Suggestions

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >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.

Sure. 



> 
> 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) 

You'll have to ask Locke about his WASPish tastes, I have no
ideas, but he's comparing the book to Moby-Dick, Mexico and
Slothrop and Benny Profane are like Ishmael figures he
says.  Yes, of course this is a 1973 Review so I think we
can excuse the omission of in depth analysis or even mention
of narrative agencies. As I said, I don't care to list them
here but...some full length studies fail to address critical
characters let alone their narrative. Several studies of V.,
for example, don't bother to say much at all about the
"Benny chapters," and Paolo, one of my favorites, isn't
mentioned at all in several studies.  


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.

A fair hearing? 



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

He says he is ALSO a parody...


> 
> 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.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by his accusation being
unfounded by his statement that most of the characters are
male and two women have thematic significance ( more than
that right?  Nora, Geli, Bianca, etc.), but I think he's
mistaken.  



> 
>     [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.

He says,  "finally (unconvincingly) his loving pursuer,"
attributing his misreading to the author. 

> 
> 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?

I'm with Locke. 



> 
>     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.

I'm with Locke. 


> 
>     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 [ ... ]

So what? It's a Review, it's not uncommon and there is a lot
agreement among readers that what Locke says here is true to
their experience with GR. 


> 
> 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.

You make this point better than Anyone Robert. 


> 
>     [ ... ] 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 [ ... ]

This a critical habit. How many critics have said this about
Melville's Ahab, Milton's Satan, in fact they say, like
Milton, Pynchon....D. Eddins for example. 


> 
> 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.

No, it's not. 


> 
> 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".

Well, you have torn it's roof off, exposed its weaknesses,
but it's a solid essay, the foundation is sound. 

> 
> 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.

That's perceptive. That, and Rilke and Freud and technology.
It's an excellent Review, with lots of flaws, but 30 years
later I applaud it. 


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

Yup, that's why we are still talking about it. 

Thanks, 

PS Thanks for the HoD/Achebe discussion, I learned a lot. 

I'm going to mix up a little chicago school for Malign
now...sleepless, one of students 
gave me some beads she brought up from Mardi Gra, magic....