Rocketmen and Wastelands

[Monte Davis]

John Carvill:  "He sticks to the pomo/theoretical side which is my least favourite aspect of Pynchon... But he also doesn't mention the wonderful poetic prose, astonishing imagery and inventiveness, etc."

A-and if it weren't for the latter, we wouldn't be reading P in the first place. The Big Themes aren't floating Platonically above the seminar room. They come *through* the words on the page. A-and time after time, hundreds and thousands of  times, P makes me drop my jaw and shake my head and say "I didn't know it was possible to DO that with a sentence."

Bear with me for five sentences:

"It made him sadder: as if all his homes were temporary and even they, inanimate, still wandering as he: for motion is relative, and hadn’t he, now, really stood there still on the sea like a schlemihl Redeemer while that enormous malingering city and its one livable inner space and one unconnable (therefore hi-valu) girl had all slid away from him over a great horizon’s curve comprising, from this vantage, at once, at least one century’s worth of wavelets?"

"She thought of other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother’s pocket radio; of other squatters who stretched canvas for lean‑tos behind smiling billboards along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, un­troubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of unheard messages."

"Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof‑ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpent, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic stain of burnt orange to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in the street before he goes up to the soap‑heavy smell of the rented room and the squares of coral sunset on the floorboards—an antique light, self‑absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep."

"According to Frenesi, Brock had been born under the sign of the Scorpion, the only critter in nature that could sting itself to death with its own tail, reminding Zoyd of self-destructive rftaniacs he’d ridden with back in his car-club days, beer outlaws speeding well above the limit, dreaming away with these romantic death fantasies, which usually gave them hardens they then joked about all night, bright-eyed, don’t-fuck-with-me-sincere country boys with tattoos reading ME 'N' DEATH inside hearts dripping blood, who feared nothing unless it was taking apart a transmission, who might have ended up cops and coaches and selling insurance, soft-spoken as could be, Mister Professional, good grip on the world, but underneath all the time there’d been the onrushing night road, the yellow lines and dashes, the terrible about-to-burst latency just ahead, the hardon, and this Brock here looked like a big-city edition of that same dreamy fatality."

"Trying to remember how they ever came to this place, both speak of Passage as by a kind of flight, all since Tenerife, and the Mountain slowly recessional, having pass’d like a sailor’s hasty dream between Watches, as if, out of a sea holding scant color, blue more in name than in fact, the unreadable Map-scape of Africa had unaccountably emerg’d, as viewed from a certain height above the pale Waves,— tilted into the Light, as a geometer’s Globe might be pick’d up and tilted for a look at this new Hemisphere, this haunted and other half of ev’rything known, where spirit-powers run free among the green abysses and the sudden mountain crests,— Cape Town’s fortifications, sent crystalline by the Swiftness, rushing by from a low yet dangerous altitude as the Astronomers go swooping above the shipping in the Bays, topmen pointing in amazement, every detail, including the Invisible, set precisely, present in all its violent chastity."

I submit that those will stand comparison with the finest flights of Joyce, Faulkner, James, Nabokov, *any* prose stylist in the language. They are astonishing at the nutz 'n' bolts, syntactical/musical level of a great fugue or jazz solo: how to go very far, very fast, in many directions, without the wheels falling off.  

They are astonishing as exemplars of that ol' Brahmin's objective correlative: "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that *particular* emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

A-and oh yeah... they are astonishing in how many points of entry to the Big Themes of its book each sentence offers. But criticism which dives straight for that without going *through* the first two always seems to me at least a little tin-eared and Pointsman--ish.   

 

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