Keesey: Rereading Pynchon

[John Doe]

Seymor-Smith is on acid...."castration"??? yeaaaaahhhh
-right...classic victim of the more you WANT to read
into a work to fit your subconcious agendas, the more
you DO read into the work...talk about not only
straining credulity, but pushing the tertiary
allegorical possibilities to the forefront of lame
justification...I mean, has he even bothered to read
Pynchon's into to Slow Learner?...sure, sure  I
realize it's loaded with false humility, untenable
self-effacing criticism ( such as his remark that he
liked to use the word "tendril" a lot but has no idea
even now what a tendril is; a guy who can digest the
workings of rocket engineering and creatively
transform the source material can easily look up
"tendril" in the dictionary! ), but nonetheless,
Pynchon was what,? 21 or 22 when he wrote it; he
clearly had not developed the ranging power of his
imagination and rendering skills to anywhere near the
level that he arguably peaked at in his thirties ( as
so many writers seems to do, incidentally ) when he
was working on GR...Entropy is a tight gem for what it
reveals about his humor, his preoccupation with the
'preterite', and for his love of scientific
metaphors...it's a porthole onto some of his soon to
be engrossing themes perhaps, but it is not to GR what
"The Dead" is to Ulysses...ironically, no Pynchon was
hardly a slow learner ( yet another phony play at
self-undermining charm ) as his high school and
Cornell transcripts one A after another...but to
assume he had become the Sorcerer before he fumbled
his way as an Apprentice is not very sensible...

Tristero69





 jbor at bigpond.com wrote:

> A poorly-edited essay that addresses Martin
> Seymour-Smith's judgement 
> (in his 1985 _New Guide to Modern World Literature_)
> that Pynchon is 
> not a "great writer". Basically it's a fairly
> bizarre reading of the 
> short story 'Entropy', inferring Callisto's
> "castration" and his and 
> Aubade's ultimate suicide. Pdf available.
> 
> '"A Flaw Not Only In Him": Rereading Thomas Pynchon'
> 
> by Douglas Keesey. _boundary 2_ Spring/Fall 1988,
> Vol. 15/16 Issue 3/1, 
> pp. 215-237.
> 
> Abstract
> The article focuses on an appraisal of the writings
> of Thomas Pynchon. 
> Critics who have had trouble categorizing Pynchon's
> three novels, 
> particularly the kaleidoscopically allusive,
> 760-page _Gravity's 
> Rainbow_, have naturally turned to Pynchon's short
> fiction for help. 
> 'Entropy' has proven the favorite, anthologized and
> discussed more 
> often than any other Pychon short story because, as
> one critic put it, 
> "The significance of the story grows, in retrospect,
> as an aesthetic 
> source and a preface for the novels that follow. In
> contrast to their 
> uncertain ties, this work is almost proverbial in
> its clarity and 
> simplicity." With its contrapuntal or fungal
> structure, "Entropy," has 
> served numerous critics as the strong, clear source
> against which to 
> understand all the complex words that came after.
> 
> best
> 
> 


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