Prosthetic Paradise(2) Enfetishment&MS

[Michael Perez]

Terrance wrote:
"Is Pynchon, as
Weisenburger argues, a satirist that simply delights or as Wood would
have it, an allagorist that only calls attention to himself, or in
Pynchon's own metaphor, a novelist that has sailed through the pillars
of Hercules into the abyss of indeterminacy, or North to the pole where
the moral compass simply spins on a relativist's axis in all directions
without discrimination of what is good and what is evil?  Are mindless
pleasure equal to mindless hours? Are we all voyeurs, tourists, buying
trinkets of Nazi genocide, taking the trip through the mad carnival of
the night towards the promise of space travel in a moraless future
where one can not know who is on trial at Nuremberg and why?

Are there no spells left that can protect us against falling
objects?"

 

To label what kind of writer we are considering here is, of course,
problematic, yet it is a bit too flippantly facile to say something
like "I would describe him as indescribable."  I can see how some
students of the novel can find fault structurally with Pynchon (or
Melville) as a "novelist" or as a "satirist" or an "allegorist."  The
forays into any and all of these identities lack any sustained
application of the necessary duties of each.  However, I wouldn't call
the kind of indeterminacy that we find as readers an "abyss."  One of
the reasons, perhaps, the "moral compass," as you say, is spinning
uncontrollably is that our expectations are not met by in some way by
being able to pigeonhole the texts.  Call it postmodern or whatever,
but there is a difference (to state the bloody obvious) with Pynchon
and other quite different fiction writers.  These are very different
kinds of books.  Does _GR_ have a "protagonist?"  Slothrop?  The
rocket?  The Firm?  Then we can trot out the "anti-hero" and the
"anti-story" or "anti-novel."  What drek.  Indeterminacy is a part life
and art, perhaps that is one of the indicators of what could be called
postmodern, even though even that is hardly helpful to achieving a
definitive description of WHAT this type of writing is.  These texts
don't preach, necessarily.  The writer reveals many contradictory
indications of what we are being "told" and what we are to think about
what is revealed.  The method of the revelations is by no means linear,
doesn't conform as picaresque, bildungsroman, ad nauseum.  The good
folks / bad folks line is blurred throughout much of this writing. 
Enjoy the ride, I say.  There are no "spells" to protect us.  I like
being a free-range reader.


Michael


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