The 'Waste' Law | Pynchon's genealogical influences

[Daniel Harper]

Comments interspersed below.

On Nov 21, 2007 12:40 PM, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
> > I think you're misreading me slightly...
>
> No, just indulging my habitual vice of using your post as a starting point
> for my own tangent. :-)

Heh heh. Fair enough.

> See, I've never thought of Pynchon as reclusive, no
> matter how many times people engaged in the *business* of book promotion
> tell me that he is, because (they say) hunger for personal celebrity is
> normal....
>
> And no matter how many times his fans tell me that he is, because they think
> their devotion entitles them to more information.
>
> I think he simply
>
> 1) works very hard at research and writing, and enjoys doing that more than
> talking about it
>
> 2) did well enough early on (published AFAIK every story he wanted to, then
> with his frist novel got a Faulkner Foundation award, reviews to die for,
> and very respectable sales) that he quite reasonably felt he didn't *need*
>+ to do interviews and book tours
>
> 3) came to get sardonic pleasure from watching all the frenzied,
> self-reinforcing bookchat speculation (i.e., what may well have started as a
> mild preference was positively reinforced and became a way of life)
>

This rings true in a lot of ways, not least because it's about the
most random and purposeless explanation I've heard, which matches what
I understand of reality very well, but the level to which he takes
this is pretty absurd if that's the explanation. I'm sure that what
you say it a portion of the truth, but Pynchon is so reputed for this
phenomenon of reclucivity and he goes to such lengths to maintain it
that I suspect there is some deeper motive somewhere. If you add what
you say above to my hypothesis of "look at the art rather than at me"
aspect, I have no problem with it. (The relative proportions of the
motivations are up for debate, however, but that's not really a
discussion I'm interested in having.)

> So... since I don't think of him as hiding in the first place...
>
> And don't agree with the repeated implication lately in these parts that the
> P. family history has been suppressed, or is any more a Deep Dark Secret of
> American Capitalism than a thousand other family histories one notch below
> the Adams-Rockefeller-Roosevelt-Bush level of prominence...
>

With this I agree. There's a lot of conspiracy-mongering around these
parts by otherwise reasonable people -- while the rich and powerful
have always engaged in PR to make themselves look good, I don't think
that the history of the P's is some deep dark coded history that will
enlighten our views of the whole of American history or any such
thing. It's a rich family engaging in the sports that rich families
have always engaged in (and yes, that includes crushing poor people in
the process) -- nothing that thousands of other "rich scion" families
would not have also done.

> I question the whole premise of a whole nother layer of "coded" revelation
> "beneath" or "behind" what are already extremely layered works of art. Your
> furniture analogy makes perfectly good sense to me.
>
>

I'm glad you like the analogy. I read some article years ago by some
novelist who bemoaned that friends of hers who read her stories would
just _love_ the fact that she used some favorite (of the friend) hat
or lamp in one of her stories, but would "get the details wrong", i.e.
make the hat red instead of blue, or the lamp tall instead of short.
In reality, writers pull from what's around them and adjust the
details of what they see in order to create a setting for their
characters to inhabit. If P is using his family history in some sense
as historical background, that is interesting from a technique point
of view, but I doubt it has any "deeper meaning" in the sense of
allowing us to take apart _history_ or even P's works. He's not
sending us coded messages; he's using events he knows of as
jumping-off points for his novelistic ambitions.

All of that basically to say that I agree with pretty much everything
you've said above. <laughs>

-- 
...the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules
are words...
--Daniel Harper