less is more

[Chris Stolz]

	Interesting talk, this, about how much one can actually
stuff into a novel.  To look at this question in Pynchon's case,
one would, I think, want to compare GR with Lot 49.  It seems to
me that whoever advanced the argument that GR was actually on the
"less" side of things was right in a sense-- the novel certainly
refuses to provide all of the information/data/followups which it
hints at and refers to. 

	However, if the point of this text is to send us outside
of it (i.e. it makes suggestions about the world which, like the
CIA responding to media questions, it neither confirms nor
denies) to verify, one must ask why Pynchon employed two radically different
strategies for doing this in Lot 49 and then later in GR.  Lot 49
works brilliantly because its narrator keeps the strident
didactic posturing that mars GR (and ruins Whineland) to an almost
nonexistent minimum.  Where GR's narrator explicitly and
obsessively states and re-states his themes, nowhere in Lot 49 is
there a clue provided by the narrator as to what his work is all
about.  Lot 49 is built around elipsis and the unspoken, while in
GR we get endless reminders about bureaucracy, mythology and
Fascism, induistrial life, simple metaphors about epistemology in
scientific terms (calculus and particle physics and entropic
theory).  GR doesn't really leave much to the imagination--
everything the novel wants to say it says, clear and upfront.
For all its encyclopediac references and vanishing plotlines and
massiveness, this is actually the simplest and most easily
understood Pynchon novel, because the narrator does all the work
for us.

	The critics have few problems with GR, but almost nobody
can say anything half intelligent about Lot 49 or V., which make
much harsher demands on our imaginations and critical capacities.
A look at the Lot 49 criticism is instructive:  critics either
mutter feeble phrases about paranoia and systems, or they wade in
there armed with either Theory (McHoul and Wills) or their theory
(Mendelson), to cite two prominent examples.  The point is that
Lot 49 is a literary artifact which will not be explained away by
its narrators comments, by Theory or by critics who take its own
suggestions at face value.  Where GR accomodates theorists of
every stripe, Lot 49 remains maddeningly enigmatic, and makes a
mockery of most of our attempts to make sense of it.

chris