C ofL49. Overarching.

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Bailey" <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 8:59 PM
Subject: Re: C ofL49. Overarching.


> Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>> like the trio in Sam Johnson's "Rasselas"---a paper on the (unusual in 
>> its time; "The Conclusion in Which Nothing is Concluded") ending of, TRP 
>> wrote at Cornell, which we know M.H. Abrams, his teacher, used as an 
>> example of a great paper to later students.
>>
>
> interesting...conclusion in which nothing is concluded...
>
> kind of a risk, in that your reader might not realize that the book in
> its entirety can be savored bit by bit without the pat ending he or
> she has been conditioned to wait for.
> it was off-putting to me when I first read it anyway.
>
> GR was such a long book that you have to savor it bit by bit anyway,
> same with V...so you get to the no-payoff ending of V. ("I haven't
> learned a *o**a**** thing", and the poem about the 20th century, and
> the waterspout) or the quickie exhortation to sing along at the end of
> GR, and you can still feel good about having read it without bothering
> to try to tie up the loose ends very much, without deciding if you
> really want to sing along with that particular hymn...
>
> But a book as slim as CofL49 even a duffer like me feels a little bad
> about not trying to figure out what the guy was driving at... though I
> managed to avoid such thoughts pretty much since I first read the book
> in '73, till now...

Don't be too hard on yourself, Michael.

If Pirate couldn't explain the they-system and the equally necessary 
we-system to Roger in a way he could understand, then what of the poor 
reader?

And Capt. Prentiss was trying to be clear about it explaining that the 
they-system was of course delusional, was neither real nor unreal, merely 
expedient,  officially defined.

P.