IVing to the last drop: 'we've got this President now..."

[alice wellintown]

In his SL Introduction, Pynchon discusses several problems he had to
work out as a slow learner. Among these were the protagonist and
dramatized reliable narrator and character who acts as a mouthpiece
for the author's passions. Thank Orpheus he stopped writing such
characters. That said, we can identify the author's norms. The essays,
like SL, help us in this. That Pynchon argues that something has gone
wrong with the American experiment in democracy and that he traces
this to several forks in the woods/roads not taken or spaces left
unexplored or unexplainable, somehow as if by magic or chance or
fortune ... is not too difficult to see. It's easy enough to see that
Pynchon explores these roads not taken and waxes, not nostalgically or
didactically, for nostalgia is shown to be a dangerous force in P's
works, and preaching to the choir a waste of time, but as a fictional
device, a major device certainly, to launch his themes. Not that his
works are bereft of what some might fancy, political barbs or swipes
at government and other powerful systems and the individuals who abuse
power to gain wealth (his political satire), but his themes, his
humanism, his pragmatism, his art, his American Art, in the tradition
of Hawthorne and Melville, and HOW he means and not what, is far more
important, and expecially when what he says, Nixon has no soul, is as
obvious as the face on a $100.00 bill. OK, that's not fair. But think
Ryder and Blythe (Painting the Dark Side)and the tones and shades and
moods and so much Bellew (the political cartoonist who made Uncle
Sam).


Two examples from his great grand fathers here. Melville and Hawthorne.

Note that the rosebush and the turf of grass are somehow, who can say,
perhaps only God knows ...ambiguously presented in subjunctives and
competing legends, folk stories, narrative just like Pirate's bananas.
Like the Bananas, these romantic symbols of nature's eternal
benevolence defy the Prison and the Cemetery or in Bartleby's case,
both/and in the Tombs.

The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common
prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all
sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon
me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The
heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange
magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.

Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and
lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted
Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused; then went close up to him;
stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed
profoundly sleeping. Something prompted me to touch him. I felt his
hand, when a tingling shiver ran up my arm and down my spine to my
feet.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;
but whether it had merely survived
out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the
gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed
it, -- or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had
sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted
Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, -- we shall not take
upon us to determine.
Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that
inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of
its flowers and present it to the reader.
It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that
may be found along the track,
or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.


On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 8:11 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Nixon. P's hatred of him--see GR--is put right here again, semi-autobigraphically?   Which, again, means to me that most of
> Doc's obs and remarks are 'reliable' in the narrator sense
> AND some kind of echo of an attitude of his creator's?
>
> Or, do you believe, as I just read today by draughtsman-artist Ad Reinhart:
> Art is art and everything else is everything else?
>
>
>
>
>
>