Reading Pynchon

[Ron Meiners]

At 11:28 AM 1/26/00 -0600, Craig Duckett wrote:
>
>Hi P-Listers,
>

>
>Anyone else ever get this sense of altered reality after a long reading of
>Pynchon?
>

This is my favorite topic.

Or one of them... Paranoid Literature is my name for the phenomenon...

And I think your response, and line of investigation, is ideal.  Clearly
some very interesting things happen to our perception of reality in some
very interesting ways.

Also it sounds as if your background with these topics is much better than
mine- I had not heard of these works and will now pursue them.  My focus
has been more on the literature itself, and my own experience.   I think
literature of the transformation "out" of society, or out of the societal
world view, has a very long history, and shows up in a number of works, and
recently in film as well.  And the dynamics of shattering the cultural
perceptual biases and replacing them with the individual's seem to play out
fairly consistently- certainly if we are to take these written records as
any indication of the authors' experience- as, I think, we must.  Certain
basic structures are reasonably inherent in human understanding.

For example, in The Golden Ass, Satyricon, Crime and Punishment, Dahlgren,
Hopscotch, Been Down So Long It Looks Like up to Me, much of Pynchon, and a
slew of stuff lately (and no doubt others I am forgetting) there is a
pattern of the protagonist being displaced from his normal world, becoming
more or less paranoid (especially in the later books) as he searches for a
new structure to replace the old shattered one, and going through a series
of wild adventures as he learns freedom and responsibility, and creates a
new world-view that is more organic to his identity.

And, on the topic of the impact of perception on the world, of world-view
on activity and "reality"... I grow more and more convinced that this is an
enormous topic that has only been briefly scratched.  The impact of our
expectation and biases on our experience is, IMHO, huge, and only slightly
larger than the extent to which this goes unrecognized.  Vast amounts of
human experience get a whole lot more "reasonable" if you posit the notion
that our outlook heavily influences what we perceive and how we interact.
Certainly this is clear in Pynchon.

Okay, thanks, and back to lurking...
rm