MMV

[Otto]

> >
> > though there is a sense of smug self-satisfaction in the way that
> >Pynchon has Siegel leave the shallow and selfish pseudo-bohemians
> > to their supposed just deserts at the close.
> >
> >
> >In this I disagree. I don't share this sense and I don't think that the
> >story has a morale like "they were so shallow they deserved to die" or
> >"they looked too weird, it served them right."
>
>
> But this is precisely what the story communicates.
>

This only would be the case if Siegel had been presented throughout the
story as a nice guy easy to identify with. But the contrary is the case;
he's clearly set up as an asshole nobody identifies with. I have a feeling
that there's nobody to identify with in that story. But an opportunity to
identify with a character isn't what I'm looking after in reading a story or
a novel.

> And I completely agree
> with robert's comment below.  It's almost as if Pynchon is describing
> himself and his own chosen world and wishing to destroy it all out of a
> deep sense of disatasfaction.

Fine, I couldn't disagree more. I've never detected this hitlerian attitude
& death wish in Pynchon: bis alles in Scherben fällt.

This is what King has to say about it:

"By the end of the story, however, the reader understands
that the careless use of language (the very crime that
Pynchon has been accused of), or the refusal to use it at all,
can lead to disaster. But if Siegel's moral failure boils down
to his careless use of language, the reader's moral failure can
be attributed to careless reading. Loon's moral failure stems
from his Windigo psychosis, a condition that causes him to
identify with a mythological figure who feeds on human flesh.
Few of us are in danger of identifying with either Loon or this
mythic monster.Yet most readers, despite Pynchon's warnings,
identify with Siegel, who is simply a more clever cannibal.
Like Loon, then, the reader also suffers from a form of Windigo
psychosis.[sup12] To blame Pynchon for this unflattering diagnosis
--or simply to refuse to acknowledge it--is itself a moral failure."

> At least in his later, better works he develops
> some sympathy for the world as it is and the characters who occupy it.
>

What kind of sympathy could you "develop" personally for a guy like Cleanth
Siegel, Pointsman, Major Marvy or even Slothrop?

> > > Comment:
> > > With its ostentatious and often gratuitous references to Shakespeare,
> >the Bible and gnostic Apocrypha, Jewish funeral traditions and Catholic
> >church rituals, bullfighting, Dada, Goethe, Eliot, Conrad, Albertus
> > Magnus,
> >Santayana, Gaugin, foreign language phrases, Ojibwa culture and
> >psychopathology, and more, the story suffers from precisely the same
> >pretentiousness that it satirises in the shape of the partygoers babbling
> >on about "Zen", "San Francisco" and "Wittgenstein" -- perhaps
> >self-consciously and self-parodically, though, if so, not overtly enough.
>
> Bingo!  All these references with no point or payoff.  No synthesis
>

Well, then you should analyse them one by one. I don't think that a
postmodern short story requires a synthesis, only some kind of consistency.
But this consistency can best lie in its inconsistency. As David Seed says,
and I quote this explicitly to counter Rob's argument that "the story
suffers from precisely the same pretentiousness that it satirises":

"(...) the story's humor and surrealism grows out of a disparity between its
various elements. We jerk unsettingly from anthropological reference to
party small-talk to literary allusions, all of which pull against each other
rather than settle down into stable oppositions. At the heart of the story
lies a belief in the inauthenticity of contemporary life and a split in the
self between feeling and intellect."
("The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon," Iowa City 1988, p. 20)

> > but what is particularly jejune is the way the narrative ultimately
> > resolves itself in a blood-bath: it's a species of that characteristic
> > and supposedly shocking "and then the world exploded" climax
> > ending written by barely-pubescent prodigies
> > ("a pose of ... somber glee at any idea of mass
> > destruction or decline" as he describes it in SL:13).
>

But within the story it makes a damn good sense. What would you two expect?
That Loon takes the BAR off the wall but instead of killing them he forces
them to listen to him, telling them in a long monologue what kind of fools
and spoiled children they are? That Debbie admits her wrongdoing and that
they all collect some money to buy a ticket for Loon to get back home?

> As I said earlier: hamfisted.
>

Without giving arguments for this, sorry.

> >Otto sez:  So concluding from this I'd say our discussion here already
> >proves that it's a good story.
>
> No.  We are only discussing it because it was written by Pynchon.
> Otherwise we would never have looked at it twice.
>
> Ghetta
>

Good point! But I still prefer MMV to "Entropy" or "Low-lands," according to
my personal taste.

Otto