Mindless Pleasures

[Andrew Dinn]

Marshall Joseph Armintor writes:

> Hi.  This list has had very little going on since I've started subscribing a
> few months ago...so i'll stir things up a bit.

OK, I'll bite (I have just sharpened my teeth on a second complete
reading of V so this might nip but I promise not to reach bone :-).

> i'm currently reading _Gravity's Rainbow_, for the first time, in a graduate
> seminar devoted entirely to TP's novels.  Some of the problems of doing this
> type of thing in a seminar is that 1) some have read it more than once

I know the program set for a literature student in academia is usually
somewhat packed but ask yourself how many of your favourite works you
really appreciated the first time around, as much as you did on repeat
reading, enough that the second reading didn't sort out some things
that you hadn't realised first time. I am sure you have been provided
with a vast armoury of critical techniques for the analysis -
philosophical, sociological, psychological, historical, thematic,
structural, rhetorical, masturbatory (no, extend that to cover
psycho-sexual-pathologic in general), combinatoric, aleatoric, etc etc
etc - by your studies, but there is always the question of which of
these techniques to apply, when to apply them and whether they are
best suited to the understanding of the work in question (a cynic
might ask to any work). And of course in the process of dissecting,
grading, measuring, assessing and finally formalising one's insights
according to these various paradigms of critical appraisal all this
extra formal work might just lead one to overlook something in the
book like, say, what was that film that guy who ate all the mushrooms
went to see or some other such mindless trivia which probably has no
significance to the whole. Of course one can probably get a flavour,
the general drift of the book - but what if it should prove to be a
cornucopia of confections, a turbulent vortex of insight and illusion.
What if, perhaps, there is a lot to it?

> 2) we can't spend all our time on Gravity's Rainbow.  Well, actually, I think
> five weeks is enough time to spend discussing anything that doesn't go into 
> multiple volumes.

As I said...

>  the biggest problem is 3) not only what does this book MEAN (the
> question is a pointless one; you might as well ask what does Moby
> Dick mean) but at what level should this book be read?  I've read a
> bunch of the criticism on GR in Pynchon Notes, especially, and it
> seems that these people don't really do anything else but pynchon -
> he's a cult figure, to be sure.  What I'm really trying to say: what
> perpetuates discussion of _GR_?  Why are people interested in this
> book?  is it because the book presents a satisfactory, crystalline
> Pychonian world-view?

I doubt this because I don't think there is *a* crystalline Pychonian
world-view, even a flawed natural crystal, let alone a perfect
synthetic one. He provides many views into the workings of our world,
some of them more or less convincing and many of them mutually
incompatible. That's not to say that any one of them is *wrong*; wrong
for what? they all have their sphere of utility and validity - and
perhaps that last statement points to one of the real attractions of
Pynchon, his adeptness at displaying the contingency of our most
cherished notions, our mercenary predisposition to construe or, where
necessary, construct facts in accordance with our current personal and
communal fictions.

It's not as if we have any choice in the matter. Oedipa's `shall I
project a world' is self-deluding. What does she think she is doing
already when she asks the question? What's more, she could not project
her own private world, anyway. Her very identity depends upon
participation in a world communally projected. The alternative is not
my world *and* your world, separate choices according to personal whim
but the world *or* no world, sanity and the reality currently in vogue
*or* insanity and personal disintegration (the latter enforced by
drugs and manacles, if necessary). Perhaps you could just slot a brief
perusal of Wittgenstein (in particular his private language arguments
in the Investigations) into your study program to clarify that point -
Pychon did.

> is it the attention and identification with detail?

Realism Schmealism. He's telling a story. Good stories always use (and
only occasionally deliberately contradict) corroborating detail. It
smooths the passage of the invention. Even scientists, those impartial
guardians of the objective, know this.

> Does it hit the reader with some kind of meaning with a capital M?

Depends upon the intelligence of the reader. A bad reader might see
one Meaning. A better one might see several Meanings. A really good
one might detect all sorts of meanings and might even fall for half of
them some of the time. Like you said it's a pointless question.

> Is it just that it's funny?

I think it would be injust of someone not to find it funny. I laughed
at snot souffle etc, but some have been not amused.

> Is it because of its telescopic (and microscopic as well) view of
> the history of brutality in this century?  Is it because it can be
> read endlessly?  Is it because of the ornate and lucid prose?

Yes, yes and... what was that? lucid? Are you serious? I confess that
my liking for Pynchon's prose has been conditioned by an early dousing
in the prose of Sterne, Meredith, Joyce and Nabokov. Pynchon's prose
is a pushover after you have survived them. Lucid I can get elsewhere
when I need it (no, that's not quite true; I haven't yet seen a lucid
account of C++, but I digress).

> Seriously now.  I do like the book (the length is not a problem), by
> the way, but how does one deal with this (like it or not) one of a
> kind work?

Well, you read it several times, taking more than five weeks over it
so that you can think it over in the background whilst reading
something else. Then you read all the other books, `V.' in particular.
Then you read them all again. Then you read the books/authors Pynchon
mentions by name. Then you maybe fill in some background reading in
American (qua US) Lit - Pynchon is a thoroughly American writer and
probably should be viewed as part of a Great American Tradition (and I
mean a pre-1960s tradition here). Then you start reading Pynchon
criticism. Whilst proceeding through this stuff you need to read the
books all over again to stop yourself taking some of the critics too
seriously. All in all you could probably get it over and done with in
four or five years part-time. If you are lucky then you will still be
reading it after 10 years (although there are other fish in the pond
which might merit a few years attention, meanwhiles - Gaddis, for
instance).

And finally, of course, I am obliged to append...

Hope this helps.


Andrew Dinn
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there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all