It's hard to believe Thomas Pynchon wrote a sentence as bad as this one

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The "Reader, she bit him" sequence on p. 666 evoked similarly negative reactions.  Was it a bad parody of Jane Austen or just bad?  It's always possible to ascribe complex motivations behind every sentence, every decision TRP makes, but sometimes a Tatzelwurm is just a Tatzelwurm.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jul 28, 2008 12:03 PM
>To: Pynchon-L <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: It's hard to believe Thomas Pynchon wrote a sentence as bad as this one
>
>27.7.08
>It's hard to believe Thomas Pynchon wrote a sentence as bad as this one.
>
>"After she had given in to the notion of being doubled up on, she
>found herself going out of the way looking for it, usually one in her
>mouth, the other from behind, sometimes in her ass, so she got quickly
>used to tasting her own fluids mixed with shit."
>
>There's more before and after that, mentions of being chained to a bed
>with leather hobbles and an instance of "you dirty fuckmouth whore"
>but that sentence is representative of the section of "Against the
>Day" in question. I've seen it referred to as the "Cowboy S+M"
>section; it's just one page but it's so poorly written and oddly out
>of place that I've been puzzling about it on and off since I read it.
>
>The rest of the book is excellent. Hugh Kenner wrote a little piece
>about Joyce beginning "Ulysses" in naturalism and ending it in parody
>and in "Against the Day" Pynchon seems so far to take the opposite
>tack, the entire book opening firmly in a parody of boy's adventure
>magazine (Doc Savage-type stuff) but becoming more grounded in tone as
>the demands of reality intrude on the characters. So there are the
>Chums of Chance and their airship The Inconvenience in the
>aforementioned whiz-bang mode, Lew Basnight beginning in a Kafkaesque
>version of Chicago (complete with unspecified sins and surreal dive
>hotels) and proceeding through the American West to England and a
>version of Blavatsky and Yeats's mysticisms, Merle Rideout and his
>daughter Dahlia in an off-kilter version of "Paper Moon" and so on,
>all at the turn of the century, and alternately interacting and
>working at cross-purposes.
>
>The S+M scene is part of the Western revenge saga of the Traverse
>family that takes up large parts of the book at a time and which
>actually I frequently find the hardest sections to get through, though
>I'm trying to reserve judgment until I actually finish the whole
>thing. That particular scene makes sense as regards the motifs of the
>book, the journeys of the characters involved, and setting up a
>situation which will apparently be crucial to the Traverse storyline
>but it's the execution of it that bugs me. Maybe Pynchon was parodying
>cheap smut like Tijuana Bibles or Penthouse stories but that's a
>stretch, it doesn't read as parody or homage in any way . . . I
>respect Pynchon's writing ability, so it comes as even more a
>surprise, especially in the middle of a work so well-written and
>elsewise engaging.
>
>My only other experience with Pynchon is the first 30 or so pages of
>"Gravity's Rainbow" but I've read about him and some miscellanea of
>his, letters, essays etc. and many of his pet interests and issues
>show up in "Against the Day", some reviewers having called it a sort
>of summation of his life's writing (guy is pretty old by now). Ideas
>about capitalism, the use of anarchy as a way to oppose
>industrialization and its effect on worker's rights, the acquisition
>of technology for profitable or military means, the uses of theories
>and hypotheses otherwise marginalized by the mainstream scientific
>community and, very interesting to me, the sense of a fictive space
>(that term is used in reference to the Chums of Chance, with Lew
>Basnight it's the Invisible Area, and to the scientists it's the is
>it/isn't it existence of a substance called Aether), a space where
>these characters can exist indefinitely, only half-seen by the rest of
>society, but a space constantly threatened by the encroachment of
>actual "reality", usually represented by the needs of industrialists
>like Scarsdale Vibe or the shadowy Organization that sends the Chums
>on their missions. An early example is the first chapter, where the
>1893 Chicago World's Fair is described as wrapped in fiction and
>wonder, but the moment the Chums leave it, they're prey to regular
>human emotions and pettiness, reflected by a shift in their dialogue
>and the narrative voice.
>
>Parallels can also be drawn to the current political climate, if
>that's your thing. Blinded by their own arrogance and confidence in
>their abilities, a scientific expedition brings a horrible power to a
>large metropolis (never named, but clearly New York City), initiating
>one cataclysmic night of flames where people flee giant clouds of
>smoke that rush down the city streets, and clog transit systems in a
>panic to escape. The city is afterward described as forgetting the
>actual event, the nature and significance of the attack, only
>remembering a vague injury to their superiority and paying their
>respects to it by leaving the charred portion of the city intact,
>establishing it as a memorial by erecting a gate with a quote from
>Dante etched on the arch.
>
>All in all, an excellent book so far and one I don't mind as my
>introduction to Pynchon, but I'd still like answers about the cowboy
>threesome.
>
>http://phenoptosis.blogspot.com/2008/07/its-hard-to-believe-thomas-pynchon.html
>
>"No symbols where none intended." --Samuel Beckett