SLSL: Robert D. Newman on Low-Lands (part 1)

[tess marek]

--- Michel Ryckx  wrote:> From:> Robert D. Newman, 'Understanding Pynchon,'> University of South Carolina Press, Columbia  (South> Carolina), 1986.> > Chapter 2: Slow Learner: Establishing Foundations> (pp. 12-33)  Tony Tanner calls "Low-Lands" a> rewriting of Washington > Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." [2] Ironically, however,> Pynchon's > protagonist enters the dream state through an> awakening.Tanner was such a astute reader of American fiction. Of course Rip Returns in VL as Zoyd Wheeler. In that Novel the mature author has learned a few things about American Fiction (a good deal of it by way of literary theft, much of it from Herman Melville--V., GR, M&D are deeply indebted to Melville) and how to write it. Rip, like Zoyd and Dennis (although Dennis is a weak character and the story is indeed the work of an apprentice) personifies the capriciousness of youth and freedom from rationality, logic, society (is the allusion to the Henry Plays only an attempt to make it literal?).  These guys are perpetually out of time, out of place, out of smokes, so on. Why? Trying to mediate old world values and new world values. We can smell and taste Fitzgerald in Vineland the Good and many critics traced the descriptions of the spilled and broken world on the West coast to the coast of Long Island Sound. Ah, Pynchon! He was born at the right time, in the right place. Rip, like Dennis, Zoyd, Lardass...have a common problem,  conflict:  loyalties. It's a theme Tom Pynchon had to deal with. And for Zoyd, Dennis, Rip, it is a wife that prevents them from living in two worlds at once. Rip's wife will not permit him to take solace, comfort in the company of indolent sages in the shade. D's pals are indolent sages too. And the masuline American intellectual individualism requires the company of men, thoughful men, to stay sane. You think Melville took to talking high German metaphysics with a man on tyhe brink of madness because he thought it a health hobby? Sanity requires communication, but how does one communicate with a w!
ife, or a society, after the total loss of self, the loss of identity, of one's pals, one's friends, one's men. OH ODYDDEUS! How can one get HOME? Zoyd will. Rip will. And that home is America on the mend. ooops gotta go.....


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