ENOUGH With the OBA Thing Now, Please!

[Mark Kohut]

Nope.....Pynchon's moral vision is coherent his whole oeuvre.....
To embrace certain ambiguities is part of that vision......

--- On Sun, 8/16/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: ENOUGH With the OBA Thing Now, Please!
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, August 16, 2009, 8:30 PM
> Yes, I enjoyed that American Masters
> film on Neil Young. Although, as
> I noted in a previous post, Young looks, at times, more
> insane than
> Manson, he comes across as a very sane and honest talent.
> 
> Artists are people and are always made up of ambiguities.
> Authors make
> use of ambiguity for a number of reasons. Melville gave the
> word to
> one of his novels. He used ambiguity, as Hawthorne, as
> Henry James, as
> the others who have influenced his characterizations and
> narrative
> tones. With Pynchon we often end up with these odd and
> loose readings.
> The worse kind is this Both /  And & he is a
> strong moralist. I mean,
> can it be that his books are Both / And ambiguous and
> unconfused
> moralist? How can he condemn the Morgan Bush Capitalist
> Murderers and
> the CIA dope pushes and Both/And at the same time? To pick
> out such
> moral reading, readers seem compelled to paste passages
> from seperate
> novels and read between lines and ignore most of the
> traditional
> elements of prose fiction, like characters, plot, theme,
> setting,
> conflict ..then argue, "those in the know are those who
> know" and all
> others are not on the proper wavelength. It does smack of
> Oour Beloved
> preacher/teacher/mentor and we are a cult following.
> 
> Perhaps Pynchon needs to be read as a style of writing.
> It's tone we
> need to pay close attention to. But then why bother so much
> with all
> the rest?
>