re RE: SLSL "TSR" - climax, anti-climax

[William Zantzinger]

--- pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> somebody
> >If P were to do a wall-to-wall rewrite of this
> story
> >I
> >think MMS Pinafore would be tossed in the dumpster.
> 
> I wonder if Pynchon would throw it out.  The plot of
> the operetta turns on class distinctions, after all,
> an element of "TSR" that Pynchon says, in the Intro,
> he likes, and it takes place in a military setting.
> It's not just layered on top of the story either,
> but
> integrated at the plot and character levels,  plays
> a
> significant role in the story's climax. It might be
> argued that Pynchon doesn't pull it off as
> skillfully
> or elegantly or seamlessly or whatever-ly as he
> might
> have done, but I haven't seen that demonstrated yet.


Young Tom's treatment of class and race is good, but
not very good.  I don't think including obscure
allusions to H.M.S. Pinafore augments his treatment of
class and race. 

Building a story is like building a house. As you move
up and out the flaws in the foundation are multiplied.


 Little Buttercup is not much more than a handful of
literary allusions.  

Trusting the literary allusions to do the work,
Pynchon fails to develop the characters. I'm Little
Buttercup, spot the quote, the wares at the end of the
tale, are no substitute for character development. She
ends up being a little blonde co-ed with Pasiphaë's
lust for a Plowboy gone Lardass? 

Rewriting the story P could flesh her out a bit. Here
is a bit of a paradox and I think this paradox might
explain why s~Z says that P must have his tongue in
his cheek in the Introduction. 

How would P develop Little Buttercup and flesh her
out? Could he ever flesh a character out as some of
the writers he is often compared with do? As Don
DeLillo does for instance?   I doubt it. To judge from
Pynchon's most recent work, M&D, a novel, the critics
say, has Pynchon most "fleshed out", "living",
"rounded", "real" characters, I doubt it. 

Just picking a little buttercup from the prairie of
M&D for an example here, I'm looking at Amy from
Brooklyn. Amy is loaded up with allusions. Pynchon
uses his much-improved ear to pun away with languages
and play with dozens of references. Her language
motivates Mason. Plays on Language develops the plot.
Moreover, she is like so many of Pynchon's young
girls, a multiple or Pynchon double. 

If Little Buttercup were rewritten today, I guess P
would keep G&S and would add additional literary
allusions. He would develop the Baxter double and do
all the wonderful stuff he does in his fictions to
make up for what he doesn't like most about his
writing. John Bailey, I think, hit that contradiction
right on the head. 

In TSR, his trusting his bad ear to do the work of
plot development compounds his failure to develop the
characters. 

This is compounded by his failure to develop character
motivation-"what matters to Levine."  

This failing weakens the race/class theme. 

The allusion to the Little Buttercups wares in the sex
scene is fancy footwork and it falls down tripping all
over itself. 
Because it is a sex scene, this problem is complicated
by P's own feeling about sex, the sexual repression of
his generation, the censorship issues. The biggest
flaw, his failure to establish some kind of distance
between himself and his narrator, compounds all this. 


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