What hooked me on Pynchon...

[Gary L. Thompson]

Harrison's latest has me almost dispirited enough not to post this. Re 
elitism on the list--as Beckett says, there are many kinds of silences . 
. . mine was the silence of skimming and moving on out of busyness, and I 
am sorry for it now.

But to what I meant to write, along the captioned topic:

As we seem to be doing narratives on How I Came To Love TRP, I thought 
I'd start with an appreciation. One of the things that really grabbed me 
about the novels (_V._, then _49_, then _GR_) was their use of verse, or 
poetry, or song lyrics. (The ambiguity between these is part of the 
point.) I didn't, and still don't, know any writer that drops these bits 
into the narrative as Pynchon does. Some of them comment more or less 
straightforwardly on what's going on (e.g., "The Eyes of a New York 
Woman," or the ditty to the tune of "Cape Cod" that opens _V._, "Old East 
Main." Some are ironic or humorous or parodic (too many examples to 
list). Some offer period detail. Our own time is much poorer for the lack 
of straight-forward musical bits in our films, IMHO--much auditory 
furniture, much irony, but no stepping forward and belting out a big 
number anymore. Tsk.

I remember spending one afternoon circa 1972 in an armchair in Rice's 
Fondren Library, disrupting all in earshot while reading for the first 
time the chapter of _49_ which contains the summary of _The Courier's 
Tragedy_. I was fresh from a course in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and 
recognized the aptness of the "Roadrunner cartoon in blank verse" 
description. (Pynchon still does a mean iambic pentameter.). 

Among other things, Pynchon conveyed to me the message that it's OK to be 
silly even in a deadly serious work. That's a great gift for a college 
student or anyone else to find. But even in apparently silly material 
(e.g., "The Penis He Thought Was His Own" or Major Marvy's song that 
starts out "Oh, thur's Nazis in the woodpiles" [I think--can't find it 
conveniently now]) these things have multiple functions.

My own favorites are from _GR_, which is still the Pynchon I come back 
to, even with the excellences of _M&D_: the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, the 
patter song of the Three-Card Monte guy, the "vulgar song" about the 
lovely little queen of Transylvania, "The Ballad of Tantivy 
Mucker-Maffick" with its wonderful internal rhymes, Frau Gnahb's 
Gilbert'n'Sullivanesque number, and so many others.  I think my favorite 
is the Mittelwerke Express song, with its outrageous naivete and paranoia 
all combined ("All the funny fascists just-a twirlin' their mustaches / 
Where we goin'? Can't you guess?"). 

Something about the use of these songs in _GR_, I think, facilitates the 
movement into and out of characters' states of mind (if that's the 
operative term) and into a kind of public domain ("Haven't we always been 
at the movies?")--when you hear a song, as Mucho Maas reminds us, you 
join an immaterial brotherhood (sisterhood? Doesn't have the same ring if 
you say association or something less familial) of people who've heard 
that song as well, whether it's "Rich, chocolaty goodness" or something 
in a different key. 

And I guess that's what I hope will / can happen with the P-list itself. 
We've read the same words, heard the same songs, with our own tunes 
assigned, and formed our own immaterial and quite temporary association. 
I wouldn't want the differences obscured--in addition to the recent posts 
on gender, other points of dispute should also come up: sexual 
orientation and race and class are also obscured to some extent by the 
list. I'd be willing to bet that this is a pretty "white" list, and 
that's troubling. I suspect that in order to appear here, you have to 
have some investment in education enough to use a computer, which means a 
certain income level and class orientation. So please let's keep as many 
differences as we can find, because there's enough homogenizing going on 
already just through the fact of signing onto this list. Pynchon's a 
starting point--as with any book, he starts us going as readers, and the 
eclecticism of this list shows the amazing possibilities in where we 
(collectively) go. So my vote is this: no moderator, just better touch 
for when your monomania is boring others. And plenty of unofficial but 
sharp-tongued commentators for when people go over the line.

I'd like to hear others' favorites among Pynchon's music or verse or 
whatever we consider it. Or anything else that moves you. I'm out of town 
for a week, so don't assume lack of interest from no reply--


Gary Thompson
Saginaw Valley State University
University Center, MI  48710

"No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."
				--Lily Tomlin