ATDDTA (6) 166 - 170 a

[Tore Rye Andersen]

John Bailey:

>I've also long thought that the structural excess of Pynchon's novels, the 
>fact that they're so >damn overstuffed with concepts, characters, 
>references etc is an attempt to echo in form that >thematic interest in 
>recovering the remaindered elements, allowing the reader to become aware 
> >of their own role in the production of waste (forgetting, ignoring or 
>"writing off" certain aspects of >the novel in favour of others).

Big YES! That idea has been an extremely important feature in Pynchon's work 
right from the beginning, both on a structural and an overtly thematical 
level. Nowhere is the idea more clearly expressed than in Lot 49: Oedipa has 
to become a sorting demon in her attempt to make sense of Pierce's complex 
estate, and on her subsequent quest towards enlightenment and the Truth 
behind the Tristero, she ends up mostly ignoring the preterite human refuse 
she encounters, discarding it as finally irrelevant for her quest.

The idea is front and center in Lot 49, but it is primarily present as a 
THEME in that compact jewel of a book, and I have a feeling that is one of 
the reasons for Pynchon's apparent dislike of the novel/story: In Pynchon's 
longer works, the idea is no less important, but it is first and foremost 
played out on a structural level, as you point out. Those novels - 
especially GR, M&D, and AtD - are so maddeningly complex that the first- 
(and second-, and third-) time reader is forced to make some choices as he 
goes along; forced to focus on certain aspects of the novels and ignore 
others. Reading GR or AtD for the first time is the equivalent of Enzian's 
impossible attempt to keep all the details of the complex Schwarzkommando 
situation in his head at one time:

"It comes down to this day-to-day knitting and unraveling, minor successes, 
minor defeats. Thousands of details, any one of which carries the chance of 
a fatal mistake. [...] The details - valves, special tools that may or may 
not exist, Erdschweinhöhle jalousies and plots, lost operating manuals, 
technicians on the the run from both Eath and West, food shortages, sick 
children - swirl like fog, each particle with its own array of forces and 
directions....he can't handle them all at the same time, if he stays too 
much with any he's in danger of losing others...." (GR, 326-27)

.....so Enzian, like the reader, is forced to choose, and in doing so, he 
passes over equally important details, relegates them to the status of 
waste.

Reading Pynchon's novels several times, of course, the reader can begin to 
include some of those previously discarded details in his conception of the 
whole picture; can begin to find value in all the waste (which was never 
waste to begin with), and can - like the music of Rossini - begin to 
transmute the shit to gold (GR, 440). The experience of reading AtD for the 
first (and second) time has been a humbling one, though: The whole waste 
idea has - for me at least - gradually appeared as I have read Pynchon's 
books again and again. The realization that first-time readers of Pynchon's 
novels leave a lot of waste behind them as they plow through the text has 
come about through a pretty intimate knowledge of his previous novels, and I 
haven't really felt the idea on my own readerly body. Reading a brand new 
novel like AtD, however, one feels the full impact of this idea: As I read 
the novel for the second time, I found it very depressing to discover how 
much I'd already forgotten from the first pass through the wilderness of the 
text; how much I'd passed over in order to make sense of what was going on.

Reading the novel for the second time, and participating in this group read, 
more and more of those initially ignored or forgotten details are lifted out 
of the dustbin of that first reading, and some of the shit is transmuted to 
gold. It's a slow process, however, at least for those who are not gifted 
like Lew Basnight, who - as we see on p. 42 of AtD - has the simple grace to 
notice things, to pay closer attention than the rest of us poor sheep with 
our limited processing capacities.

_________________________________________________________________
Opret en personlig blog og del dine billeder på MSN Spaces:  
http://spaces.msn.com/