VLVL2 The Return of Weed Atman

[Terrance]

Many aspects of
> the fantastic in Pynchon's works are indeed without reference and point "to
> nowhere in particular" (the fantastic for its own sake, like in GR when
> Pointsman and the lab mice burst into a Busby Berkeley dance routine, for
> instance), but many aspects of the fantastic also *have* purpose, whether it
> be social or political satire, allegory, literary parody, pop culture
> allusion, etc.

I agree with all you say here ... Kharpertian's model, fantastic,
parodic, M-satire ...which explains the silly song bursts too. 


> 
> Terrance's summation of, who is it?  Wood?  


Well of course it's Wood. It's Christmas. 

indicates that this person
> perceives  Pynchon's works as "behav[ing] like allegories that refuse to
> allegorize, allegory and the confusion of allegory, are what drive Pynchon's
> books and his explicit politics."  While this is certainly true, it
> unfortunately smacks of over-generalization of the fantastic in P's work.

Quit with the over generalization stuff already. 


> Unlike many other writers, who employ the fantastic for pretty specific
> purposes (Swift, Kafka, Tolkien, Heller, Vonnegut, etc.), Pynchon's is a
> multifaceted hybrid of absurdism, satire, parody, pop allusiveness that
> defies simple categorization. 

What have you done here? 




   
1) Carnival
Think B: Brazil and Bakhtin, and Eliot
Braha to to boot. 



  2) quest-motif serves to test philosophical truths

like, being and knowing and meaning and sophistic stencilized Grave
Adams' mommy motifs



  3) the trilevelled construction of "earth," a "nether world"
  and an "olympus" 

There has got to be a place to put Brock in, a place for the thanatoids,
and a place called home. 


  4) dissolution or merging of identities, in particular, the
  motif of the double.

DL is Frenesi and Takeshi is Brock. DL is Moody and Frenesi is Sasha.
Che's (not the Cuban revolutionary but the mall rat who befriends
Prairie .. typical Pynchonian muddle of crazy names for Sue) family is
Prairie's family only different
(the lesbian prison family is a parody of Frenesi & DL and Sister R). 



  5) extraordinary freedom of philosophical invention within
  the plot

Karmic Adjustment, as several critics have pointed out, is a joke. A
parody. It makes fun of the eastern religion business in California and
(not  discussed in the critical literature)  the Investment
(derivatives) and 
Insurance business (mutual Life Insurance companies), but there is more
to it. Pynchon plays with big books (like the book of the dead and
dante's DC) and big ideas. See Eddins' brilliant reading of The Sailor's
Grave scene. 




  6) combination of free fantasy, symbolism and --on
  occasion--the mystical religious element with the crude
  naturalism of low life


Thanatoid Roast. 

Or Again, the sailor's grave. Or, the example Robert pointed out to me,
Paola with the church key (bottle opener). 


7) the concern with ultimate philosophical positions

Say, Buddhism Enlightenment and 18th Century Enlightenment when Mason
and Dixon meat but don't eat the D O G God's body spelled backward.  
Insurance is pretty important to M&D too.  


  8) the experimental fantastically in the handling of
  perspective which can imperceptibly shift from ant's to
  bird's view

Quite common in all Pynchon novels. 


  9) eccentric or scandalous behaviour--spectacular
  stomach-turning passages

Gonna jump through a window in a dress and eat Lots of bad food too. 


  10) utopian--or, to be more accurate, dystopian--elements of
  the quest motif

Like Dorothy calling the Which back after she's melted only its Brock
and Company she wants. Hey, he's got a flying machine. 


  11) the juxtaposition of items normally distant, often in
  oxymoronic combinations

A Pizza Temple. 


  12) the parody of various genres and the mixture of prose
  and verse diction


like screw ball and hard ball, and hard boiled and you know 

  13) the variety of styles

unfortunately one style (screaming unfunny TV style) dominates VL 

14) skip it it's unlucky 

  15) topicality and publicistic quality--WWII novel that
  illustrates ideological issues of the 1960s

GR 




(One might even say that P's use of the
> fantastic lacks the sustained control of writers like the aforementioned.
> Is that true?  Or does the hybrid fantasy of Pynchon demonstrate method in
> its madness?)