Well I just reread Vineland and the news is still bad...

[Dustin Iler]

I happen to find AtD quite brilliant from beginning to finish. Before I give 
some reasons why I'll say that if one wants to read GR then one should read 
GR rather than AtD, just as I would say that if one wants to read Ulysses or 
Madame Bovary or Moby-Dick one should read those works reather than 
Portrait, A Sentimental Education, or Typee.

Now for a few of the passages that make AtD a phenomenal work:

On page ten Pynchon describes the Chums descent into Chicago over the 
Stockyards:

"As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell 
and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality---like the dark conjugate of 
some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared increasingly likely, to 
help promote. Somewhere down there was the White City promised in the 
Columbian Exposition brochures, somewhere among the tall smokestacks 
unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the effluvia of butchery 
unremitting, like children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the 
day. In the Stockyards, workers coming off shift, overwhelmingly of the 
Roman faith, able to detach from earth and blood for a few precious seconds, 
looked up at the airship in wonder, imagining a detachment of not 
necessarily helpful angels." (10)

An amazing facet of the above prose is the way in which the narration moves 
us from the Chums point of view to that of the Stockyard worker. Moving from 
air to the earth the Chums do not see the whole city, rather details of the 
city rise to their senses as the sky above Chicago is sundered from the city 
itself, then all coalesces in a multitude of sens experiences through their 
oversight: from the smell and sound of slaughter into darkness and light, to 
the clean crisp and contrived representations of the White City in the 
various printed promotional brochures which lit the tourists way to the 
Exposition; then back into the darkness of industrialization, the worker's 
bleak life whose faith proimses the encompassment of all, and culminating 
with the moment when, for the worker, oversight overtakes him as he glimpses 
away from the world and into it, up at hte descending Chums whose vantage 
the reader's descent into Chicago began, and with whom the workers' mundane 
lives are momentarily lifted into the realization that both they (the 
workers) and the wonderful Chums exist in the same world.

Such realizations---that the impoverished worker and the Chums of Chance 
coexist---is one of the great parts of AtD. The description of the 
Stockyards is at once grim, dark, and beautifully described in Pynchon's 
prose.

On page 53 Pynchon once again describes the Stockyards as "where the Trail 
comes to its end at last," an allusion to the closing of the Frontier, and 
continues in a scene that evokes the evacuation that opens GR:

"following the stock in their sombre passage from arrival in rail cars, into 
the smells of shit and chemicals, old fat and tissue diseased, dying, and 
dead, and a rising background choir of animal terror and shouting in human 
languages few of them had heard before, till the moving chain brought in 
stately parade the hook-hung carcasses at last to the chilling-rooms."

Here the stockyards become the railroad in miniature. The railroad and its 
rail cars are attached like the links of a chain, parts comprising a whole, 
which lead to the trail of moving stock, links themselves, one following the 
other---chaos threatening if even one link falls loose of the 
line---marching to a convergence of human and animal voices, each an 
unitelligible assemblage; a middle reaching out from the interstices to 
encompass all.

Later Chicago is described as, "the city at the center of twenty or thirty 
railway lines, radiating with their interconnections out to the rest of the 
continent . . . the steel webwork was a living organism, growing by the 
hour, answering some invisible command" (177). In this manner Chicago 
becomes an interstice for the whole of the country, which it very much was 
in 1892, a place where capital slowed down and accumulated, making fortunes, 
and (necessarily?) a place where forced animal life slowed to a crawl.

I could go on with more scenes, and perhaps I will, but all of this ties 
into "stupid" Pugnax and the Chums as characters who connect---like Chicago 
and the Railroad and the cattle---the numerous narrative threads. The Chums 
of Chance are a fun, nostalgic, and inventive way to move the reader from 
scene to seen, culminating in the readers becoming Chums themselves. Now, if 
you haven't reached that part of the novel, then you aren't reading the same 
book as me, or others who have managed to get there. All I can say is keep 
on reading, and back your claims up with some reading, otherwise it 
appears---at least from my computer screen---like I'm reading the 
compositions of an illiterate armed only with no sense and a keyboard.

Longtime Lurker, Occasional Poster


>From: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
>To: kraimie at kraimie.net, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Well I just reread Vineland and the news is still bad...
>Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:44:03 +0300
>
>
>
>>I've no interest in arguing this view, for a couple of reasons.  In the 
>>first place, it strikes me that arguing this view on the p-list would be 
>>rather like arguing to a devout Catholic that the doctrine of the Trinity 
>>is horseshit.  Except in the rarest of circumstances, no good is going to 
>>come from such a discussion.
>
>
>I can only speak for myself. As far as I'm concerned any criticism of AtD 
>is more than welcome. Discussing its flaws may be as exciting as discussing 
>its merits. If you say that AtD sucks, it's quite alright with me, you 
>haven't become my sworn enemy after this. But it would be more productive 
>if you could be more specific about your disliking, I mean: plot-wise, 
>character-wise, imagery-wise, language-wise etc.
>
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