SLSL 'Low-lands': racist, sexist and fascist talk

[tess marek]

--- The Great Quail 
> 
> I agree; though I also feel that he is being too
> hard on himself, and some
> of the SL intro seems to me a bit much; I think
> Pynchon comes it a bit high
> with the PC hand-wringing.

I disagree. We should remember that this is a mature
and honest guy looking back at his first published
stories. He was just a kid. He was a kid growing up at
a time when all these influences were in the air, on
the Tube, in the films and magazines, in the culture
he was raised in,  and  so forth. It seems that P was
pretty much like a lot of young guys at the time. But,
he matures. More importantly, I find that if I take
P's criticism as honest and level headed I can
appreciate how he matured and the effort he put into
it. Moreover, 
I can see where he fails and where he suceeds. For
example, his essay on Watts is a Giant Step for young
Tom. The Secret Integration is too. But there are
problems in both. He tries too hard at times and 
he simply was a slow learner. Although he put his
heart into it, going to Watts, addressing issues of
segregation and the like, he was simply very ignorant
of what was going on at the street level, of people
and their worlds. 

> 
> "Low-lands" is a story about mid-century sailors,
> and if the narrative voice
> wouldn't resonant with a certain fond tolerance,
> even sympathy, for Flange
> and Pig, it would be much less effective. It's a
> story written by an
> imperfect guy about an imperfect guy, and I truly
> feel that if the narrative
> voice would be more PC or sanitized or careful or
> what-have-you, the story
> would lose some of its effectiveness, as we'd see
> the author placed too far
> above the characters.

Part of P's problem as a young writer is his failure
to create a distance with a narrative voice. I'm not
sure right now, but I recall reading that after
Hemingway, P started reading Conrad. At some point,
prior to or while writing V. he read Melville (at
least he read Moby-Dick). I think it is essntial for P
to create this distance and the Stencil (he may have
been reading Nabokov too and the idea to
Stencilize--Henry Adams & Graves etc--is a great big
giant step in P's development as an author. It's not a
matter of being above the average or ordinary
protagonist (not sure P manages to make Flange very
ordinary or if that is his objective?). P has the guys
sit around and spin yarns. This is good. However, the
"almost me" guy keeps intruding. And he's a smart-ass
with attitudes that put us off. They put off the
"Modern" reader not because they are not PC or not
what we expect from a postmodern 
thinker like TRP. They put us off because they intrude
in an awkward manner because they are the attitudes of
an apprentice writer. The Pynchon of V. and GR is a
wonderful ironist. But a wet back psychoanalyst and a
fat pork-pie hat on negro keeper of a dump is not
skillful irony. A grotesque disparity infused with the
fantastic, like the Italian Roman Catholic Jew named
Benny Profane at the holy festival where girls morph
into demons or the Jesuit in the sewer eating his
saints, works ironically because we have obvious
reasons to question the reliability of the narratives.
What P does time and again in GR, and in V. too, is to
infuse the narrative with fantastic elements, "black
humor", inflated style (consider the horrible murder
scenes in V.)  and grotesque disparities that
undermine reliability and create all sorts of
ambiguities and indeterminates. 



 
> This isn't to say that the story is not insightful;
> it is, and it's my
> favorite Pynchon story. It lands its shots well,
> deep beneath the flesh, so
> well that it takes a while to even figure out where
> you've been scored....

> 
> But of course, I am a 35-year old guy, obsessed with
> nautical fiction,
> classical music, and tall tales; living in New York
> in a relationship of 5+
> years and a bit freaked out about the "when are we
> going to have a child"
> question, so.... Well, maybe "Low-lands" works for
> me because I see so much
> Flange in myself? 
> 
> --Quail


Yes, well being about the same age as you and living
in the same city and all that I've got quite a few
friends like Flange. I had my kids when I was a kid.
So it's been a matter of, should I start over and have
a new family now. I think it was Betrand Russell, in
Marriage and Morality maybe, that said, having
children is necessary for human  happiness. I don't
know about that. But I can't imagine not having them.
But, of course there are risks either way. They can
die and you can go on living with only broken memories
and your heart stapled to a dying animal. 

"Life is what happens to you when your busy making
other plans." 

    --John Lennon


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com