Pynchon's misdirection

[pynchonoid]

Sorry, Tore, didn't mean to attribute a knee-jerk
response so much to you as to Pynchon-l more
generally. This topic - P's misdirection and
Hollander's fine articles - comes up again and again,
and always goes in the same direction. I also assumed
from your previous post that you have read Hollander,
and didn't mean to imply you hadn't. Also, I did say, 
"no offense intended" which might count for something
in a friendly literary conversation like this one.

Yes,  Hollander "more often than not points out valid
and compelling additions to those Pynchonian
multivalences."

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


Agreed that to some degree, as Tore says, "It is a
leap of the 
imagination to jump from Varo to Varro"  but I guess
to what degree is the question. And how many are "too
many" connections when connections seem to be
Pynchon's fundamental point, or, maybe better to say
it's noting connections and trying to figure out which
are worth heeding.

Tore says " 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" 
and I guess I was assuming most of us frequent p-list
posters, are already in that mode when we read
Pynchon, and that P counts on it. 

I see COL49 as more about Oedipas' consciousness
expanding to include precisely those things Tore says
she "forgets to see"-- "...all the suffering going 
on around her, all the human refuse and all the
preterite waste she 
encounters in the American night". 

Right, Pynchon's text says "if only 
she'd looked" and then, of course, goes on to affirm  
"She remembered now."  

In other words, even in the search for encrypted
meanings and secret codes, the deeper truths managed
to seep in and make themselves known to her.

"Hollander seems to believe that the True Text in
Pynchon's works is 
hidden beneath the surface"  - this is a simplistic
distortion of Hollander's work. 

True enough, it's the version that the likes of Keith
and other Hollander-bashers have been selling here for
years, but it's not the case, imo.  I've met the man
and talked about these questions with him at length,
and if you had, too, Tore, I don't think you'd go
after Charles Hollander quite this savagely. He's a
perceptive and sensitive Pynchon reader, of enormous
erudition.  Safe to say Hollander has researched
Pynchon's texts as thoroughly as any Pynchon reader,
and he has made his research available freely for the
rest of us.

I'll take Hollander's insight into Pynchon over
Keith's tinyurls any day.

Tore "I firmly believe that the important stuff in
Pynchon's work is 
right there on the surface for all to see"  and of
course that's true but that observation leaves out the
both/and aspect that cuts through Pynchon's texts. 
Surface AND depth, not either/or."

How often have Tore and others in the ATD discussion
to date echoed Hollander's statement that some readers
(lame ATD reviewers in the current discussion) 
"don’t get the hang of it."  Reading Pynchon does
involve a learning curve, if the reader is going to
stick with it.  

I'd have thought by now that it would be obvious that
Hollander's "Magic Eye" is a metaphor, not a physical
attribute that he claims for himself and denies other
readers.  I'm surprised how many otherwise
sophisticated Pynchon readers seem to forget this. 

Tore: "It *is* a subtle game Pynchon plays", as you
put it, but 
part of the subtlety is knowing when to stop." 

I guess my question is, what's really gained by such
"stopping", even if it were possible - where again is
that clear boundary between Pynchon's text and the
rest of the texts to which it relates?  Back to square
one, I don't see the leap from Varo to Varro as
outrageous or even unexpected, given the puzzle that
Pynchon obviously makes of his texts, and others
disagree. So be it. That works for me.

Thanks for your post, Tore, and for the chance to make
a few of these points again.


>http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"

>http://nonhumancommunications.com
"for the rest of us"


 
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