Pynchon's endings

[Daniel Harper]

On Wednesday 07 March 2007 11:55, you wrote:
> --- Daniel Harper <daniel_harper at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Much of the pleasure of reading the book comes
> > not from trying to sort out the mystery, but rather
> > of all the strange and wonderous things that happen
> > along the way.
>
> I second that e-motion.  It's more the frustration
> that comes from trying to sort it out ...
>

I'm referring to something a bit different. While the "meaning" of Lot 49 is 
buried in the meaning of Trystero, etc., I think it's entirely possible to 
read the novel as a series of set pieces without any real overall meaning. 
And the book is meaningful and wonderful even on those terms.

Two name two examples from that novel, the two that struck me as particularly 
great even upon a first, Jack-Daniels-laden read:

1.) The Oedipa/Metzger meeting/love affair from chapter two. It's an amazing 
sequence visually, with rock stars/rock songs all over the place, a TV-movie 
with out-of-order reels (a reference to Pynchon's own inscrutability?), a bet 
between the two characters regarding the ending of the movie, as well as the 
whole "strip a piece of clothing for every question you ask" bit. It's filled 
with low comedy (Oepdia's appearance after reappearing from the bathroom) and 
high concepts, shaken and served to the reader without a perceptible rhyme or 
reason. By the end of the chapter the reader feels shaken, with huge volumes 
of plot that might fill a lesser novel to the brim whizzing past. And it has 
very little to do with the "meaning" of the novel -- it exists almost just to 
introduce and ancillary character. 

2.) Towards the end of the novel, when Oedipa meets up with Hilarius in his 
office surrounded by police squad cars. On page 111-112 of the Modern 
Classics Trade Paperback, Hilarius relates his account of Buchenwald, where 
he was employed as a staff psychiatrist "work[ing] on experimentally-induced 
insanity. A catatonic Jew was as good as a dead one. Liberal SS circles felt 
it would be more humane." And he talks about the meaning of something like 
Buchenwald in Freud's ("that Jew") thinking. And while Hilarius used funny 
faces to drive the Jews insane, a ridiculous notion, it's also a very sly 
nudge towards more "liberal" social reformers in Germany and the US who were 
responsible for the eugenics movement, in which "humane" eugenicsts felt that 
sterilizing the unfit was much better than simply killing them. And all the 
while the cops are pressing Oedipa to get Hilarius to give himself up...

This is getting long, but ATD is even more astonishing in this regard. I can 
open the book to virtually any page and find something astonishing, something 
amazing, something absurd, that has little or no straightforward relevance to 
the main "themes" of the novel. Pynchon's works aren't just puzzling, they 
are _dense_ with levels of meaning, filled to the brim with material that 
makes it possible to read them at many levels of attention. While this group 
specializes in understanding the myriad complexities of the meaning of "day" 
for instance, Entertainment Weekly gave it an "A" rating simply due to the 
sheer joy of reading such astonishing bits as anarchist golf and the Traverse 
revenge plot.

I'm a bit spoiled, now. Other novels just seem to plod along now, barely 
making me pay any attention to them at all.

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper