pynchon-l-digest V2 #1844

[Swing Hammerswing]

>Doug partly answers that himself later on, but I would like to add a few 
>thoughts:
>To write history is to take sides.

Is to write fiction not to take sides?
I've not read most of these posts, but again, I
think Dave Monroe has been very, very solid on all this.
Malign, has been less convincing, though personally
I find that Malign's argument that Pynchon's political/historical
elements can be a distraction, a compromise of the more
aethetic elements, is also very, very solid. On that, I
have suggested Booth's *The Rhetoric of Fiction*, see "All Authors Should Be 
Objective," Chapter 3, of particular interest are the comments on 
Shakespeare's "objectivity" and Nabokov's "commitment."
Irony, now there in lies the rub that doth make Plato's Postmodernism 
cowards of us all. Speaking of the bard upon Avon, Thomas Moore, in his *The 
Style of Connectedness* compares Pynchon's knowledge and
use of science to the great Grandfather of Pynchon's
anxious and influential American Father, Melville, who said, perhaps
it was in Mardi, that novel about fiction writing, that silence (thinking 
now of that Eastern influence on our man) is the
consecration of the world, Moore says,

"Pynchon means to propse that science, no less than
other metaphorical systems, is a dynamic subjectivity
interrelating the images, myths and sythetic methods
of human experience."

After reading Norbert Wiener, after reading Moore, I am
convinced that Moore is so close to connecting the style
of connectedness, but so far away.  He is  as far away as Fowler, the
critic Moore critiques, it seems, at least at  times, because he, like
so much of the critical stuff and so much we read here,
can't seem to make sense of the text, the Pynchon text that is.

Moore's chapter on the gods of GR is a mess. A totla mess.
A shame because Moore is so good.

Otto, Moore goes directly for the heart, page 703 of GR.
Everything is connected, everything. In these
digital days of Zero and One, Moore would have better
served by analogue, as he is in chapter 1-6, but in the 6th
chapter, "The Gods of GR," he Opts for the ONE. He makes
judicious use of Robert Sklar and then applies E. M. Forter's
"fantasy" and "Prophecy." He's very close, music and magic,
and I hope he will publish a study of M&D, but when he tries to
explicate the text, tries to make sense of a long and difficult, but
by no menas atypical passage from the text of GR(GR693-94), he stutters and 
gets all foggy in his thoughts:

"That I feel mysekf here growing even more vauge
than usual means either that I am talking nonsense
or that Pynchon is writing it, or indeed what is happening
in the writing where I think I hear it is "song" in Forster's
sense, the passage relaesing its flood, leaving mere
words-as-counters behind."

Moore, then turns to the danger of the ONE reading, the Zero reading,
to Fowler, and ultimately to some vauger that usual Jungian
vision of the ineffable inside/outside, turning away, it seems
from Freudian religious agon and the war of the worlds reading
of Fowler.

In any event or in no event, why I decided to drag
Moore into all this is for one word--historicist.

Moore, as unsure as he is about the gods of GR, as good as he is on 
Weber/capitalism Film, the style of connectedness, as wonderful as his
introduction (the best intro ot P's use of science in GR) to
P's use of science, is very convincing when he argues that
P is

"the most dedicated historicist and most intense moralist
among living writers."

Pynchon is, almost beyond criticism, but I remain convinced,
that the best stuff written about his fictions, do not
take on the other critics, get caught up in the culture wars, the
theoretical manifestos is the schools, but go right to
the heart of the matter--you know what it is.


Again, see Joseph Dewey's "The Sound Of One Hnad Mapping"


"...like the sound of one hand clapping..."  Bob Dylan









There is no such thing as an objective history/historian. Everything is 
always seen through a filter. Some filters are less opaque than others, but 
still opaque. And why, pray thee, good sir, would Pynchon want to synthesize 
a worldview, when he can shift between worldviews (which he does), thus 
presenting a much more complete and much less distorted picture (or, rather, 
a multitude of pictures)? Besides, Pynchon uses history in order to reach 
way beyond it, to something much more universal, fundamental, timeless and 
interesting: human nature.
>It is in that spirit, I believe, that Pynchon presents history as "at best 
>a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud" (GR, 164) and "not 
>woven by innocent hands" (GR, 277).
>
>Cyrus
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