IVIV IV & Playboy article

[alice wellintown]

Trick &/or Treat!

Don't like the terms? Reactionary, Conservative, Anarchist, Christian,
Satirist? James Joyce was not Catholic. Not even a Christian was he.
But who can understand Joyce if they fail to understand that his works
are Catholic?

Henry Adams is important to Pynchon, still.  There is no Return.

That conflict, betwixt Return, to a time when things were not so as
they now are, a Romantic longing, AND the political project of return,
to a time when Ronald Reagan understood America, is rather important
in those California works, but far more important and far better
developed in the Romances.

In any event, read this, if you've not read it:

THE DIALECTIC ASPECT OF RAYMOND CHANDLER’S NOVELS
RAY NEWMAN
Pembroke College, Cambridge

http://home.comcast.net/~mossrobert/html/criticism/newman.htm

Chandler also alludes, in form and content, if not in style, to
Dickens, as shall be discussed later in this essay. A conflict emerges
when this allusion becomes a nostalgic lament, and the truth of the
modern is compromised: there is a frustrating force. Only the modern
can be real, and yet the present is worthless. Daniel Schwarz15,
writing of Joyce, Eliot and Lawrence, notes that the author no sooner
brings together two distinct worlds than he satirically compares the
modern world disfavourably to a previous one’ (p. 20), and it is a
problem for modernists that their vision of progress is actually a
process of devolution’ (Ibid, p. 21). Chandler is not a modernist, but
his work resonates with the same kind of melancholy lament for the
future as Lawrence’s proto-modernist’ The Rainbow16. A lack of hope
for the future, represented in Lawrence’17 by the collapse of
male-female relationships, also pervades Chandler’s novels, and
Marlowe, with his curious lack of progress, personifies this stasis,
as expressed here, first in his own words, and then by Chandler:



On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 9:40 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Oct 31, 2009, at 6:40 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>>> . . Your reading, Pynchon tips his hat to the hardboiled hacks
>>
>> because of some funny-bone affitnity has some legs . . .
>
> My reading is that Pynchon is specifically tipping his hat to Raymond
> Chandler, who accurately mapped out he co-ordinates of L.A.'s haves &
> have-nots, the powerful and the powerless and those echelons of the monied
> class that are untouchable, who in essence control the levers of
>  government, banks, drugs & power grids—the Golden Fang of corporate
> capitalism.
>