Locke

[Terrance]

What Locke actually wrote: 


This is a judgment about its form, 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, 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. Pynchon's sensibility and achievement
here are limited by the very
paranoid traits that he is ostensibly criticizing. The
sentimental and comic characters and their mindless
pleasures do not have the
intended force to counterpoint the theme of death; the
druggy, spaced-out comedy becomes
too juvenile and self-indulgent to function as a real
alternative. 

Like one of his main characters, Pynchon in this book seems
almost to be "in love, in sexual love, with his own death."
His imagination--for all its glorious power and
intelligence--is as limited in its
way as Céline's or Jonathan Swift's. His novel is in this
sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis
that will take its
place amidst the grand detritus of our culture. Its
teetering structure is greater by far than the many
surrounding literary shacks and hovels. But we
must look to other writers for food and warmth.


It's interesting that Locke also attributes this "flaw" to
Swift. 
He's wrong.  Swift was not mad, was not in love with death
or 
excrement. I have posted at length on the strange case of
Swift and how it too applies 
to these types of statements about Pynchon. 

However, this deconstructing of the text on this point says
nothing much at all. 
On Eddins, we continue to read only nonsense.  Eddins does
not construct a "white bread" view of sex or an evil view of
gnosticism so that he may condemn Blicero.