Why Sista be messin wit the Devil

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> Thanks. It's an excellent essay, and I have to say again that I agree with
> Otto's comments about Sullivan's conclusion. I don't think that the ending
> trades the "master-narrative" of Brock Vond for that of Reaganomics at all.
> It's a supreme irony that Brock has his funding cut right at that moment --
> a case of poetic justice a bit like Major Marvy's castration in _GR_ -- but
> Vond's and Reagan's "master-narratives" and modus operandi are pretty
> compatible in most other respects. And I'm not sure how a resistance to
> master-narratives (cf. Lyotard) can become a "master-narrative" in its own
> right, one that Pynchon has "fallen victim to". For one, there is that
> characteristic self-conscious or reflexive irony which permeates Pynchon's
> work (eg. the Deleuze & Guattari "fakebook"), and postmodern writing in
> general, wherein the text demonstrates an acute self-awareness of itself as
> a narrative construct. Secondly, what is the alternative? Sullivan poses
> nothing, and the tone of Pynchon's ending scene with Prairie and Brock is
> wistful, almost despairing. Finally, the rejection of postmodernism as just
> another "master-narrative" is a "master-narrative" in itself, and a
> reactionary one at that.
> 
> The quote I like is this one: "some white male far away must have wakened
> from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over" (Pynchon 376). Word
> choice here is everything. Brock's "clambake" ends just like the '60s
> "clambake" ended for those in the ascendant when Nixon came into power. It's
> the continuity in American society and history which Pynchon invokes, social
> and civic regimes motivated by self-interest and arrogance ousting one
> another in generational cycles.

And of course one reason Sullivan misreads the text is because he
ignores it. For example, Sister R tells Takeshi that she is talking
about DL and she asks him not to commit original sin. It's all very much
inside/under the covers. 

Sullivan's essay is so typical of the kind of stuff the Pynchon Industry
can grind out day in and day out: so focused on one of postmodernism's
master-narrative tropes it doesn't bother to open the novel. I agree
that he starts off on the right track when he quotes The Postmodern
Condition and I really think he's on to something with that quote from
Giroux because the Sister R story is a good of example of 
postmodernism's rejection of general abstractions that deny the
specificity and particularity of everyday life ... that really very
good. But he stumble out of the blocks when he takes the baby step and
says that Pynchon's and Postmodernism's suspicion toward
master-narratives. OK Good Job. 

>From here on the essay is a mess.  The conclusion is, as we all seem to
agree, another misreading.