Less is More...

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

Chris writes:

> 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.

I don't think this is true.  I haven't got a copy of Lot 49 in front of me, 
but the late pages where Oedipa is staggering thru the San Narciso night, 
seeing maps flashing in the sky, tracks running into others, and finally 
holds the wino on the mattress in her arms and sketches out, in her 
imagination, her possibilities of (middle-class, Californian) action, and 
realises she can/will do nothing, these are the scenes where the clues to 
"what [Lot49] is all about" are provided.

In my reading of Pynchon's work, Lot49 is a Journey Into The Mind Of 
America, and absolutely a fictional companion to the Watts piece.  So for 
me, the reason he has voiced doubts about Lot 49 is because these San 
Narciso passages are actually inferior to just about every comparable piece 
in Gravity's Rainbow.

And I absolutely concur with Ron's comments that, in GR, "the prose is often 
hauntingly beautiful and the radical and dizzying rapid-shifting of 
point-of-view and temporal sequence are marvelous to behold.  As a reader. I 
feel I'm always scrambling to keep up and am often left sitting in the dust 
going "wha?""  There is almost none of this in Lot49.

Kermode seems to love Lot 49 because it can be read as a Borgesian exercise; 
he's welcome to do so, but don't expect us all to trudge dutifully behind...

jan


PS Just to pick another fight, I have problems with Kermode's reading of 
Borges too; for me, the pleasure of Borges is in the perfect structures and 
the vertiginous swoops that reading the ficciones produces...  And when I 
read Kafka, I read him thru perspectives opened for me by Borges.