Trying Crying

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu writes:

> Andrew's interesting take on the flaws of CL49 prompts some further
> thoughts.

   . . .

Good. I'm not really convinced by what I wrote, much as I am convinced
that TCOL49 is not a patch on GR.

>  I'd like to try to defend it against some of those charges. Andrews
> objections seem to boil down to a lack of *development* in the
> novel.  He tells us it is programmed, cartoony, and obvious.  My
> premisses differ somewhat from Andrew's, and probably account for
> some of the different value judgments we lay upon CL49's ravelled
> tresses.  First of all, we seem to agree that CL49 stands somehow
> apart from the axis which kabobs the other three novels.  I think
> that is because, strictly speaking, it's not a novel, but a novella,
> or a long short story.  It is well known that CL49 was marketed as a
> novel by its publish er (Lippincott?) for the economic purposes, but
> it was originally published as a long short story.  So we can't
> expect the same development of character as we can justly demand
> from a novel.  There are lots of magnificent novellas (a creaky term
> to be sure), Billy Budd, for example, where one could easily
> criticize its 2D characters, but we realize it's not to the point.

I'm not sure your premises are so different. Perhaps you have
misunderstood some of my conclusions. Yes, TCOL49 is a novella and
that accounts for much of the difference. That is the root of most of
my arguments. And actually, I would place it *and* Vineland separate
from V and V2 (yes, I *do* think of GR as V2 and hope M&D will be a V3
rather than another Vineland). TCOL49 is in part a pastiche, of the
detective story. This already sets it well apart from V and GR which
are `serious novels', by which I identify not the matter they address
but that they set out to address this matter in a particular style and
at a particular length.  TCOL49 is not yer average short story but it
is quite deliberately a far less ambitious piece than GR. Of course we
can't expect the same development of such a work and look, it isn't
there. But then was that not my point? Given its scale Pynchon does an
admirable job of this short novel but that doesn't stop it being
junior league by comparison with GR.

> Rather than applying idiosyncratic criteria, such as how much
>  *poetry* or how many *epiphanies*, etc. we can count--all too
>  subjective, IMO, I think it's better to conceive of > the work as a
>  whole.  What is it?  I've already played with the conceit that CL49
>  is a book > about how to read a Thomas Pynchon book.  Its
>  compression, which I agree is one of its > clearest features, comes
>  from this orientation towards his other fiction.We might want to
>  see it as a kind of-- allegory--of Pynchon's fiction.  If we do,
>  then its compression seems > appropriate to the genre, and its
>  *cartoony* characters seem exactly the right type for an >
>  allegory.

I don't think I suggested that the effect in GR was a mere one of
numbers - I don;t normally read by numbers. It's the depth of insight,
the neatness and subtlety of expression which count. GR is a fugue
where the same themes keep rising up out of the music, appearing in
strangled and permuted variations, underpinning as counterpoint in
retrograde or inversion - it's The Art of Fugue to TCOL49's
Brandenburg Concerto.

I am not totally switched off by your attempt to see TCOL49 as an
allegory for reading Pynchon but I don't find it very appealing.  It
encourages the idea that Pynchon's writing is all about uncertainty,
and excluded middles. Well, I don't think so. Or rather I think
Pynchon strives to show the falseness of such a binary model. Whereas
harping on about unknowns in binary systems is actually to grant
credence to the notions of right and wrong, true and false etc whose
network of oppositions enables the indeterminate to slip between the
cracks. Remove the network of opposing concepts and the unknowns have
nothing to disappear into. They don't go away but they stop looking so
mysterious (the edge effects which occur at the boundaries between
true and false, right and wrong etc are just that, a moire pattern
caused by the intereference which occurs at the join point when two
independently determined concepts are butted together on the
assumption that one is a negative reflection of the other - and for
those who know, you can understand LudWit's comments on double
negation in the light of this image, establishing the truth of a
proposition and the falsity of its negation are different activities
achieved by different means, equating them or even putting them in the
same ball park is to conflate outcomes with process - one might
equally say to conflate judgements with judgement or even Phosphorous
with Hesperus).

To assume (as one does if one takes TCOL49 as one's guide) that
reading Pynchon's work will leave one reeling at it's ambiguity and
indeterminacy doesn't sound like my kind of Pynchon. The man knows
what to call a spade and lets you know too. The fact that he digresses
for 20 pages on what else you could call it, what mistakes people have
made in both naming and delving, what perverse uses one could make of
a spade etc etc is neither here nor there. Ambiguity is just an
epiphenomenon of all that secular history.

> Another genre we might usefully compare CL49 to is the fairy tale, a
> la, ALICE IN WONDERLAND--another work to which it bears great
> resemblence.  We would hardly find cause to criticize ALICE for lack
> of character development, though one could argue, I guess, that its
> poetry is superior.  In such a work as ALICE or CL49 the idea of
> *epiphany* it seems to me, is diffused throughout the strange logic
> which orders the world behind the looking glass.  It is an epiphany
> of the modes by which we construct messages, draw conclusions, seek
> ontological stability, and the epiphany involves how fragile those
> modes are, in both books.

Yes, and in TCOL49 the epiphany diffused throughout the book is
Oedipa's epiphany, her slow awakening to the fact that the world she
lives in is a nightmare (and thereby ours and perhaps also Pynchon's
own epiphany - slow learner that he is did he diss the book because it
was too naive, did not show enough political savvy, gave too
simplistic a picture of his country and its flaws).

You are right, there is character development in TCOL49, Oedipa's
character develops. But this does not answer my criticism since I did
not claim that GR had superior character development, rather that
undeveloped as they are the characters have the appearance time and
enough liberty from the strictures of plot to be presented in
situations where they can reveal a host of complex responses. The only
character in TCOL49 to whom this really applies is Oedipa. What can
one say about Mucho, Nefastis etc as characters?  Where do their
actions reveal much about how people deal with their world, their
lives and their deaths. GR repeatedly shows characters in extremis
(not necessarily extreme situations but situations where their psychic
fabric is stretched, crumpled, torn or rotted) and their reactions in
these situations are full of insight into human nature in all its
panoply and variety.

> Another wrinkle on the epiphany is that even in the terms Andrew
>  discusses it, I think Oedipaa clearly has one in her encounter with
>  old Mr. Thoth, in a scene which IMO specifically comments on the
>  work's central epiphany concerning metaphor.

Well, again your answer bypassed my line, which was that the reader's
epiphanies are the important ones. Doesn't matter at all what Oedipa
realises so long as we see (or rather are shown, taken to water
whether or not we drink) something about what is going on. But anyway,
let's consider Oedipa's emerging recognition. Where does Oedipa's
drawn-out epiphany come from? How and why does she arrive at this new
found understanding? Who let her see it? What for? What do they want?
No answers? Of course not because GR is the book which deals with all
these questions. TCOL49 is not so much a guide to reading Pynchon's
other work as a statement of the problem his major work addresses -
the world we live in is rotten, we don't understand it, don't know how
to deal with it and feel threatened at every turn by the way the evil
mounts up around us and seems to pick us out personally for misfortune
no matter what good, polite, quiet, obedient little people we have
been. Now which book would you expect to contain the meat and which
one is small potatoes?

> When Andrew writes-- otherwise it's a straight story from A to err
> ... Y and all points in between --I confess to confusion.  Am I
> missing another joke behind the joke you're trying to make?  One
> can't really call this a straight line story, not with a straight
> face anyway.

No. It tells a straight story pretty much straight. We have a
protagonist whose story is being told, other characters introduced as
they appear, a chronological development of the plot (actually, the
mystery too), straightforward (i.e. as it happens so you are told it)
narration and dialogue laced with a bit of interior monologue to
continue Oedipa's story. The play within the story is one of the few
technical effects employed in this story. And of course it's A to Y
since we don't actually get to see Z.

> When Andrew compares the multitudinous narrative voices of GR to
> CL49 he fails to consider the uniqueness of GR.  One could make the
> exact same point w/ respect to GR and VINELAND, and almost the exact
> same point w/ respect V But, again, we realize that that point isn't
> the point.  GR creates a narrative voice much more varied than the
> voice of FINNEGAN'S WAKE, too, or MOBY-DICK, But that's obviously
> not a productive way of comparing these works.

If you asked I would probably have made the same point wrt Vineland.
V I am less sure about but maybe so. V does have other things to
redeem it which I find lacking in TCOL49 (and probably Vineland too).
e.g. V plays around with interweaving disparate plots, the scenes with
Benny and Stencil employ some of Pynchon's later narrative tricks,
Esther's nose job is a piece de resistance, Foppl's siege is
incredibly dark, deep and dense.

Perhaps what you are doing is bringing me to task for comparing GR and
TCOL49. Well, I'm quite happy to agree that comparisons are pretty
odious, I would rather go for contrasts and preferably not bother at
all. But, someone started saying how they thought TCOL49 was so much
better a book and I thought this indicated a shallow reading of GR so
I tried to explain what was so good about GR by comparing them. And if
you do try to compare them it seems to me that TCOL49 is lacking many
things which GR contains whereas vice versa it ain't really the case.
Not surprising in a short story vs a magnum opus and omission is not
necessarily a sin or a failing but given what GR is I find this
comparison telling. Whether GR is unique in this respect is neither
here nor there. Moby Dick is a damn sight better than TCOL49 too but
so what. I do actually rate TCOL49 as a great novel, just not a patch
on GR.

> Andrew bewails lack of spine tingling, but my own personal spine
> tingles when I realize Oedipaa looks like the echo court statue;
> when that ashtray is *read* for us; when I think of Mr. Thoth
> feeling his god; when I mediate on the implications of the Remedios
> Varos painting; when Driblette disappears, u.s.w.  Spine tingling is
> as a tingling spine does.

True, true. There are chills and thrills aplenty. It is a couple of
years since I last read TCOL49. Must read it again, it's a damn fine
story.

> Finally, when Andrew asserts-- Poetry is only permissible in the
> right voice.  --I reach for my gun.

Uh, that's taken somewhat out of context and clearly misunderstood.
The point was that if you try to segway from a Mickey Rooney voice
into Keats bleating about some nightingale you had better be able to
do a good imitation of Mickey Rooney *and* Keats. Otherwise people are
going to get rather confused about what the hell you are saying, never
mind why. It's the *sharpness* of voice in GR that I find almost
totally lacking in TCOL49. And with that sharpness comes the
opportunity for so much more brilliance and contrast.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.