First ATD hatchet job

[David Morris]

The first paragraph below makes it clear that the reviewer thinks that
ALL of Pynchon's works are "inhuman."  And at one level he's correct.
Pynchon's novels deal with highly abstract concepts and dichotomies
which ARE coded into the stories he tells.  Sometimes the characters
and stories are subservient to the abstract concepts: characters are
themselves a code.  This is related to our earlier discussion of
fleshed-out versus cardboard characters.  Pynchon's successes or
failures are the result of how well he tells his coded stories and how
human he makes his characters.

As for lists, they are a red herring.  Of course lists have no syntax,
but none of Pynchon's novels are primarily lists.  He may have stories
piled on top of stories, but that doesn't make them lists.  Their
integration is what is at stake.  That integration IS syntax.  How
well he does it is again the question.

As for the reviewer's political differences with Pynchon,  I don't
think the last line of his review supports John's charge.  Again, his
charge has to do with how "human" is Pynchon's portrayal of violence.
We know Pynchon plays with concepts such as anarchy in the overall
spectrum of power relationships of individuals and larger
organizations.  This reviewer is not convinced with Pynchon's
portrayal.  Don't charge him with being a right-winger.  That's simply
not fair, and way too defensive.

David Morris

On 11/15/06, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Incredibly snide (and highly spoilerish) review of ATD. Hinges on calling Pynchon just a conpiler of lists.
>
> .
> For the writer who lives by the list must die by the list, and Mr. Pynchon, in pushing the form to its limits and beyond, demonstrates what a list-like novel cannot do. Multiplicity, it turns out, is not the same thing as complexity: Complexity requires syntax, and syntax is just what the maker of lists must forswear. Human meanings — psychological, social, spiritual — require other kinds of structure than the infinitely repeated "and" of the shaggy-dog story. That is why Mr. Pynchon's meanings, in "Against the Day" as in his better books, are finally inhuman, Manichean, utopian, and dystopian. He believes in conspiracies, not histories, including the individual histories that the novel was invented to tell.
> .
> .
> In fact, however, his attitude towards violence is childishly sentimental, and ruthless in a way only possible to a writer whose imagination has never dwelt among actual human beings."
>
> Reads, to me, like a classic Vinelandish case of the reviewer being unimpressed with Pynchon's pinko commie rat political views.
>
> JC
>
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