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

[Robin Landseadel]

	You may already know what a blow to the ego it can be to have
	to read over anything you wrote 20 years ago, even cancelled
	checks. My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my
	God) accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell
	upon. My second thought was about some kind of a wall-to-wall
	rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those
	episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to
	have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was
	back then. I mean I can't very well just 86 this guy from my life.
	On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped
	technology I were to run into him today, how comfortable would
	I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping
	down the street to have a beer and talk over old times?
	Thomas Pynchon, in 1984, writing about his younger self.

On Dec 6, 2009, at 9:19 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> Alcie writes:
>> Thanks. Larry, here, is parroting
>> what Bigfoot said earlier when he
>> was trying to recruit Larry. pp. 32-33.

Huh?

> I have reread pages 32-33 and what doc sez is NOT parroting. If  
> there is an attitudinal echoing, I think it makes the case that  
> Larry comes to see this "truth".

Yeah, what Jefferson has to say is different than what Bigfoot has to  
say. Bigfoot—in what appears to be somewhere in the general vicinity  
of the Old Paramount Ranch Agoura Ca.,  just five miles outside of  
Rocketdyne—is attempting to turn Larry. Jefferson is explaining to Doc  
just what to do in order to save his ass. Remember at all times that  
Doc is necessarily a genre creation, he has certain genre rules to  
follow, he's an knight errant, after all. Jefferson is telling Doc  
that he has to spill some blood. Make of that what you will.

>> This undermines the argument that Larry is a mouthpiece for  
>> Pynchon, a reliable narrator  . . .

When was Pynchon ever a reliable narrator? The narrators of Pynchon's  
novels are all quick-change artists.

>> . . . (you can call him effaced but that term us fairly useless if  
>> you apply it as you have to every work P has written).

Something like that but not exactly that. The author in question is  
always messing with the frame. It's something Pynchon shares with Joyce 
—"Whose Consciousness Is This Anyway?" The narrator of Inherent Vice  
is particularly unreliable—messing up dates, essentially using the  
same gag, more or less over again, a paragraph later as if his short  
term memory's shot to shit:  "Dave's Not Here!" The narrator of  
Inherent Vice may be every bit as wasted as the protagonist.

> An effaced narrator, if that is the mode of narration is there or it  
> is not, no matter how many of P's novels I have said it of. All of  
> them could be. James gave us the technique fully articulated and  
> almost all of his narrators are, aren't they?

Call it Pynchon's new thang, if you like. The narrators of Pynchon's  
novels constantly break the fourth wall, juggle time and space, get  
all mushy on us, mutate into Proust . . . Pynchon's "voice" is  
unstable, does impersonations & foley. Against the Day, if nothing  
else, is a tour-de force of shifting genres. Old time radio comes to  
mind. He's more of a Mynah than a Lark, more of an unstable mimic like  
Lenny Bruce or Spike Mulligan.

> 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?

Looking at the events detailed in Inherent Vice as being closer to the  
"Real World" personal experiences of Pynchon one can clearly see how  
stuff in the "Real World" was influencing Pynchon as he wrote  
Gravity's Rainbow. Think of "Inherent Vice" as an "Idiots Guide to  
Gravity's Rainbow" and tell 'em Robin sent ya.