Melancholy

[jeff severs]

A plea for help: I just picked up yesterday Max Pensky's _Melancholy
Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning_ and became aware of
melancholy's connections with acedia, which, you'll remember, TRP did a
number on in the Sloth piece from the NYT Book Review. I know there's been
some critical work done arguing for a Benjaminian "influence" on Pynchon
("That Other Sentimental Surrealist," by Wm. Dawers, for example). To this
point my take on Pynchonian mourning has been linked to the desire for a
lost center or clean slate (as in the Argentines and the fenceless map)
that, following Derrida, a lot of recent Pynchon critics (Berube,
Berressem) have identified as the major problem or delusion of characters
in the novel (and readers' desire to limit or center the meanings of GR as
symptomatic of the same sort of nostalgic movement).

I was wondering what fruit there might be in trying to read our friend
Slothrop as a melancholic or mournful figure in a different, more
generative sense -- as someone profoundly sad with the twentieth century,
trying to find some praxis in mourning, unwilling to write off his sadness
with a poststructuralist disdain for "origin myths." In what sense is
melancholy an alternative to entropy (Entropy or Sloth=Tyrone Slothrop)? Or
at least could somebody tell me if there's any grounds for pursuing a
Pynchonian melancholy?

Glad tidings to all,
Jeff