PYNCHON IN PULSE

[jporter]

Steely continues his milling:

>For that dreadful preservationist Steely--out here in the gray fogs of
>coastal Oregon, where Newt and President McMuffin have conspired to restart
>clearcutting of our few remaining 1,000-year-old trees--to be accused by
>Jody Porter of cleaving into a "sacred wood" is, well, if not sacrilegious
>at least comical. In my view, Vineland never lived up to the promise of its
>chilling cover.

I always try for the comical, Steely- glad you caught that. But of course,
Ralph Wayvone is the true master.

>JP asserts that "Vineland is the work of a much more mature author
>than the author of GR, and certainly of V."
>
>Of course, some might argue that "much more mature" ain't that far from
>"overmature," or senascent, as if Brennschluss had already occurred (and
>we--the faithful, unwavering readers--are left to scream, Brennschulss? no
>it can't be this soon, can it?)

But you just noticed? American Culture began an inevitable decline after
the publication of GR, with GR representing a transitional work at the
peak, and probably uniquely dependent on the work of Gaddis (and everything
else) which preceded it. In that sense, GR is the apogee of one culture's
passage. GR feels "self-conscious" of its position there, and seems
"self-aware" that it was helping to effect the end of the "polyphonic
freedom" of the many cultural threads which theretofore had been fugally
streaming until the "power loom" of TRP brought them together into the
fabric of GR.

If GR was an apogee, then one can speculate on when "brennschluss,"
somewhere earlier in the culture's ascent, actually occurred. Accepting
some of the usual Pynchonian guidepost's- and opinions are sure to differ
on exactly when the culture "ran out of steam," or at least began to
sputter- but the fin de siecle, haunted by the spirit of Henry Adams, feels
about right. I.e., there was continued ascent, but it was purely ballistic.

>Jody sez Pynchon no longer needs to prove he can write the "great novel."
>
>Obviously, Pynchon has no need to prove he can write a great novel. He's
>already written three of them. And if he can submit crap like Vineland,
>reap huge advances, have it land on the bestseller list (of all places), so
>much the better for him. Hell, he deserves that and more. But do you really
>believe that if you or me or even somebody like, say, the neglected Steve
>Erickson or the awesome Tom Maddox (though Maddox--who seems to labor along
>at Pynchonian speed--would never turn loose for public scrutiny anything as
>sloppily written as Vl) had packaged Vineland up in a grocery bag and sent
>it off by private courier to Little Brown, they'd've bought it?

You, me, Maddox, Erickson, etc., are not the point. Only Pychon could have
written VL, and only after having written V., L49 and GR. To fully
appreciate VL, you've got to consider it as part of a body of work. VL is
not in competition with, but in addition to those books.

>Certainly it [VL] doesn't display the sophisticated political analysis you find
>in Robert Stone (A Flag
>for Sunrise), anything by Ward Just, Jayne Anne Phillips, Margaret
>Atwood, Carlos Fuentes (who, I've come to believe, is TRP's near equal, I
>mean check out a Change of Skin or Terra Nostra), John LeCarre, or even
>Rushdie himself, whose incredible The Moor's Last Sigh has received nary a
>mention on this list--passed over, I guess, in favor of all the hype about
>that awful pretender DF Wallace.
>


Give Wallace a break. He wants to live on Olympus with TRP, Gaddis, or
whomever. TRP is already there, and when VL was written, TRP knew he was
there. He is clearly well acquainted with the works of all the people you
mentioned, and probably everyone else. Did he need to repeat, reiterate and
echo what others were more than capable of saying? No, he needed to be TRP.
And given the three works preceeding VL, and how far they had moved the
game along, that was no easy task.

>Maybe its all about fractals, afterall.
>
>Steely

VL is a direct descendant of L49. The gang: Mucho, the Paranoids, the
Californian ambience are all there (where's Oedipa, you say?  Hey, where's
TRP?- hovering?). But where L49 represents the brutal subversion of meaning
by structure, VL denies the supremacy of form/structure- Vond, his small
but erect penis, even his skeleton, etc.- and liberates function/meaning,
allowing those lovely fractals, self-similar across (the universe?) scales,
ethnic divides, sexes, fenestrations, classes, etc., to take shape.

Jody Porter