IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

>
> You want agency?  Hold the puppet up close, make it speak, look into its
> eyes. All together now: where is the hand pointing?
>
> -Monte


Thanks, I understand your reading. I simply disagree. I'd say it
again, it's flat wrong, but that would only get the pandemonium
flapping the coal dust and dying embers. I've read most everything
written about Pynchon. Eddins made the most sense and is by far my
favorite text on Pynchon. I see Pynchon's texts as deterministic. Man
is very little. The Earth will not miss him when he goes. Dark
Romantic. That's Pynchon. The politcs are not all that interesting.
The magic is. The poetry is. The Rilke influence. The Adams influence.
Melville, Hawthorne .. .so on William Carlos Williams .. .Shakespeare
....Blake. Blake had politics. Sure, and so we may point to his
position on enslaved persons and America, but these are but the sparks
splashing from a welder's tool while a lightening storm of sublime
poetry cracks open the firmament and shakes the sacred Earth to its
core. Why study a political pamphleteer? Why not? One may read
Milton's tracts on Divorce. But who really cares? They may augment our
reading of his sonnets. He had three wives. The last, we assume, he
never saw since he was blind when they married. So his sonnet, I
though I saw my late asposed saint takes on deeper meanings from the
biographical. We may read Areopagitica for its satement on publication
and censorship. We may read it to augment a reading of Marvell's
poems. Milton and Marvell were official mourners at Cromwell's funeral
and Milton nearly lost his head but for the intervention of his dear
friends, including Marvell. But we read Paradise Lost because it is
the best epic in the language. Better than Spencer's. Yes, better. I
suspect that we will read GR for a long time. Anybe not. But not its
politics. Would we read Wyatt for his? Or Orwell? Well, some political
heads do. And, we certainly do not read Orwell because he is great
author of prose fiction. He is not. So why does P admire the work so?
For its ideas. So ideas can make a novel important but not great. P's
Romances are important and great. The political or California novels
are failures.  To apply the standard and reading stance of VL and IV
and CL49 to the Romances is a mistake. That's what I have argued and I
have listened to the other side for over a decade now. We needn't
agree. But, please....never tell me to take drugs. That is just wrong,
dude.

Goodbye,

Terrance