Flatness and Language

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

Bonnie Surfus writes:
"I think I've been misunderstood.  _Pynchon's_ language doesn't
necessarily deteriorate in an iterative fashion starting w/ _V._.
Language, however, particularly 'heartfelt language," poetic language,
has.  I believe that _V._ is far from flat.  Same for GR.  It's in
examining not just the words themselves, but in overall ideological
orientations of various characters and how they interract w/in those
constructs, that we see the decline.  Is this more clear?  Pynchon
himself, his work, is anything but flat."

I think I follow.  P. (to me) seems to be more self-consciously imitative
of other authors in earlier work (reaching its epitome in Chap. 3 of V.), but
carving out something different in later work.  LOT 49, "The Secret
Integration," and "A Journey into the Mind of Watts" are (for me) site of
that struggle for self-definition.  While Slothrop is one in a line of
seemingly entropic (overweight) heroes from Lardass Levine and Meatball
Mulligan through Benny Profane, these earlier characters seem almost
puritan Type As by comparison.

And of course, just as one is beginning to swoon in a (Henry) Jamesian
revery of verbal jouisance (or is that plaisir?), P. pulls out the rug
with a fart joke.  (Perhaps *that's* jouisance!)

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN