GRGR(12)Mystery of Imipolex G

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Cjhurtt6 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> In a message dated 10/18/99 4:55:44 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
> Lycidas at worldnet.att.net writes:
> 
> << and although I doubt Pynchon's infallibility, I
>  think it best to give the author the benefit of the doubt
>  and search for an alternative explanation for these apparent
>  problems >>

> the anachronisms and other "mistakes" in gr could be just that..mistakes
> and/or pynchon's subtle way of saying "hey, don't take my word as gospel. i
> can't even keep track of my own timeline here."

I don't think so. Pynchon is a meticulous writer. Like Joyce
he is nearly obsessed with getting it right. If he were not
concerned with getting it right, why bother with all the
detail? Why not create a fictional town, a fictional family,
and set all his stories in it?  Every detail he needs, he
gets correct, or nearly correct. Like Joyce, he is in a
sense an artist in exile. He needs a brother, a friend,
someone to bring him the Dublin/London news. Certainly he
makes mistakes. I have been told, that he writes with a
pencil. The problem is not that he is writing a "beat"
fiction, but that he has several layers and timelines,
patterns within patterns working at once. One such pattern
involves bringing his stories together--his short stories
compare well with Joyce's Dubliners. Let me give an example
from Pynchon's short story, "The Secret Integration." This
story was written after V., where we find few mistakes.
Pynchon digresses politically, naming an exiled king as a
target. Problem is, the king was not in exile in the years
Pynchon notes. Now why would Pynchon research all sorts of
details about this king and fail to get the critical dates
correct? Well, one of the boys gives us the dates. The
narrator then qualifies what the boys provide by saying that
they have learned these dates, (note these are boys that are
coming of age and one of the recurring themes of the story
is the boy's learning to listen to, understand, and judge,
what adults tell them) from conversations they have
overheard and what they picked up on the tube and in history
class. The king needs to be in exile on a particular date to
fit into a larger time structure, but since history does not
jive with Pynchon's larger structures, he has the boys shift
the dates, creating a "mistake" or anachronism. Another
example from the same story. The narrator tells us that
Blaine missed a train and did not attend a party. Fact is,
Blaine did attend the party (a party of dirty money
political influence) and it cost him the NY primary and the
presidency. Why does Pynchon have Blaine miss the train?
Pynchon's first story begins with a party and he has these
parties all over his stories. He often likes two parties,
contrasting parties. In this case, he wants to draw us away
from the obvious historical explaination--we can read it in
the NYT or NYP as Pynchon probably did--and into a deeper
structural pattern of the story. In this case Mark Twaine,
Blaine, Grover (a character) Cleveland, and other political
issues that frame the story. So in GR, we have an apparent
extra Christmas added to the war, we have recurring
anachronisms, so obvious, to a novelist that early on copies
Joyce, so detailed, so meticulous. A novelist that complains
about his geographical refernces(SL.Intro.) , when in fact,
as a Poet in exile, they are usually pretty damn close.  He
writes multilayered, multistructured novels, he brings his
whole bag of trick to the structure, including in GR, a
narrator that at times seems confused, self-mocking,
paranoid, indistinguishable from characters, characters that
are often mad, intoxicated, hallucinating, mediums, seers of
all sorts, and so on. And he brings a european genre (I
won't mention it again), to an american tradition that
includes gothic romance for example. In the chapter I just
posted the notes to, Weisenburger and Fowler identify dozens
of gross errors. I think giving Pynchon the benefit, not of
being infallible, but of creating a complex set of
structures that fit together without collapsing into a bunch
of loosely spun yarns.

Of course I make mistakes too, and I could be dead wrong,
but until I am convinced that Pynchon is either careless or
indifferent or that his major "mistakes" have something to
do with his way of writing, I'll give him the benefit of the
doubt and try to understand what he's up to with all these
"errors." 

TF