"Difficult"?

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Greg Montalbano writes:
> Now, Umberto Eco & his stultifying infinite regressions ("Thinking back to
> that night, as I stood remembering the previous summer, when we talked of
> out youth, reminiscing about our lives as sperm, basking in the memories of
> our past incarnations ....."  -- about which point I REALLY want to use a
> cattle-prod on the guy) are kind of tough going for ME.  
> Truth be told, I find some of Andrew's lengthier posts rather akin to hard
> labor (no offence, Andrew;  this is more a comment on the reader than the
> writer, no?).

I'll interpret that remark as a cattle-prod rather than an insult,
although being put in the same boat as that Eco lala arguably might
excuse certain egregious offences committed with the aid of a
flame-thrower.

> ...I have never looked up from a Pynchon novel & thought "This is HARD!"

Cannot really disagree there, at least never untempered by the
observation that this is exhilarating. In particular, it may be
difficult to follow first time round but reading the same page twice
makes much of it clearer and reading the whole thing twice makes it
clearer still. At which point you don't just say `Oh, so now I
understand. Why didn't he say it straigth first time'. It's not that
he is deliberately obscure for its own sake. On the contrary, the hard
to get aspect of Pynchon's prose is an epiphenomenon of several
deliberate, careful and masterful choices in matters of style and
content which fully justify the rereading (as much true of M&D as GR).

For example, the difficulty in maintaining track of place, time and
`speaker' causes the bulk of the problem for most naive readers. But
straighten out the narrative and you notice and identify all sorts of
clever transitions and elisions. Yet at the same time, when you reread
you don't notice them because they are so seamless. This is a
technical fortissimo. Yet those who review on one rapid sitting see
only their own confusion, their own inability to grapple with the
text. If a 17 year old said the same of Moby Dick he would be told to
do his homework again. The reviewers who perpetrate the myth that
Pynchon is obscure and unreadable need to be told the same.

Fire the Bastards!


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