Does the Broken Estate Have a Heart?

[Rob Jackson]

On 24/07/2009, at 5:00 PM, pynchon-l-digest wrote:

>> his weakness for character

This is one of those long-standing misapprehensions of Pynchon's work  
which is all too often mindlessly recycled imho. M&D, which is the  
twin peak in Pynchon's oeuvre, and perhaps might even one day come to  
be the Everest to GR's K2, is a character-driven masterpiece. ... And  
the psychological depth which a great many of the more prominent  
characters in Pynchon's works possess - think of Pointsman and  
Weissmann/Blicero in GR, Roger and Tchitcherine ... some of the female  
characters too, Katje, Frenesi, even Oedipa - is something that  
Pynchon labours long and hard to achieve, and extremely successfully,  
too. All that stuff about Pavlov and Pierre Janet and transmarginal  
stimuli in GR betrays a very real interest in the human psyche - as  
well as intensive research into theories thereof - which manifests in  
the novel as literary technique just as strongly as it does as theme.

As for the realism/postmodernism nexus, the layers of detritus upon  
Slothrop's desk are as close to mimesis as you're ever likely to get  
in a postmodernist novel, but it's the splicing of these realist  
impulses with the zaniness and cartoon capers and narrative  
abreactions, and the disorientating effect that this has on the  
reader, that exemplifies this particular strand of postmodernism.

> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Does the Broken Estate Have a Heart?
>
> Campbel Morgan wrote:
>> He certainly doesn't value the picaresque tradition that Pynchon and
>> other hysterical realists have pushed, with  manic post-millenialsm
>> and purring prose, to the exhaustion of any possible, insert several
>> subjunctive clauses here, reading.
>
> James Wood said an interesting thing in his review of Against the Day:
> "Many things can be said against this writer, but no one has ever
> accused him of lacking talent. (It may be that he has too much.)"

I agree with Terrance-on-summer-break's take on Wood's attitude to  
Pynchon, and I think it's what Wood doesn't like about the genre that  
"we"* do like. (* I think that Pynchon's point about "we-systems" in  
GR is that by their very nature they inevitably and automatically  
become a "they-system"; like Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle  
it's whether you're cold and lonely on the outside looking in or safe  
and cozy on the inside looking out that makes all the difference ...  
they're just like "excluded middles", to be avoided at all costs ...  
and that's one of the reasons why "anarchy" seems to hold such a  
fascination and bittersweet appeal for the author ... But I digress.)

I think that what Wood is admitting here is that he does admire and  
respect Pynchon's literary "talent", very much so, but that it  
sometimes spills over into self-indulgence and becomes art - or   
"mindless pleasure" - for its own sake. And I think that this is where  
M&D has the edge on GR, because the vision and the style and the  
construction of it have been so carefully-orchestrated, it has a unity  
of purpose, a more even tempo and momentum ... there are far fewer bum  
notes than in GR ... it's an audacious work, Pynchon's attempt to  
identify and describe and trace the beginnings of "the tradition of  
America" ...

... but I gotta say ... by the time I got to about page 450 of AtD and  
was served up yet another of those "something which was almost but not  
quite like something else" teases I threw the damn brick of hot air  
that was "almost but not quite like" a novel across the damn room  
"that was almost but not ..." yada yada ...

best regards