IVIV (12): 195-197

[Mark Kohut]

What other writers with a full vision of the world we live in do we hold to some late Tolstoyan anti-art literalness about his implied actions as we know of them? 

Do Roth and Updike not believe in marriage or that adultery is wrong because they, evidently, have committed it---BOTH, heh, heh? Is Coetzee anti-South Africa (now) because he left it and won't move back. Does he not believe in a "homeland" [the fiction sez otherwise]? Was David Foster Wallace anti-life because his demons overcame him and he killed himself? Is Cormac McCarthy, as has been said of Milton, on the devil's side because of his portrayal of profound evil in a character and in book after book?

TRP immerses himself in his world as he wants to experience it. The world is all that is the case. Or, as Conrad wrote. perhaps "in the destructive element immerse" is operative. Doesn't matter. To me, that he loves John Garfield movies, as we seem to learn in Inherent Vice, as an American cultural experience and example which largely ended to be replaced in his vision by the "social control' species of cop shows exists easily to me in his vision of what photography has done TO US in history....

But, I may be wrong; I may be stupid. I may be self-delusional. Amen.

 


--- On Sun, 11/1/09, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IVIV (12): 195-197
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, November 1, 2009, 4:51 AM
> Interesting that some question the
> claim that Pynchon is generally
> ambivalent about technology. Personally I struggle to
> conceive of him
> being anything but ambivalent.
> 
> As for the photography, at the opposite end of teh scale
> from his own
> 'unambiguous' dislike of being photographed, I would 
> cite his obvious
> passion for movies. Can we doubt that he enjoys John
> Garfield, for
> example?
> 
> From Vineland to IV, he seems to fear and loathe The Tube's
> insidious
> influence, yet also shows string signs of *enjoying
> watching* TV,
> particularly those trashy programmes such as Gilligan's
> Island. A-and,
> would he have appeared on The Simpsons if he didn't???
>