ATDDTA (6) 166 - 170 a

[David Morris]

On 4/10/07, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
[big snip]
>
> 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).

Interesting insight, which is clearly - from the passages quoted- a
conscious strategy in Pynchon's big novels.  But some of the linkages
(not the prose) should be shit, right?  Some clues should lead no
where, or to false conclusions.  But thinking back to GR, nothing is
ever really certain, no conclusion doesn't have an explicit
contradiction somewhere else in the text.  So in many ways "truth"
really is left to the discretion of the reader - so in THAT regard,
nothing really is shit.  The patterns in the text can never clearly
resolve, and this is I guess what makes GR so different from Ulysses
(which nobody ever clearly understands either the first time through).

David Morris