dust jackets

[Chris Stolz]

whoever asked the blurbs question raised a super-interesting
issue!

	My take on this:  Pynchon's blurb voice is the voice of
one of his narrators (or, one of the tones his narrator uses).  I
don't see much change in this blurb-voice over the years.  I
think, to respond to the question about the apparent distance
between the blurb voice and the more "serious" narrative tones
which appear in the novels, that this is largely a function of
context.  Pynchon, if you think about it, is a super blurb
writer, who compresses into a few sentences with his metaphors
genuine insight.  He realises (I think) that the aim of a blurb is to
make people comfortable with a book and to offer a glimpse into
it (as well as to sell a few copies of it).

	Another thing:  I would hazard a guess that Pynchon's
very erstwhile and folksy tone in these blurbs (and in the
sickly-sweet and nauseating _Whineland_) is a function of his,
uhhh, invisibility in public life.  The man is our profoundest
moralist, isn't he, but he lacks the moralist's platform.  These
blurbs are a way for him to push his ideas-- his fictional
techniques at their finest (_Lot 49_, _V._) are notoriously
eliptical and indirect when it comes to moral issues, and I think
that blurbs allow him to speak as an advocate of a position more
directly than his fiction allows him to.

	BTW, it's also interesting to consiuder the differences
in tone between his serious journalism (The Watts essay and his
review of the Garcia-Marquez novel) and the blurbs.  He's much
more his writerly self with these two pieces than in his blurbs.

	Finally, what y'all think o' this?--> I find in his
blurbs a desparate tone.  _GR_ was written just before Sixties
politics began to freeze and before a hemisphere-wide right-wing
resurgence began (Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, the U.S.,
Salvador, Somoza's antics in Nicaragua, Peru, the failure of
reformism in mexico post '68, the decaying welfare politics and
resurgence of the Rightin Britain, the post 68 failures in
France, etc.).  _GR_ is
just enough onside with classic '60s politics and just cynical
enough (by the end, we get Zhlubb and nuclear missiles) that P.
seems to have anticipated that things could go either way (or
both, but with one side of the binary heavier, as always, than
the other) in his book.  I hazard a guess that the blurbs bespeak
a man shocked at the extent of the failure of one of the few
really radical decades in U.S. history.

chris