Idolatry

[Tom Stanton]

>>On Tuesday, 13 May 1997, Jules Siegel wrote:
>>Is this the Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., fan club?  Are we allowed
>>only to offer fawning praise to his talent . . .?  What is really going
>>on here?

At 09:45 PM 5/13/97 -0500, Andrew Clarke Walser wrote:
>Unfortunately, Jules has a point here.[snip]  As much as I
>admire Pynchon, I do not admire him as a hockey fan does
>the Blackhawks, or as a Trekkie does Captain Kirk.  

God, I hope we don't come off like Trekkies!

I also think Jules has a point. I admire TRP immensely but he's
not for everybody (my older sister is struggling through "V." and
wonders what I see in the guy). The fans here do get pretty
uppity about direct attacks on TRP, but to some degree that's
to be expected. After all, the list exists for fans as well as scholars.
Where I'd part company with Jules is his apparent insistence on 
havingthe last word in his flaming debates. He's not alone in this
either.  I used to post a lot more, but I've slowed way down, mostly 
because I notice a disturbing tendancy to be "right" than any real
interest in exploring, questioning, or debating a given issue. 

>Jules also raises, later in his posting, an interesting question:  Does
>the INACCURACY of some of Pynchon's work mar it aesthetically?  Does
>Pynchon sacrifice a potentially valuable realism -- one toward which he
>seems to lean -- for the sake of cheap literary effects?

TRP writes fiction, not journalism. While I admire his extensive use of
history, it is "used" in the fullest sense. Jules chides him over the drug
culture respresented in "Vineland," but the book, IMHO, was never about
the Northern CA drug culture Jules lived in, anymore than GR is about
the German rocket program. I've never seen any of TRP's works as an
example of realism (though he uses realism as a technique), and I doubt
scholars would classify him as a realist.