GRGR(24)Re: That Little Package

[Seb Thirlway]

From: Terrance <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>
To: unlisted-recipients:; (no To-header on input)
<unlisted-recipients:; (no To-header on input)>
Cc: Pynchon List <pynchon-l at waste.org>

>
>> Don't know what it is about the way that whole episode is
>> presented (perhaps it's Slothrop's total indifference to what
>> might be in the package that drives the point home), but the
>> message I get is "don't know what's in it, and you'll never
>> know".  or maybe you don't want to know...and this doesn't
matter
>> anymore.  There's a sad note of resignation that comes into
thte
>> book around here, when before the focus was always on the
>> possibiity of finding out, if you look hard enough: whatever
>> happens to you, there is that Kirghiz Light (Holy Centre,
>> nerve-centre of the Rocket-cartel, one true reading of the
Text)
>> waiting ahead, and then you'll get IN, and all this time spent
>> OUTside looking to get in will have been worth it.
>> I don't think the package can contain anything offering
promise.
>> That's not the way the book is going IMO.  Whatever happened
to
>> all that delicious paranoia?
>
>We have cycled over from everything is connected
>("paranoia")to nothing is connected ("anti-paranoia").
>Remember Tantivy tries to convince Slothrop that
>'operational paranoia' can be useful, "especially in
>combat...you know PRETEND something like that."

Yes, I'd forgotten that, but there it is, way back in a pub near
Grosvenor Square.  In a book on the scale of GR it's difficult to
judge what your own temporal bandwidth should be: how about a
poll - how many readers liked GR (and especially, liked GR past
this point, which for me has always been the point where it
starts getting very difficult - around page 550) on first
reading?  You've just pointed out a connection which is obviously
there and meant, because now, 500-odd pages later, the question -
how much has all that paranoia been a pretence, and possibly a
necessary pretence on the part of the characters - starts kicking
in in a way which is not pleasant.  But how easy is this to spot,
without exhaustive knowledge of the book?

This kind of mischief is something about GR that makes it
irresistible - it's as if GR was written expressly so that
argument/discussion on this list will never stop - there'll
always be something someone else has noticed that you haven't.
There is that conversation, quite early on in the book, when the
reader's mind is still trying to settle down and grab hold of
_something_ that might deliver a handle to what the hell is going
on - just a casual conversation in a pub - and now it pops up as
something significant.  A bit like those neo-classical composers
who liked to blind the audience with atonality while the Elect
could (well, I flatly refuse to believe those who say "on first
hearing") eventually realise that what was going on was a sonata
form.  On that one I'm on the side of Pynchon and Webern
(early) - lots of clever connections and forms that can keep you
excitedly awake at night with "a-ha now I've got it" moments, but
also a lot of intense/amusing/moving stuff while they're at it.

So here we've got Tantivy casually suggesting, just as a
conversational gambit to help out a friend who's getting freaked
out, that paranoia can be useful as an operational tactic - there
follow 500 unbelievable pages (count the number of words they've
generated on this list alone), followed by the revelation that
those 500 pages were an illustration of that one sentence, and
now the reader is going to get the ground cut from under h feet.
Is this a great novel?  I'm not sure, it's sure not a comfortable
read - perhaps an "intensely annoying, fascinating, moving,
sometimes boring, always unexpected novel that you can never get
out of your mind once you've read it".

The real mystery is how the bare statement (to unfairly
paraphrase Terrance) that "from page x to page 550 Pynchon is
leading the reader up the garden path with a presentation of the
very tempting modus vivendi that we'll call Paranoia" has no
effect whatsoever on the emotional effect that those 500 pages
can have.

Sorry, did I mention I'm a Pynchon fan?





seb