The Burial of the Dead

[alice wellintown]

The mediated violence, sex, paranoia, and obscurity in his works, is
the product of a particular violent, repressed, society, one
flickering faster than anything Fitzgerald or Henry James or Hemingway
or Henry Miller or Ralph Ellison ever experienced, and thus never
thought to articulate. The mediated and paranoid flux, obscured the
origin, the content and context, and the description, definition,
direction of his art. After the Great Gap and Vineland, the critics of
his art described and defined it. M&D did not impress because it had
been done by others, some argued convincimgly, better, and it did not
baffle and amaze with the kinds of intuitive readings of the American
and Postmodern condition that critical readings of GR attributed to it
and to Pynchon's art. That American & Postmodern condition, wrenched
almost out of any recognizable shape in such a short period was
articulated in the works of Gaddis and Pynchon and others but these
artists, at least in the critical world, were always pushing against
the inadequate and outdated and, against concerns, such as the Bomb,
the population Bomb, the "problem" of the "non-white" peoples,
technological dehumanization. Around Pynchon & Co., a new critical
language developed and, as the two-cultures broke down into fragments,
then into atoms, then into one big union, new schools and cultures
were constructed to define, describe, evaluate.

And, Pynchon published AtD. A work that is better than anything he's
done thus far.

The rest is just smoke and sand.