Amazing

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Daniel Harper:

>[...] after reading some two thousand pages, including
>four-and-a-half novels, three short stories (saving the end of SL for after
>I finish V.), and several essays and articles, I'm coming to finally be to
>the point of actually being able to read Pynchon. It's an amazing feeling 
>[...]
>
>On the other hand, after I finish V. there's really only one more book to
>go. Sure, I'll be rereading this stuff for my lifetime, and I'll definitely
>be rereading ATD and joining in on ATDDTA after I finish GR, but the
>prospect of being in some sense _done_, with no more to look forward to, is
>slightly disheartening.

But this is when the REAL pleasure starts! I just finished reading GR for 
the tenth time (I timed it so I could finish on Pynchon's 70th birthday - 
the best homage I could think of), and it was at least as enjoyable as the 
first time. Even after several close readings I keep discovering new 
connections, new hidden nerve lines, in that novel (and while doing so, I 
forget others, which can then be rediscovered during a later rereading). 
When Slothrop in GR goes to Raoul's party, he finds a "giddy, shiftless 
crowd" connected by a "network [...] whose complexity his head's never quite 
been able to fit around" (GR, 244). Well even after several readings of all 
Pynchon's novels my head's never quite been able to fit around the 
complexity of them. Reading Pynchon is analogous to Enzian's doomed attempt 
to gain a clear perspective on the tangled web of the Schwarzkommando:

"The details [...] swirl like fog, each particle with its own array of 
forces and directions...he can't handle them all at the same time, if he 
stays too much with any he's in danger of losing others..."
(GR, 326-27)

....o-or to Brigadier Pudding's equally doomed attempt to work through all 
the possible permutations of the European Balance of power in his 
magisterial work 'Things That Can Happen in European Politics': "Never make 
it, [...] it's changing out from under me. Oh, dodgy -- very dodgy." (GR, 
77)

So after finishing GR, you are in some sense *done* with Pynchon - but in 
another sense you're just beginning.

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