Pynchon's misdirection

[Tore Rye Andersen]

>From: Dave Monroe

[On Charles Hollander]

>I've said this before and no doubt will inevitably say
>it again, but here I think the problem is mostly taht
>he leads with his most tenuous example, is all.  In
>general he may overstate his case, but, taken
>alongside other readings, as any reading should be,
>reagrdless of any reader's insistance otherwise, he
>more often than not points out valid and compelling
>additions to those Pynchonian multivalences ...

I'm not saying that Hollander doesn't make some valid points, but I'll argue 
that his examples, especially in his Magic Eye Views-essay, are often at 
least as tenuous as the Remedios Varo/Varro connection. And this leads me on 
to Doug's post:

>How is it that Varo wouldn't, doesn't, or can't lead
>to Varro, again?

>Seems a rather natural progression, and I've never
>really understood this rap, it's almost a knee-jerk
>reflex on Pynchon-l (no offense intended, Tore - this
>topic comes up often enough, and it goes in the same
>direction each time), that such an interpretive move
>requires some extraordinary leap of faith on the part
>of a reader. I don't think that's the case.

It's not a knee-jerk reflex on my behalf, and frankly it's an "Inexpensive 
Salvo" (as Mason would call it) to write off my critique with that 
characterization. I'm pretty new to the p-list, and have not been involved 
in previous discussions of Hollander's essays, so I've come to my "knee-jerk 
reflex" (or, as I would argue, sound critique of Hollander's work - which I 
*have* read, Doug, more than once) all on my own. It is a leap of the 
imagination to jump from Varo to Varro, especially when Varo's painting 
makes so much sense itself in the context of the novel. If the use of her 
painting hadn't been so developed, I would be the first one to start looking 
for additional connections etc. - and yes, I would even be "quite willing to 
get out the dictionary and the encyclopedia and lots of other books and 
start piecing things together", as you put it - but one can easily make 
*too* many connections, as I recently argued in a post about paranoia and 
reading:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=113911&sort=date

- and Pynchon thematizes just this throughout his work. I especially 
consider Lot 49 to be a critique of such an endeavour. Oedipa is so busy 
chasing hidden Grails that she forgets to see what's all around her. In 
other words, she's so busy using her 'Magic Eye View' that she forgets to 
use her real eyes, and consequently she doesn't see all the suffering going 
on around her, all the human refuse and all the preterite waste she 
encounters in the American night. She would probably have seen it, "if only 
she'd looked", as the narrator points out (twice) on p. 179, but she 
doesn't, and readers busy searching for encrypted meanings and secret codes 
may not either.

Hollander does make some valid connections in his essays, but the main 
problem as far as I'm concerned - and apparently as far as Keith is 
concerned, too:

http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0701&msg=114703&sort=date

-is that Hollander seems to believe that the True Text in Pynchon's works is 
hidden beneath the surface. His rhetoric seems to imply as much. And it is 
certainly tempting to believe so, since Pynchon's texts are dense and 
complex, but I firmly believe that the important stuff in Pynchon's work is 
right there on the surface for all to see - to quote Pynchon himself: His 
novels are texts "that speak their entire meaning, all of it right out on 
the surface" (GR, 435). Hollander's readings attempt to get *under* the 
surface, to get to the good stuff beneath, but I think that reading Pynchon 
is all about untangling the surface.
Hollander, on the other hand, seems to believe that he has cracked the code, 
unlike most naive readers:

"Some viewers don’t get the hang of it. They don’t recognize anything beyond 
the flatly two-dimensional view of the printed page. So it is with reading 
Pynchon: some people just don’t get it. […] Reading Pynchon with a trained 
eye transforms Lot 49 into an analogue of a Magic Eye® book with levels of 
dimensionality available to readers who have the knack, the magic" (62)

Hollander apparently has "the magic", and as he says at another point in the 
Magic Eye-essay, he's one of "those who know" (37), but I must say that I 
balk at this kind of rhetoric, and I'll repeat that its resemblance to that 
parody of paranoid reading in GR 664-65 is uncanny. To imply, like Hollander 
does, that he has 'decoded' Pynchon and found the true meaning that a 
literal-minded poor sucker like me can't see, seems arrogant to me. 
Hollander puts himself in the company of Elect readers, leaving preterite 
readers in the dust, but he does so by piling tenuous connection upon 
tenuous connection. It *is* a subtle game Pynchon plays", as you put it, but 
part of the subtlety is knowing when to stop. And I'll do just that: stop. 
There's only so much one can say about a knee-jerk reflex, after all.

Best,

Tore

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