GRGR1 - Giant Adenoid

[Craig Clark]

Curt Gardner <gardner at haas.berkeley.edu> writes:

> It has been mentioned already that GR is not the easiest book to dive 
> into, and I think the Adenoid fantasy is probably a point at which the 
> innocent first-time reader may feel that she has gone well over the top 
> into sheer silliness, a particularly male goofiness which Pynchon is 
> able and willing to indulge in at times.  This is not to say that 
> there are not valid references and reasons for the scene, but still...

Interestingly enough, I gave up on my first attempt at GR at the 
Adenoid. I could appreciate what TRP was trying to do, but it became 
apparent at this point that this was going to be a much more 
difficult read than either _Lot 49_ or _V._, with many wild shifts 
between realism and fantasy which would demand a lot of attention 
from me. I was trying to master Henry James' _Wings of the Dove_ 
for English Honours seminar purposes (attending, not giving!) at the
time, so I decided I'd shelve all plans to read _GR_ until a later date.

I'd had to borrow _GR_ from someone because it was still banned in 
South Africa in those days (1984, to be precise - appropriate, come 
to think of it...). So I decided that the best course of action to 
follow was to scout around then and there for a supervisor for a 
Master's degree on TRP's fiction the following year. That meant I 
would be allowed by the apartheid state to import a copy of the novel 
into SA on condition I used it for bona fides academic purposes 
only... A good pretext, and when I did get down to reading GR in 
early 1985 I devoured it within a week. 
 
> Perhaps this remark was prompted by my overhearing a woman at a staging of 
> DeLillo's "The Day Room" express her strong distaste for Thomas Pynchon.  
> To mix in a bit of that low culture, she said that she was all prepared 
> to like David Duchovny, but after reading an interview in which he 
> expressed his interest in "Pynchon and Norman Mailer" it just wasn't 
> possible anymore.  Then again, maybe it's just one woman's opinion.

...maybe it was Mailer she didn't like?
 
> Any thoughts on what makes Pynchon difficult, or difficult to like?

I'd argue that Pynchon's difficulty is two-fold. Firstly, I would 
assume that a substantial number of those who read him do so from the 
background of an education in the Humanities, and while there's a lot 
of nearly every Humanities discipline in TRP, there's also a lot of 
the "hard" sciences. I know I spent a lot of my MA degree just 
reading layperson's books on quantum physics in order to understand 
what _GR_ was all about.

But I think there's a deeper level of difficulty and that resides in 
TRP's textual innovations, which are arguably more radical than those 
of _Ulysses_. I have in mind TRP's complex shifts in narrative 
perspective (about which Andrew Dinn is more articulate than I can 
ever hope to be); his "mixture of writings" which means that a 
paragraph on polymer chemistry could turn into a parody of a bad 
vaudeville routine in a few words; the wild swings in emotional tone 
from howlingly funny to deeply distressing (the best example, I 
think, of this is when Roger and Pig leave the Utgarthaloki banquet - 
it's one of the saddest and yet silliest passages in the history of 
fiction); his treatment of character, in which I believe he focuses 
on the languages/jargons which characters deploy and which therefore 
become their reality... the list is damn near endless, but the point 
is that we're conditioned in fiction not to expect such things. A 
Well-Made Novel, we have been told, has clearly focussed narrative, 
unity of form and tone, and characters with "real" "psychological" 
depth. 

Undoubtedly the history of 20th Century fiction has been about 
breaking down these preconceptions, but TRP takes it further - I 
believe MUCH further - than anyone else. We're not used to reading 
texts that take this form, therefore we find _GR_ difficult.
Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"