Spoiler? 450 to be safe (was Re: spoiler? 200 to be safe)

[Paul York]

Unknown User wrote:

> i think it's a matter of tp blurring the lines of various narratives,
> presenting something like a  more or less transparent clock, tho one
> isn't sure where the fassades overlap &etc. i think the capitalization
> thing is far from half-assed--it seems well-thought-out if a little (a
> lot, probably) hard to make sense of. (i acknowledge that you might have
> been suggesting much of what i'm saying here)

Yeah, I'd say we're probably pretty much in agreement here.  As with 
much in Pynchon's work that is "half-assed" (which re Pynchon is not 
meant to be interpreted as a putdown) I would not be surprised if it the 
capitalization thing wasn't somewhat thought out.  Given the time he 
took to write the book, I doubt he just handed it over to the editors 
and said, "Hey, while your at it, could you maybe randomly capitalize a 
bunch of my dominant nouns."  Your comment about "tp blurring the lines 
of various narratives," does a great job of summing up what I was trying 
to get at.

One of the things that really interests me about (I'm on about p 450 
now) this book is how TRP has developed a more subtle approach to 
narrative complexity.  People keep talking about how this is Pynchon's 
most "straightforward" work to date, but I don't know that I'm buying 
that.  Certainly, we aren't faced with all the various strings of 
narrative development that we have in his other books, so that we don't 
need the attention span of my Chesapeake Bay retriever to follow it.  
But I think your image of a transparent clock is right on target -- 
there's an overlapping or merging of narrative levels going on here that 
is a lot iffier than it at first appears (note how often Revd. 
Cherrycoke's presence as ostensible narrator seems to provide a frame 
tale whose embedded narrative gives way to a narrative that would seem 
to be spoken by someone else (Mason &/or Dixon being the primary 
suspects here).

Too, I wonder if Pynchon hasn't decided that the historical novel isn't 
something of an oxymoron and has decided to give us a book that riffs on 
the historical novel while not actually being one (in the same way _GR_ 
riffs on the movies, and _Vineland_ on the tube, though perhaps with 
more accuracy because, here, he's still working in the same medium).  So 
what we get is the 18th Century thoroughly polluted with 20th 
Centuryisms and a book that's much more concerned with how we look at 
ourselves today than it is about the "real" personages of an earlier 
era.  I guess that's why the book seems to have so much to say about 
what has happened to America since the 18th Century...?  Just some 
thoughts I wanted to throw around.

	Paul