TPPM Watts: (31) In the spirit of the season

[Paul Nightingale]

"... a kind of festival in memory of Simon Rodia ..."

The essay ends by recalling the creativity that, throughout the essay,
characterises popular culture as a form of resistance.

Seed's account of the Watts essay concludes with the human skull:

"This image fits Pynchon's purposes so exactly that one wonders whether
it ever existed. But that doesn't really matter because his article
works basically through rhetorical strategies rather than new
information. The object makes an artistic gesture of defiance against
one instrument of power in the white establishment--the television. It
both embodies the debris of Watts and at the same time transforms it
into an emblem of impending crisis. In his manipulation of the reader's
perspective Pynchon extends Rodia's art, attempting to salvage
rhetorically the inhabitants of Watts from being written off as social
detritus." (The Fictional Labyrinths of TP, 155).

Seed has been worth quoting at length, not because I wish to agree with
every word, but because of the amount of time he has devoted to the
Watts essay.

With regard to the final passage of the essay, the arts festival, with
its "fine, honest rebirths" seems more a reiteration of the ethnographic
project. Hence, to dismiss the skull as a mere "emblem" (the
arbitrariness of which gives rise to the possibility that it might be
'made up'--I'm deliberately not using the word 'fictional', of course)
is to deny its narrative function.

Anyway ...