Non-fan-club post!

[Murthy Yenamandra]

Paul Mackin writes:
> Well, this seems like a perfect place for squaredom to step into the
> discussion--not to criticize Pynch for his misogyny (that wouldn't be
> quite  square enough), but to ask why he finds it necessary to hide
> behind irony and underdetermination.  This would, in my opinion,
> constitute a Vidal-like critique. I DO recall that in his now famous
> "Plastic Fiction" essay, V. remarks on the degree to which certain
> writers put words in quotation marks in order to avoid responsibility
> for their possible literal meanings.

Well now we're getting somewhere. My take on this is that the irony and
ambiguity in Pynchon's books is not in order to avoid responsibility for
the literal meanings (although I agree that this is the case with some
other writers I can think of), but because without some kind of irony
and ambiguity, his novels would turn into long screeds against Them and
have to stocked in the non-fiction aisles. The ambiguity lets us look
into Their mirror and see ourselves.

Here is the biggest difference between an essay and a novel - the
essayist or the journalist is trying to take something obscure and make
it transparent, whereas the novelist is trying to take what we all well
know (or should) and making art out of it. Overdetermination of meaning
is desirable in the first, but not necessarily the second. Novels don't
have to be obscure or unreadable in order to be great, but they need not
be artless as peeled bananas either. Not that artless isn't good, but
it's not necessarily the goal of all novels. Great novels walk that line
between truth and beauty.

I'm afraid this has turned into another fan club type post and I'm sure
I've exceeded my quota for the day :-).

Murthy

-- 
Murthy Yenamandra, Dept of CompSci, U of Minnesota. mailto:yenamand at cs.umn.edu
    "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time can not decay
     I'm junk, but I'm holding up this little wild bouquet
     Democracy is coming to the USA" - Leonard Cohen