Suggestions

[jbor]

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>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

> The Locke essay is certainly perceptive, more perceptive
> than many full length studies.
> It's one the best Reviews there is of any P novel.

I'm afraid I disagree. Some quotes from the review:

    Pynchon is a much more complex writer than Vonnegut, a less esthetic and
    narcissistic one than Barth, and works on a larger scale and has a finer
    prose style than Heller--though he is not a better architect, or
    "greater" novelist, or bigger heart.

This introductory summation seems back-handed. The latter negative
comparisons are actually personal opinions, arguable at the very least, if
not entirely gratuitous.

In the review proper Locke identifies only Slothrop and Mexico as the
empathic narrative protagonists (in his words the "Ishmael figures"),
omitting to note other characters who loom large as agents of narrative
exegesis such as Enzian or Tchitcherine (perhaps because they are not
WASPish enough for his tastes) but also neglecting to mention the fact that
even the purportedly "evil" or misguided characters such as Blicero or
Pokler or Pudding or even Greta and Thanatz are given a fair hearing in the
(postmodernist) fragmentations of narrative agency within Pynchon's text.

Further, his assertion that Slothrop is a "parody" of Blicero
over-simplifies the significances of both characterisations enormously imo.

More from Locke:

    Pynchon implies that men of soul, like Roger Mexico, always waste
    themselves by loving treacherous beauties who sell out; there's no
    little sexism in this.

I'm not sure that this is what is implied at all, and certainly not to the
generic extent asserted here. In fact, Locke has just commented on how few
women characters there are and so his accusation of "sexism" seems somewhat
unfounded.

    [Katje] is also Slothrop's seducer and manipulator, and finally
    (unconvincingly) his loving pursuer.

I'm not so certain that Katje *is* Slothrop's "loving pursuer" at novel's
end.

But the review really begins to deteriorate towards the end when Locke
launches into his unflattering and condescending comparison with Nabokov.

    In all of Pynchon's books there is also an element of soft lyrical
    sadness, a longing for a tryst with a lost love. But this tenderness is
    most often inextricable from a drift into passiveness, self pity,
    withdrawal, emotional impotence, or it is the feeling that links victim
    and executioner. In Pynchon's world there is almost no trust, no human
    nurture, no mutual support, no family life. In "Gravity's Rainbow" the
    one romantic love affair is sentimental and doomed as the war ends, and
    the others are instances of either heterosexual or homosexual lust.

If it is the stereotyped fairy-tale romance that Rog and Jess enjoy which
Locke is referring to as the "one romantic love affair" then he is way off
base. Their passion is fuelled by the dropping bombs in the No-Go zone of
London, the proximity of death, the release from routines both domestic and
moral, which the War affords. Lust figures in their liaison, inordinately
so, both Rog's and Jess's. And, what of Slothrop's sincere affection and
concern for Bianca? Enzian's for Blicero? Gottfried's for Blicero? Katje's
for Blicero? Geli's for Tchitcherine? Pirate's for Katje?

    This is most unlike Nabokov at his best, when he allows his feelings for
    people, family and sexual love to stand revealed at the center of his
    dextrous verbal work. Pynchon doesn't create characters so much as
    mechanical men to whom a manic comic impulse or a vague free-floating
    anguish can attach itself, often in brilliant streams of consciousness.

I'd say there is quite a bit more "humanity" in Pynchon's characterisations
and character relationships than in Nabokov's. There is often an emptiness
and propensity for navel-gazing at the heart of Nabokov's "dextrous verbal
work". Pynchon's language is equally dextrous, his plots moreso, and his
self-consciousness is less oppressively egotistical imo.

    The risk that Pynchon's fiction runs is boredom, repetition without
    significant development, elaboration that is no more than
    compulsiveness. For all its richness and exuberance, "V." is more a
    wonderful, concatenated jigsaw puzzle than an esthetically coherent
    literary structure. "The Crying of Lot 49" is smaller but better built.
    In "Gravity's Rainbow" the structure is strained beyond the breaking
    point. Reading it is often profoundly exasperating; the book is too long
    and dense; despite the cornucopia of brilliant details and grand themes,
    one's dominant feelings in the last one to two hundred pages are a
    mounting restlessness, fatigue and frustration. The book doesn't feel
    "together."

    This is a judgment about its form [ ... ]

And this "judgement about form" discloses Lockes own preconception of what a
novel *should* be, evidenced by one of his opening gambits:

    Pynchon establishes his imaginative continuity with the great modernist
    writers of the early years of this century.

Locke fails to acknowledge that the final section of the novel moves
Pynchon's text beyond Modernism and directly and self-consciously into the
realm of postmodernism. What he identifies as a failing of the novel's
"form" is actually Locke's own unwillingness to accept the anti-form of the
text's final section as a legitimate literary manoeuvre or aesthetic
statement. What he misses is *Pynchon's* deconstruction of his *own* text.

    [ ... ] but let me go a step further. One feels in the end that
    Pynchon's imagination is so taken with the imagery of Nazi death, so
    close to Blicero [ ... ]

NB that Locke allows that Pynchon's "imagination ... is close to Blicero".

    One feels in the end that Pynchon's imagination is so taken with the
    imagery of Nazi death, so close to Blicero, that he is driven to make
    the plot larger and larger, to add more and more characters, to invent
    increasingly zany comic routines and digressions as a frantic defense
    against the fear and love of death--the odor of the crematorium, burnt
    cordite, bombed out minds and bodies, ruins. This all gets out of his
    control.

I love that ostentatious "One feels"! Like many others, Locke is unable to
cope with the fact that Pynchon's "imagination ... is close to Blicero". He
is forced to marginalise this aspect of the text as a flaw (at least he
admits it's there rather than pretending it isn't!), as something that
Pynchon wasn't aware that he was doing, as something which "gets out of his
control", and so he concludes that Pynchon's "sensibility and achievement"
are "limited". I can certainly understand why Locke would want or need to
offer such an opinion, but I don't think that it is the only opinion or even
a particularly insightful or sympathetic one.

So, I do find it very difficult to comprehend which works you are referring
to when you say that Locke's review is "more perceptive than many full
length studies".

To give him his due, Locke does make some perceptive observations (eg that
Pointsman is also depicted as Blicero's "counterpart" in the novel) and
pertinent comments, such as the following:

    But it is Pynchon's ambition to relate the history of Germany to that of
    America and indeed the entire Western world.

I just happen to think that Pynchon fulfils this "ambition" somewhat more
effectively than Locke allows.

best