"Difficult"?

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Mentions M & D in passing
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Enjoying this thread.  Maybe it goes back to a couple of other ideas we've been discussing 
of late, mainly, the idea that thinking itself is "hard" and the idea that the aesthetic 
responses provoked by great art require both a visceral and a cerebral engagement.  You 
can't read P without thinking.  What we're calling *difficult* might just be a reflection of 
thinking. Interestingly, though,  some of the very  best moments seem to require absolute 
no-mind to appreciate.  "Done in by a malevolent cheese" is now embroidered on my 
soul, but not really challenging me intellectually (though the whole scene forces me to 
think about the giant adenoid scene in GR for structural and tonal echoes, then I have to 
wonder about that, etc, etc, yeah, it is work in a sense).  The snap-on bodice ready to burst 
at a moment's pressure both makes me laugh and think too, since it is both intrinsically 
funny and at the same time a tacit comment on creaky novelistic devices and maybe even 
the fact that women are the ones inserted into these creaky novelistic devices more often 
than not.

Then there's the whole question of stylistic difficulty.  P's style is, what do you 
rhetoricians call it, "hypotactic" as opposed to "paratactic" (do I have these 
reversed?)--connectives are left out, ellipsis is the structural signature.  This forces readers 
to supply the kind of missing links which are never left out in tenth-grade level writing 
(which seems to be the default age  people use to describe writing for everybody). 

Another stylistic  quirk which I love but which sometimes trips me up momentarily is 
the way he introduces dialogue with words that might or might not describe the speaker's 
tone.  He seems to do this more in M & D than previously.  Can't find a specific example, 
book not around, but it's like a million weird ways of saying "He said"--here's a made up 
example, inferior by far:

"Well as to that," Mason conspires, "I wouldn't know."

 It's the use of *conspires.* For an instant you're not sure if the narrator is about to fork 
off from Mason's comment into a narrative interpolation, then you realize it's a
 
comment on his tone, or some other contextual marker, always relevant.  Do others see 
these little plays?

On a slightly larger scale, there's the oft-noted habit of seque-ing scenes in unusual or 
indeterminate ways, marked especially by the tendency to switch causes and effects and to 
shift the reader's context and only retroactively explain what was going on. Thinking 
mostly of GR here--as when the weirdness of the Kenosha Kid section turns out to have 
been *caused* by Slothrop's sodium pent buzz.  And the epistolary form gives us no 
possible clue as to *where* in the narrative we are. This strategy seems to be employed 
much less in M & D (though happily I still have far to go).

This said, somewhat incoherently I fear, I admit there are times when I am
 conscious of the labor involved in reading Pynchon.  Sometimes the density of the prose
 makes for sluggishness (though it usually pays off in a flare of illumination).  For me V.
 is the most laborious of his novels, though the center of VINELAND gets that way for me
 too.  GR in places almost hurts my back to read.  I find M & D gettting easier to follow as I
 progress.  I had trouble orienting myself up to the first encounter with the French 
warship.  But though it's not too laborious, I still can only read in small chunks, with 
frequent stopping.  So much to savor.  Have others felt this way too?  There might have 
been a thread on this, but I wasn't following it.


john m