IV Chapter 17 Thoughts

[alice wellintown]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Dec 10, 2009, at 7:38 AM, Carvill, John wrote:
>
>> I really really wish you would cease acting as if you are the world's
>> greatest authority on Chandler. It is immensely annoying.
>
> Sorry if you find this annoying. I find the relation between Chandler's
> writing and "Inherent Vice" crucial and I'm not going to stop writing about
> it.

Crucial or not, and I certainly don't agree that Chandler is crucial
to Pynchon, or even to a reading of IV, it's obvious that Robin has
identified one of the authors that P has elected to parody and hold
his fun house mirrors up to. Robin's work, when focused, reminds me of
Dave Monroe's job with Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket (1838), and other Poe tales, and how Poe's novel was
published and the like, and I've been giving Poe's "postmodernism" and
"unreliability" some thought; how it may parallel Pynchon's IV
project. Chandler is not the central parodic text, but is only one of
many in the genre because Pynchon simply doesn't work that way. He
never has, and he clearly has not in this work, written a work that
responds to one author or text or genre or one in which one author,
text, or genre is the focus of his parody. While Poe's Pym, for
example, is important to our reading of V., it is not crucial. I
disagree with Robin's assessment of the text; that it is largely
biographical and set in Pynchon's life in and around the times he was
living in California and composing GR. Again, the narrator, the
protagonist, is not the author. The narrative is unreliable. The
author creates a distance between himself and the protagonist and
narrator and then exploits that ironies and ambiguities that this
narrative technique affords. To dismiss this is to deny the modern and
postmodern novel.