surfing away, happy holy days

[Arthur Chesterfield]

It has been said that in a world of cause and effect,
coincidence is always
suspect. Previous books have explored the
psychological motives that drive
people to perpetrate or perpetuate sinister plot lines
to rationalize extraordinary
events. In "Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy
in Modern America"
Robert Alan Goldberg, a history professor at the
University of Utah, takes a
different tack. He tries to identify the historical
and social undercurrents that
have driven seemingly sane Americans to attribute such
events to nefarious
conspiracies instead of embracing equally or more
plausible - if also more
mundane - causes like government arrogance, sloppiness
and even
coincidence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/18/books/18ROBE.html

Just think Mr. P is having fun with another American
tradition is all. P is a traditional American author
as far as I can tell. OK, just thinking now about the
reader, the victim, the partner, the participant, the
co-conspirator.... now what is it that P has written
anyway....and I still keep thinking that Weisenberger
and Tanner and others were on to it, although no
scholar has yet taken it up, that Pynchon writes the 
kind of fiction that Melville wrote and Faulkner and
other Americans (I always say USA when I mean the USA)
 have written....like The Confidence Man for example,
but what happens and now we are in a new phase after
Mr. P's M&D , is that the scholarly community, being
incestuous, all get to reading the same cannon of
critical stuff, not unlike all the boys on wall street
reading the same newspaper everyday and the same
reports, well, and we get cemented into things like, P
writes postmodern tales of subversive indeterminacy or
some such...but why not say that P writes satiric
allegory, as James Wood says? Well,  James Wood, being
a very astute guy, might be correct and he hates
Pynchon so.... but it seems to me that the case for
allegory is a good one....but they will say, what is
truly mimetic in the text and what is psychologically
real or novelistic about M&D? No, Chester, M&D is more
puzzle than representation, they say. Yes, so is
Chaucer…But M&D, and I am reading along, got Part One
of the book on tape too, cost me $40, and they are
worthless unless you have read the book, I have
several times now, but...M&D seems like an aimless
string of episodes, at least on the surface, but dive,
dive, any fish can swim on the surface, dive, and down
there, deep, is tension, 
 even climax, well not for Mason...but this MDMD
sucks, not work and all play makes the P-listers
interested in pynchon stay away….but this is not
cipher to be decoded...as allegorical fiction it
should develop along the lines of an external set of
ideas (yeah, David Morris I agree, P didn't take all
of what Nabokov had to say too seriously all the time
and good for him) but there is a tension, a tight as a
virgin and rock band tightness that drives against the
probable, possible, and even the necessary forces in
human actions, this even while, plot (yes there is a
plot) and character are defined in terms of arguments
(social, moral, historical) more so than human
desires. What motivates P characters? Human desire or
some thing about America? They are questers, looking
for America. But of course this doesn't account for
P's fiction at all, to begin with, those narrators are
unreliable and unreliable narrators are not usually
found in allegory because the unreliable narrator
abdicates responsibility, doesn't seem responsible for
an evaluation of motive or for guiding the reader
through events, even if these events are not in any
order. Where is the resolute voice of P's fiction? We
try to identify the applied or implied author, who is
or what is an author and what does it matter who is
talking anyway…and for the postmodern critic the
argument disintegrates or is only about fiction
making, and the reader is simply trapped between  a
hard maybe and a rock of possible forces invisible,
but is there a meaning at the bottom, is there are
message in the tea leaves, a clear and firm cloud to
stand on in this carefully constructed whirlwind of
indeterminate subjunctive musings about? The first
half of M&D seems more a human comedy while the second
half like a wave curling in on these dark funny
fragments of history and biography is more social
satire beached on America. Does our involvement begin
to wane? The dark comic beginning opening to
allegorical lamentations and brighter possibilities?  

Don't know, but I'm going south, the holy days just
don't feel right here, the church is on fire, that's 
it, just can't take anymore.....

Peace and good will hunting osama bin hide in way down
in the hole. 


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