ATDTDA 671ff

[Monte Davis]

David Morris sez:

> You want me to list the faults I see with ATD?  That wouldn't 
> gain me friends nor converts I suspect. ...

You could be right, but I don't feel *that* far sunk in fandom. Let's kick
it around.

If I guess correctly at what you mean by "*writing*", I'd be the first to
say that he's no Flaubert or James or Nabokov. He can do passages that stand
with anything in the language, for both polished sentence- and
paragraph-level beauty and seamless integration of many themes at many
levels. (Stop and read the paragraph on 740: "Outside, citizens were...")

.. and on the next page he's haring off after a gag, or a sendup of a
pop-culture cliché, or a tangent in setting or subject that practically
shouts "this turned up in my research, and it's lumpy and awkwardly bolted
on, but it's just So Cool!"

James famously charged Tolstoy, Thackeray, and Dumas with failures of
economy, control and "organic form": ''But what do such large loose baggy
monsters with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary,
artistically mean?'' God only knows what he'd make of Pynchon.

And yet, and yet... Pynchon is a magpie-mind, a polymath wannabe. (Wannabe
is as good as it gets since Goethe, or Ficino, or maybe Aristotle, they tell
me.) Based on all the historical, political, scientific, literary, critical,
and bread-sex tangents I see here (as well as the premise of the group
readings themselves) many of us share some of that, feel pleasantly stroked
at catching more of his arcana first time around than the average bear, and
enjoy playing Weisenburger in tracking down more.

I don't think that's an incidental tic in him or purely a game for us. I
think it's inseparable from another esthetic value, right up there with (and
yes, at odds with) economy and control and organic form. It's a sense of
hairy, ramifying, unlimited *connectedness* -- ranging from GR's paranoia
_in excelsis_ to "that reminds me" -- that I get from the loose and baggy
monsters, in even purer form from Rabelais and Sterne and Joyce. And, come
to think of it, from the world and my life.

So I agree with you -- AtD is rambling and divergent and self-indulgent. It
sure looks like scores, hundreds of pieces of it could be excised and you'd
never know they'd been there. But at the same time I'm inclined to cut
Pynchon more slack than any other writer in my experience. Because over
time, a lot of what I thought at first was vamping digression has turned out
to have more and richer connection than appeared at first, to feed back
*into* the most "writerly" side of his work.

E.g., I think if I spent a week with that Venetian paragraph above, I'd find
many, many connections to things scattered throughout all the self-indulgent
Pynchonian handjive about midget submarines, Adriatic pirates, raunchy
waterfront waitresses, Venetian trade to the East, etc. Not to mention other
Pynchonian angels and winds, cities and seas.

And by the time I'm done, the Venetian paragraph will be even more beautiful
than before. And the handjive won't seem so jive-y after all.