Pynchon & rap

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> This Hollander explanation is complete gobblety-goop.  "Total absence" is
> not equal to "not mentioned (only once: Dallas)," AKA alluded to.  Pynchon
> is the master of cyrptic allusions.  These allusions are not "total
> absences."  Sloppy semantics, seems to me.  Aren't professors supposed to be
> more precise?  Or is he being mis-quoted?  Jeezum-Pete!

Well, one point I am trying make here is that it is ironic
that the Hollander essays have been, several times, on the
wrong side of this protracted debate.  I think its a bit of
a shame that the Hollander essays keep getting dragged into
the protracted "Holocaust Denial" debate, but like the jbor
post that Doug put forth as evidence of some malice or
repudiation by Robert, which I and others read as a very
fine post, I think the essays often support Robert's
position and undermine Doug's. 

That being said, I think Dave Monroe has a point. What I
posted, while it is exactly what we discover in the essay,
that is, that the event (like the other historical events
that are absent or largely absent from from Pynchon's
"historical fictions"), the assassination of JFK in Dallas
Texas, is not part of the tale that is the CL49, as
Hollander admits, but  this is, for Hollander, a deliberate
absence. P has very good reason to write in a cryptic style.
Hollander has a very difficult task.  He wants to argue that
CL49 is "Pynchon's encrypted meditation on the assassination
of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy," while admitting that
Pynchon never  mentions the "then-recent event directly."  

OK, so Dave Monroe says that I am wrong to say that
Hollander does not propose a total absence, but in fact he
does. The event is not present in the story. He never
mentions it directly. What Hollander says is that he
mentions it indirectly. He then shows us how P has
constructed a subtext that points, if only with an
encrypting hand,  to the JFK murder. 

Whether Hollander succeeds at  what is undoubtedly a very
difficult task, is to me anyway,  irrelevant. Along the way
he opens a thousand windows and as many doors into 
Pynchon's fiction and constructs one of the most unique
readings of Pynchon to date. 
 



I don't think one can appreciate the later essays w/o first
reading the earlier ones.  For example, the brief essay on
Monk and Sphere is very thin if one does not know
Hollander's method. He outlines the method in his Political
Essay in Pynchon Notes and  in Pynchon's Inferno and also in
the JFK/CIA essay. The essays, imho, are exceptional. Sure,
there are problems. The primary error, again, imho, is a
misreading of P's use of paranoia.  Hollander also wrote a
very brief essay on Pynchon, Johnson and Voltaire. It is
interesting to note that the essay I suggested, the one in
the critical essays on M&D, Dim Enlightenment, seems to
confirm, in part anyway, what Hollander argued in that too
brief essay. Several dissertations, and of course a few
books, have taken up the Menippean Satire & Co.