V.V. (13) Lhamon

[jbor]

More from _Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American
1950s_ (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990):

      Like Kerouac and Pollock, Pynchon and all of the deliberately
    speeding artists were thoroughly marinated [!] in black culture.
    Pynchon's fondness for jazz is at least as clear as his reliance on
    European musics. He uses both as subjective correlatives for their
    participants' positions on form, sentimentality, romanticism, and
    much more. It is fruitless to argue that he preferred either African-
    American or European culture. Rather, he uses both as complex indices
    of characters' consciousnesses. During the writing of _V._, and then
    again while he was constructing _GR_ from many of the same impulses,
    European culture certainly came to represent "analysis and different-
    iation" to Pynchon. African culture, as embodied in the Hereros, came
    to indicate for him "unity and integration". [Lhamon footnotes P's
    letter to Hirsch here] Like all American writers from Mark Twain and
    Henry James through Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Heller, Pynchon
    understood how to butt these two cultures to show each off (and up). It
    is hardly accidental that when European scientists injected truth serum
    in Tyrone Slothrop, Pynchon's most emblematic American, they discovered
    mingled among his deepest fantasies amalgamations of Charlie Parker and
    Malcolm X, the blues harmonica and _King Kong_. (250-1)

Though the last sentence about Slothrop's dream-confession at St Veronica's
is another example of Lhamon's inattentiveness to the text/s, his reference
to Pynchon's letter to Thomas F. Hirsch at least confirms the impressions I
had of the general purport of that letter, which I would have thought to be
somewhat obvious, even here (obviously not ... ) And Lhamon is right on cue
about those "subjective correlatives" within Pynchon's fictions.

best