Lineland as Pynchon Authority (redux)

[Jules Siegel]

At 04:06 PM 05/13/97 -0500, "Deng, Stephen" <sdeng at spss.com> wrote:
>I don't know why, but this all reminds me of a famous fictional poet (John
Shade) and his obsessed commentator (Charles Kinbote) from Nabokov's Pale
Fire.  Kinbote also claimed to have provided the source material for Shade's
work.  Maybe Jules was also the former king of Zembla?

You don't know why? Because you're an attention-getting jerk who can't come
up with anything creative or original to say and so you discharge your
frustration by just writing any stupid thing that comes into your tiny
little mind.

I have to say that this is the kind of asshole response that just ruins the
really great fun that can be had on this list. What I especially dislike is
the nattering tone of snide exaggeration, the ridiculous accusation
presented as if it had some relationship with reality.

I was going to hold off sending the following, but I think that what I have
to say here needs to be said.

At 01:10 PM 05/13/97 -0700, Steve Robinson <srobin at animal.cc.wwu.edu> wrote:
>Oh horseshit, Jules.  You haven't read it [GR} cuz you just don't get it.
Get it?

What makes you think you get it? I get it. Too well, believe me. I just find
it really depressing. I made the mistake of looking through it again
yesterday because I had abolutely nothing to read and I was just going crazy
from boredom.

This is what I found:  Well crafted but very grim, dark Heavy Metal
landscape filled with mostly defiantly disgusting characters portaryed in
gross situations. Lots of fecal imagery, like an unwashed stained glass
dingleberry. Feels like stepping into a dimly lighted diorama of semi-living
rotting corpses trying to have fun on a bomb-shattered graveyard. Bitterly
graphic sadomasochistic, homosexual and pedophiliac sex scenes, rendered
without love or affection.

He sure captured the feeling of the industrial holocaust, no doubt about
that. I've escaped from all that. It did make me appreciate what I have, but
I was left quite blue, like reading about the death camps and Nazi Germany
again.

May I ask a question?

Is this the Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., fan club?

Are we allowed only to offer fawning praise to his talent, or can we discuss
what he's really doing, how he does it and what works and what doesn't work
for a given reader? As an artist, I personally admire the skill and talent
and even genius much of what I see in Heavy Metal, but I also find it
morbid, repulsive and grotesquely perverse. I can see the humor. I can see
the social comment. I just don't happen to like most of it. Sometimes I also
see things that I think are not very well drawn, compared with others,
sometimes within the same artist's work.  

I feel as if I'm forbidden to say anything from the heart about Thomas
Pynchon's work because I'm not ready to nominate him for the Nobel Prize and
have some frankly negative observations about his material and techniques.

I thought the criticisms of the less than enthusiastic reviews of Mason &
Dixon was worthy of the Mickey Mouse Club.

It gets quite Stalinist on this list, believe me, when all subscribers must
bow in the direction of the Leader and cast stones at anyone who finds the
slightest flaw in any of his works, or even suggests that they aren't all to
the taste of every literate, intelligent reader. Did Gore Vidal have
something personal against Thomas Pynchon? Is Gore Vidal an insecure
"wannabe writer?" Or was he expressing a perfectly legitimate opinion that
is shared by many intelligent, perceptive readers who just don't mesh with
Thomas Pynchon?

I've read a little of T. Coragessian Boyle and found his depiction of the
Northern California dope scene (in which I lived for quite a while) much
more accurate than Pynchon's, not to speak of funnier. Anita has nothing
against Pynchon personally (as I'm supposed to have, of course, based on the
petty bourgeois inferences of jealous little minds). She also lived deep in
the dope scene for a while. She got two-thirds through Vineland and then
just gave up because it rang so false. It's an entirely invented work. Maybe
it convinces those who were never there, but it gets me almost as irritated
as the "Just Say No" campaigns, even though it's not meant that way.

Anyone who really knows some of the sources of Pynchon's work is
automatically disqualified from speaking his or her true thoughts. It
reminds me of the LSD debate. The opinions of anyone who took LSD were
rejected upfront because we were contaminated. Only people who hadn't taken
it were considered objective enough to talk about it.

What is really going on here?

--
Professional English-Language Editorial Services
Jules Siegel http://www.caribe.net.mx/siegel/jsiegel.htm
>From US: http://www.yucatanweb.com/siegel/jsiegel.htm
Apdo 1764 Cancun Q. Roo 77501 Tel 011-52-98 87-49-18 Fax 87-49-13