact.  When I read page 37, I was hooked, here:
	They're bound eastward now, Roger peering over the wheel, 
hunched Dracula-style inside his Burberry, Jessica with bright millions 
of droplets still clinging in soft net to her shoulders and sleeves of 
drab wool.  They want to be together, in bed, at rest, in love, and 
instead it's eastward tonight and south of the Thames to rendezvous with 
a certain high-class vivisectionist before the clock of St. Felix chimes 
one (GR 37).

I don't finish the paragraph because this is what got me.  Then there's 
the most brilliant discussion of DuPont on page 249 that has become my 
favorite, as well (with Pynchon, I have more favorite lines than I could 
reconstruct here.)  But consider this too;  GR itself asks you to ask the 
very questions that frustrate you.  He calls attention to our harmful 
desire to impose meaning, as you say, with a capital "M" on ANYTHING, as 
meaning is elusive at best.  Life cannot be contained within the covers 
of a book.  Meaning cannot be imposed.  It is located only in chance 
encounters.  If anything,  
you should stop looking for it.  it will smack you in the face whether 
youlike it or not.  Sometimes, it strikes you after the encounter that 
announces it (and then, only in fragments.)  The point is to keep on 
living (oops, I suggested "meaning," but it's all theatre anyhow.)  We 
are told:
	He [Slothrop] gets back to the Casino just as big globular 
	raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks
	on the pavement, inviting him to  look down at the bottom of the 
	text of the day, where footnotes will explain all.  He isn't about
	to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of
	sense at day's end.  He just runs. (GR 204)
Unfortunately, as he/we run, They keep advancing their 
technologies/control.  This echoes contemporary Univeristy situations, 
where increasing techologiecal possibilites seem to eclipse human 
concerns.  IN this respect, GR, I believe is a useful anchor text for any 
course, particularly those that problematize writing instruction (my 
field), where computers are standard in the classroom.  Certainly, there 
is a force/counterforce paradox here, as we must teach them to advance in 
their chosen specialized discourses, which calls for human considerations 
of human responses and the cognitive faculties that allow us to remain 
ethically. . . something.  Computers mitigate the whole process and we 
run into a situation like that in _Vineland_, where every 
communication/thought/dream/interaction is peripheral to the larger 
network.  Oh I do go on (anyone who knows me, knows that this is what I 
say when I've got to go do "my" work.)  

Marshall, i hope you don't give up on TRP.  I think that the advice my 
instructor gave was useful---that I should approach GR with a "leap of 
faith" and try not to impose "readings" along the way.  "M" eaning will 
reveal itself to you in various collisions between you and the page.

Bonnie Lenore Surfus