col49 2 pt2

[Dave Monroe]

To continue ...

--- Karen Hudes <kade at inch.com> wrote:
> Her name in the book starts out with buffers around
> it--Mrs. Oedipa Maas.  She's just returned from a
> tupperware party--a celebration of containment?

Again from Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A
Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP,
1995), Ch. 9, "Beyond Plastic: The Culture of
Synthesis," pp. 277-305 ...

"As an author of an encyclopedic narrative, Pynchon
simulates the language of innumerable
twentieth-century points of view, including the
plastic utopianism of such works as Slosson's Creative
Chemistry and Haynes's This Chemical Age." (p. 294)

Imipolex G (pp. 294-5)

"Synthtic chemistry, with its power to organize matter
in artificial structurs, provides Pynchon with a
metaphor of the twentieth century's organization of
human beings into deadening economic and bureaucratic
structures." (p. 295)

"For Pynchon, synthetic plastic signifies death
masquerading as life.  To the extent that we surround
ourselves with it, or incorporate it into our bodies,
or dream of a securely controlled artificial
environment in some utopian future, we become more
dead to life, less in touch with what Pynchon would
call the natural.  Oddly enough ... Pynchon's fiction
exhibits astonishing plasticity of theme, image, and
technique." (p. 296)

"... so does Pynchon use the stuff of ordinary
experience to create a synthetic multiverse.... If at
times he mocks his own endeavor, as when referring to
'the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist
whose molecules are words ([GR] p. 391), his inventive
prose continues to flow forth in structures so
flexible, so shifting in voice and phrasing, often so
apparently innocent of ultimate purpoe, that it is
hard to take the measure of a chain of words." (pp.
296-7)

"Just as synthetic chemists 'improved on' nature when
they developed plastic, so does Pynchon 'improve on'
history by offering a subversive parahistory taht
reshapes the recent past to create alternative
narratives more real than the official history of the
twentieth century." (p. 297)

"... Pynchon's parahistory possesses a plasticisty
that might have been 'set up deliberately To Avoid
Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror' in
readers too absorbed by fantasies of control to
understand thec reasons for recaling and redeeming
inconsequential things 'from their times and planet
...' ... ([GR] p. 297)."

"The name also indulges a pun: Imipolex = imitation
pole." (p. 379, n. 33)

Okay, before I lose this one as well ...



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