The Bad Priest

[Andrew Dinn]

Edward Heinemann writes:

> But now that I have your attention...I've just re-read "V." for the
> first time in 4 years, and what strikes me most about the book,
> especially in comparison to GR - the touchstone text for my readings
> of TP - is the *style*, of all things. The writing seems resolutely
> anti-lyrical: sentences are chopped short, easy opportunities for
> high-flown Pynchonesque locutions are foregone, and the diction
> seems intentionally shoddy. Maybe Pynchon merely hadn't developed
> the lyrical abilities he displayed later in GR, but the work
> displays too much control for the style to be accounted for in a
> *negative* way, by any *lack* of ability (and devastatingly lyrical
> passages *do* pop up every 50 or 100 pages, the first one being the
> description of the clock in Schoenmaker's ("beautiful-maker's," I
> just realized) office).

I was just reading a passage in The Recognitions which touched on the
point of style which I include below. I agree with Edward's main point
about the minimal stylistic apparatus. Pynchon seems to use this to
belie and perhaps deny the insidious mysticism and mystery of `V.'
herself. This only serves to highlight her otherness all the more, as
though a scientist were to write about a miracle using neutral,
objective, external observations and consequently completely fail to
express the essence of the miracle. And why? For the sake of encomium,
for reasons of purism, in accordance with the punctilio of disinvolved
observances, rational selectivity sets in. Here's the Gaddis (Penguin
Edition, page 113):

- All right, listen, I have ideas but why should I oppress you with
them? It's your work, and something like writing is very private,
isn't it? How . . . fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate,
but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep
breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and
show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when
something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on.
That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three
four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no
adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they
finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is
the way it is, when really . . . why, what happened when they opened
Mary Stuart's coffin? They found she'd taken two strokes of the blade,
one slashed the nape of the neck and the second one took the head. But
did any of the eye-witness accounts mention two strokes? No . . . it
never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know,
laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the
nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same
magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their
minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on
them, people brought up for reading facts, who know what's going to
come next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and
detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're
embarassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise.
How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man alone in
a boat, changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a
boat, in all this . . . all this . . . Listen, there are so many
delicate fixtures, moving towards you, you'll see. Like a man going
into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear
of a table corner, and . . . Why all this around us is for people who
can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though
nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a
sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the
pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite
the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them
within reach, and others come to by themselves, and they break, and
even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can
bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe
a little more enduring,until you've broken it and picked up the pieces
enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But
the discipline, the detail, it's just . . . sometimes the accumulation
is too much to bear.

Pynchon uses the `one two three four' style, `no adjectives, no long
sentences' as a device, not to make readers believe that `the way they
saw it is the way it is' but to disconcert them by contrasting this
style of telling with the gaps in the plotting, the character's
motivation. He writes explictly to tease `people who can keep their
balance only in the light' by pandering to their need for direct
writing, `clarity', `detail', `no fake mysticism' yet at the same time
failing to play the game properly.

He does not write for those who walk in `a dark toom, holding [their]
hands down guarding [their] parts for fear of a table corner'. As the
reception of `The Recognitions' testifies most readers would not have
braved such an attempt and even if they had their guard would have
been up so the attempt would have failed. For most people `the
accumulation' is indeed `too much to bear'. In fact, Pynchon does in
`V.' what Gaddis eventually resorted to in `JR' which is play the
system, abuse the conventions to lure in the unwary then spring his
real tale from under wraps. This is real subversive literature.


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