What I know of Pynchon's knowing

[Eric Alan Weinstein University Of London Centre For English Studies]

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  Friends, Americanists, Country persons,

      Lend me your ears. I come to tell you what I know of 
Pynchon's knowing. What I know, to misquote the wonderful
 Reginald  Perrin, is that I can not know. (strictly speaking, that 
is.) Yet dear old Reggie did know that fact, thus one-upping all
 others---excepting Frank Kermode, who saw this: Pynchon offers
  a demanding  training ground for the balanced critical mind, and 
also a trap for our critical desires.  

     I infer that Pynchon is (or perhaps let me say has been) one
 of the most self-conscience writers to ever put pen to paper, and
 this his imaginative project demanded.  For Pynchon is a Critic of
 the Critical impulse to colonise the text and gain authority over
 meaning, a task which is both necessary and awful  to perceptive
 consciousness. For the rage to order ( pale Ramon) can at one 
extreme be an urge to control, an urge  which destroys that which
 is best in us. Thus to manipulate structure, implication, and 
possibility in such a way  as  to (as Robert  Lowell says) "leave 
a loophole for the soul," he  must, paradoxically, enable an even 
greater degree of formal order to his work,  albeit in a multiplicious 
and self-contra-distinctual way. (The result: whatever else a World-
Wide Web may be, it is surely a Pynchon narrative.)

     Hence order and freedom, and even chaos, need not always exist
 in opposition. Indeed, the uses of one may implicate the necessity
 of the other (or the Other.)  In the spaces between these forces, we 
recognise (hopefully) the topos of our own lives.  

     I thus leave the intellectual biographies to the dry figs, and  myself 
learn from moment to moment  to temporarily delimit infinity and my own
 desires without  mistaking  the true expanse, both without and within.
 For there remains this romantic impulse in our  post-modern dialectics.

     Endeavouring to spread a bit of joy on the toast of life,

E.A.Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk