LAXNESS and VINELAND

[Mascaro at humnet.ucla.edu]

My first venture into the field here, a-and it's prompted by pique!

Browsing, I discovered that one A. Walser offered this comment a few days 
ago:

	"VINELAND, I think, reads like the first draft of a masterpiece.  
In this sense, it resembles the work of Marge Piercy, whom Pynchon has 
praised (or blurbed, to use the word of the week).  This deliberate 
laxness of style seems to me a mistake, which will make VINELAND date in 
a way that GRAVITY'S RAINBOW does not."


The first sentence, with all due respect, is annoying, snotty and just the 
kind of thing that makes critix out to be fools.  How can one evaluate 
Walser's kind of "critical" "judgement" except to ask the him to remove the 
pipe from his nose and speak English, troop.  It's such a fatuous thing to 
say.

I apologize in advance for the testiness, but c'mon man.  

Spontaneously, let me offer that the "laxness" Walser feels in VINELAND is 
deliberate, and most definitely "opposed" (rather, complementary) to the 
"stiffness" of GR.  After all (here's me opinion, anyway)  GR is a dream 
made real; Vineland is reality made into a dream.  The act of making a dream 
real requires cloaking it in the stuff of reality (and I'm talking about 
this quality of "laxness" or its opposite, not about any particular "content 
in either book); conversely, making reality a dream MIGHT smell like 
"laxity" to some, but to others,it offers just the kind of smoky, drifty, 
half-here-half-not, shadowy translucence of, of, a TV image!  (Now don't go 
new critical on me and start talking about the "Fallacy of Imitative Form," 
not yet anyway)

Let me also posit,tentatively, that this quality of "laxness" (I agree 
there's something slack there, but "lax" is too negative) is connected to 
fractals, which are always about to arrive at some integral dimension, but 
don't.  I'm working with this idea because I thought of the word "fractals" 
as I was trying to keep the plots together (can't get into this here, but 
there's something fractal going on about plot lines, having to do with 
self-similarity especially).  A-and the VERY NEXT PAGE I turned after I had 
this thought contained that word, in the line about "invisible fractals of 
smell" during the last chapter's opening family breakfast.  The timing of 
this intuition and this word's appearance (it felt like a critic's wet 
dream, to have an intuition and have the book on the next page SAY TO YOU 
sort of, hey, that's right) has forged an unassailable belief in me poor 
head, but danged if I know enough about fractals or self-similarity to prove 
it, say, to someone for whom the novel reads like a 17-year long rough draft 
(didn't wanna go w/out stoking my little pique one last time, sorry).


I think that VINELAND is every bit as un-lax as GR; it's just diff'rent, 
s'all.  

John Mascaro
UCLA Writing Programs
Friends of Koopman (F.O.K.)