Ayn Rand (was Ayn Rand)

[Dave Monroe]

No, nothing in partcular about Ms. Montessori, pretty much just poking
fun at Ms. Rand.  "A = A" signs, not-so-crypto-fascism, condescension
and that haircut.  But I wouldn't imagine Pynchon would have had to read
much at all of Rand in order to parody her through Mafia Winsome.  MW is
a caricature, in the sense of a parodic sketch, of AR more than anything
...

What's more interesting is how the whole marital infidelity thing comes
up even at that still relatively early date, when it would have been
more a matter of rumor to common knowledge than documented fact.  Though
perhaps easily derived from Rand's "turgid"--in rather more than just
the stylistic sense ...--prose, which, as you know, seems to owe more to
bodice-ripping romance novels than such avowed influences as Hugo or
Tolstoy.  Hence MWs "Heroic Love" ...

At any rate, at the time, Rand was "in the air," esp. in your New York
literay or otherwise intellectual circles (and it's been suggested that
TP might even have circulated in ARs vicinity on some occasion or
another, will check on that)  as much as anything Pynchon touches on in
V.  As was, indeed, Abstract Expressionism ...

Again, I find these little details in Pynchon's texts fascinating, and
Slab's "Catatonic Expressionism," his cheese danish period here, is,
like Mafia Winsome's "Heroic Love," an interesting example of Pynchon's
little plein air sketches.   And jasper Johns is indeed a reelvant
figure here as well, albeit not as a so-called Abstract Expressionist,
but, rather, as one working in reaction to then-(and, often,
still-)current critical formulations thereof.  As, perhaps, was Pynchon,
as, perhaps, does V. ...

Now, I'm going to do some sketching of my own here (albeit with Fred
Orton's Figuring Jasper Johns fortuitously on hand to sit for me; I've
been working on something of late ...).  Think of what was going on in
that postwar cultural sphere.  Haiving previously been largely a
hemispheric power, the United States suddenly ascended to global
military, political, economic preeminence.  And the race was on to
assume cultural preeminence as well ...

Hence that postwar quest for an American cultural identity which one
could stand pproudly next to any venerated European tradition, say, the
quest for "the great American novel," which, among other things, led to
the reeavluation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's formerly "underrated" The
Great Gatsby, which FSF had wanted to retitle "Under the Red, White and
Blue" just weeks before publication (see  the Cambridge UP ed. of TGG).

But also the ascendence of so-called "Abstract Expressionism," so
conveniently  American-scaled and so conveniently, ostensibly, at least,
apolitical.  And the two great formulations thereof: Clement Greenberg's
formalism and Harold Rosenberg's notion of "action painting."  On the
one hand, Platonically "pure" painting, the "essence" of painting as its
alleged "flatness," therefore no illusion, no depth, no figuration, no
representation, and, underneath it all, no history, no politics.  On teh
other, the canavs as arena for the existential action of the heroic
artist.

And along comes Johns, and Rauschenberg, and Dine, and Diebenkorn, and
Thiebaud, and Warhol, and ... and ... and the reintroduction of the
figurative, the representational, the dimensional, even (though Warhol
of course pointedly retains the flatness), as, indeed, the emphasis on
the painterly (Diebenkorn and Thiebaud in particular come to mind here)
is further explored.   That figure of the existentially heroic artist,
however, is undercut, as are, to some extent, the high-cultural
aspirations (and Warhol is the signal figure here).  There might well be
a certain extent to which Pynchon might have common cause with Slab here
...

Anyway, on the above, do see not only Orton's Jasper Johns book (which
I'm only setting in on, and I've skipped ahead for the moment to the
second chapter, on those flag paintings), but, more generally, Serge
Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, and Ann Gibson, Abstract
Expressionism: Other Politics.  That postwar
military-cultural-industrial (Adorno echo intended) complex is no doubt
germane to those Pynchonian texts ...

Now, as far as "hectoring" and "slander," "misreading" and
"pointscoring" go,that's pretty much up to the both of us now, isn't
it?  And then some?  But do note that I wasn't the one keeping the
scorecard.  And that you didn't even manage to make it out of your
paragraph there without reopening whatever sutures you might have
intended to sew there.  "As ye reap ..."

But my point in re: totalization has been, if I haven't implied as much
strongly enough yet, that any reading, any readings, will always be
local, partial, I believe I've operated here in full awareness of, with
full acnowledgement of, and will all due respect to that stricture.  But
also that there simply IS no "whole text," in the sense of one fully
enclosable, fully encapsulatable, even between two covers, "il n'y a pas
de hors-texte," "there is no outside-the-text," which also problematizes
that notion of the inside of the text as well.  One might come to
tentative, tenuous encapsulations, inconclusive "conclusions," but ...
but all I'm asking for, all I keep asking for, is for those
encapsulations, those "conclusions," intentionally tenuous or no, at
least to be made explicit if one constantly invokes a "whole" text
against a partial reading thereof.  Again, sketching here, rather than
drawing contours, much less painting.  But I see the Digest has once
again come down the line, so ...