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

[Mark Kohut]

Robin sent us:
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.


Written 40 years later, one can say, sez I, that it is Pynchon's portrait of that artist that he was finding his vision. His sportello on America...






--- On Sun, 12/6/09, Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

> From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: IVing to the last drop: 'we've got this President now..."
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, December 6, 2009, 3:02 PM
>     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.
> 
>