IVIV (1) From The Desert To The Sea (And All Of Southern California)

[Mark Kohut]

I look very forward to you showing the roots of IV in @2000 America thru the NYTimes......as Tore said, the forseeing of the future is not like the prophecies in the novels through GR. Which is leading me, at least, to other ways to understand them

Romance as meant, as Chase meant it, comes out of AN EPIC QUEST among other things.....the knight errant homage of noir fiction is NOT epic....the 'quest' is to solve a mystery........as Edmund Wilson famously wrote but backtracked on some when he read Chandler, "Who Cares Who Killed
Roger Ackroyd?' [the most famous Christie, maybe]. The basis of his case
was that a writer of mysteries could not embody, richly, earnedly as the phrase goes, a whole lot of BIG THEMES since great books---Moby Dick; GR---need to embody those themes in the whole structure of the work, which mysteries, having a literal crime to solve, could not generally do. 

IV is a comic homage to the noir mystery; it is a noir mystery. There is NO epic quest ala AtD, although themes can be buried as P does bury them. 

The simple 'quest", as in Marlowe is to solve the crime(s). Lotsa social observation can be made while that is happening. 

--- On Thu, 8/27/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IVIV (1) From The Desert To The Sea (And All Of Southern  California)
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, August 27, 2009, 4:31 PM
> IV may be sorta set in 1970s
> California, although setting in Romance
> is not the same as setting in a novel so we're not so much
> talking
> setting as in when and where here, but the work is dealing
> in post
> 9-11 money and technology.
>