Woodstock - SPOILER ALERT

[Stephen Musgrave]

On a second reading of IV one clear theme emerging for me is the story being of and yet not of the time in which it is notionally set, and I think TRP drops various clues throughout to this effect. Though the only tangible one I have for now is the inclusion in a list of bands of one(s) from later periods, the Corvairs I think. 

 

Plus there are the nods to ipods and the web - the observation of kids on record-listening booths and the ARPAnet. All very funny and surely also intended to get the reader to at least consider that maybe all is not as it appears to Doc. I think this also links to the issue of how stoned he is/isn't throughout, and hence the extent to which he is/not an unreliable narrator. In a quite hilarious way. "So then class, can we trust the narrator?" "I dunno teacher, but I'd like a hit of whatever he's got" etc.

 

TRP is mocking a lot of things in this novel...
 
> From: robinlandseadel at comcast.net
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Woodstock
> Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2009 15:50:48 -0700
> 
> On Aug 16, 2009, at 2:06 PM, Carvill John wrote:
> 
> > Bekah sez:"IV is not particularly nostalgic . . .
> 
> I'd say it isn't nostalgic at all. Mournful's more like it.
> 
> > . . . if you weren't there because the names and places are not the
> > ones which have continued on in our collective media-induced
> > memory (Manson excepted)."
> 
> . . . and Charles Manson is absolutely central to the book's notion of 
> "Inherent Vice."
> 
> > A very interesting point. IV isn't as saturated with canonical 
> > Sixties references as we might expect. Is this just because Pynchon 
> > wanted to avoid obviousness and cliches? Or is something more 
> > complex going on?
> 
> One thing that's clearly going on is that this is Los Angeles, spring 
> 1970. I guess that wouldn't be apparent to someone who wasn't there at 
> the time. 1969/1970 was a one-week visit to see my Mom in hippie situ, 
> and plenty of other shorter trips, mostly to South Central on either 
> side of that great new-year's divide. Otherwise I spent most of my 
> time a four-hour car drive away via old highway 99, in Fresno. Spent 4 
> extraordinarily weird months in Eagle Rock in 1972, later moved in for 
> a longer spell 1974-1979, living in various low-rent spots between 
> Eagle Rock and Altadena.
> 
> Much of the texture & vibe of Inherent Vice is that of Los Angeles 
> just after it found out that Love, is it turned out, was not all you 
> need and in fact wasn't even all that durable.
> 
> > One of the things that sort of occurred to me as I read through IV 
> > first time, was 'how many details would you have to change for this 
> > book to have been set in, say, the early 1990s?',
> 
> Everything—this thing is trapped in time like a fly in amber.
> 
> > I guess this initially triggered by all the Lebowski associations 
> > we'd been fed before we got to read the book. I ended up thinking 
> > that IV seems both utterly bound up with its temporal setting, and 
> > simultaneously somehow not really 'of its time' at all.
> 
> Like it's also stuck [Like Eliott Gould in "The Long Goodbye"] in the 
> mise-en-scène and time-zone of Raymond Chandler, only difference is 
> that everybody's a wise guy these days so Marlowe's forties lines 
> don't have the "zing" they used to now that we're all in this stoned 
> and cynical seventies world.
> 
> > If it sounds like I'm hedging my bets that's because I'm still 
> > puzzling over it. Now and then, I got to thinking that it seemed 
> > less 'Sixties' in feel than the 1960s segments of Vineland.
> 
> That's because Inherent Vice is set in the Seventies, only all these 
> stoners haven't got the memo yet. The Sixties in Vineland were the 
> Sixties. What a difference 4 months, a year, a decade makes. eh?
> 
> > Part of me recoils from this line of thought, but still it 
> > persists.This sense of duality - that the book is (obviously) very 
> > Sixties, yet!
> > also somehow not very Sixties at all . . .
> 
> You mean like how Gravity's Rainbow feels like Los Angeles' long shadow 
> —via the movies—falling over the world [something timeless] during the 
> forties while folks in the novel also feel a lot like denizens of the 
> L.A. of the seventies at the same time?
> 
> Geli Tripping? Meet Sortilège.
> 
> > . . . ties in, for me anyhow, with the question of just how stoned 
> > Doc really is throughout the narrative.
> 
> And whether that "stone time" is different from other times, a subject 
> that also comes up during Doc's [and everyone else's] acid trips. And 
> it ties in, for me anyhow, with the question of "just how stoned was 
> Thomas Pynchon when he was writing Gravity's Rainbow?"
> 
> > Which both contribute to the sense that IV is nowhere near as simple 
> > as it seems on the surface.
> 
> Namaste.
> 
> > CheersJ
> 

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