doktor's pre(in)scriptions

[doktor at primenet.com]

John M. suggests that I was "so swept away by the metaphor
[Col49-as-chamber-piece, suggested by Henry] that [I] start making
completely unjustified extrapolations from it (symphony?)."  Yeah, I
probably was carried away, or well into a third martini or something.  Then
he goes on:

        What possible connection to the question of GR's
        quality can the observation about adding notes have?
        I never dreamed you were accusing GR of verbosity.
        You can't really mean that can you?  One of the
        reasons folks call it sometimes a *prose poem* is
        not because it lacks a coherent narrative, but because
        it sustains an almost inhuman density of language,
        for over 700 pages.  Verbosity is empty language.
        (I'm not sure what *excessive* verbosity might be.)
        I doubt you could show me any chunks of empty
        language in GR. But if you can, please do.

I think the reason some have labeled GR a prose poem _is_ because they
perceive that it lacks a coherent narrative.  Here is a book that presents
an extraordinary number of ideas, images, characters, points of view,
references and snippets of plot.  But where does one find the coherent
narrative?  You have argued that part of the book's power is its ability to
thwart the reader's expectation of cause-and-effect.  Isn't this lack of
cause-and-effect another way of saying that there is not much coherent
plot?

I agree with John's idea about pre(in)scriptions.  Admirably phrased!  (If
Alec McHoul could have come to that point as well as you did, I might have
gotten a lot more out of "Writing Pynchon.")  When I used the word
"iconoclastic" to describe this process, I meant it in its original sense
of pertaining to the smashing of icons--and in this original sense, icons
were a far more serious matter than advertising.  And here we get to what
may be that irreducable conflict between our views of the "greatness" or
GR.  I admire, on an intellectual and quasi-political level, Pynchon's
wholesale disruption of the reader's expectations in GR.  But this
technique doesn't exert any hold over my emotions, so I come away from the
book feeling like my mind has just run a marathon but my emotions have
hardly gotten their running shoes on.  It it this gut-level tug that causes
books to be read hundreds of years after they were written.

Regarding the length of the book, of course I don't think shorter is always
better.  But I wonder: by the time GR was being written, Pynch had
established himself as a writer to be reckoned with.  Did anyone edit GR,
or were his editors so bedazzled by the man's works that they let GR go to
press untouched?  I think the reason so many people start but do not finish
GR is because all that disruption of the reader's expectations and gets
wearisome after, say, 400 pages.  I'm not prepared now to say what I would
have cut...that's another post that I could only write just after
re-reading GR.  (I know this is a wimpy response to your challenge, John.)

BTW, John, you wrote: "GR, like all of P.'s writing, creates much more than
it clasms."  Is that last word a typo, or merely confirmation of my own
ignorance?  And if the former, what was it supposed to be?  Clasps?
Claims?

And now, apropos of god-knows what: I was describing Hemingway's _In Our
Time_ the other day to someone who had not read it, when it occurred to me
that it bears a number of resemblences to GR.  A number of
thematically-linked stories taking place during a war, none of which are
sustained to any great length.  Critiques of the kind of thought that
reduces people in war to the category of "other" for the purpose of killing
and/or dehumanizing them.  A structure that disrupts the reader's
expectations.  A book that raises questions about whether it should be
called a novel at all.  Techniques of organization and presentation that
seem borrowed from film.  Admittedly I have not checked the P-list archive
on this...has anyone made such a connection before?

Sorry for the rambling nature of this post...a busy day looms large and ugly.

--Jimmy

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/Insouciance/index.html