IVIV (14): Postmodern Logorrhea

[Robin Landseadel]

On Nov 8, 2009, at 7:08 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> After catching up with more posts,[thanks Michael and Clement] and  
> learning what filiation really means, [self-criticism,..etc.] I can  
> see more reason to read more of these remarks----although I still  
> think that that abstract neo-academic language is virtually self- 
> parodic......
>
> But that might just be me. I want to believe that the best insights  
> into Pynchon's vision can be expressed in intelligent prose for the  
> 'common reader', to use a neglected concept.
>
> As we mostly do it at the plist.
>
> Later,

It's times like these that I wish this list had HTML so's we can have  
graphics, smilies, different font sizes & styles, usw—

Alice in Terranceland's obs that "The Gnostic Pynchon" is his favorite  
text on the text is a personal fave—seriously, man—who the fuck can  
glean relevant data points from:

	I agree with Wilde that the "middles" of these two novels are to
	various extents "subverted," but not that this subversion is solely
	phenomenological; it is, rather, an aspect of a conscious
	thematic structure that comprehends all of Pynchon's novels in
	a demonstration of how gnostic religious vectors undermine the
	domain of the human. Oedipa's "waiting" is not a stoical
	acceptance of perpetual metaphysical uncertainty, but an
	anxious interval before the "crying" of some Pentecostal
	revelation. Even Wilde, arguing for a purely "secular Tristero" to
	support the postmodern secularity of his analysis, admits that
	there "is much in Lot 49" that supports a religious interpretation
	a la Mendelson (p. 98).

There's something there, but it's so much harder to read than anything  
Pynchon ever cooked up.

Contrast and compare:

	Pooh also teems with puzzles that can engage still older
	devotees of nature's laws. One instructive example is Eeyore's
	drifting within the eddies of the stream into which he has been
	"bounced." Injured dignity prompts the floater to ascribe his
	motions to free will: "If, when in, I decide to practise a slight
	circular movement from right to left ... or perhaps I should say ...
	from left to right, just as it happens to occur to me ... " But  
fifteen-
	year-olds who have worked the problems in their physics texts
	can see that the ineluctable dynamics of liquid turbulence are
	firmly in charge here.

	Those readers will be aware that turbulence-with its Taylor-
	Couette flow, its Swinney-Gollub doughnut spin, its Landau
	frequencies measured with laser Doppler interferometry, and its
	Ruelle- Takens one-parameter Ck vector fields on Hilbert
	space-lies at the very heart of contemporary chaos theory. But
	they will also recall that the strange attractor remained
	untheorized in 1928, and hence they'll content themselves with
	what was then known about kinematic viscosity-the Reynolds
	numbers and all that-as illustrated by Figure 2. Next slide.

	Postmodern Pooh, Frederick Crews

	6

	Stupid Undergrounds

	Zone

	Apocalyptic cults and youth gangs, colleges and phalansteries,
	espionage networks trading in vaporous facts and networks of
	home shoppers for illicit goods; monastic, penological, mutant-
	biomorphic, and anarcho-terrorist cells; renegade churches,
	garage bands, dwarf communities, norisk survivalist enclaves,
	unfunded quasiscientific research units, paranoid think tanks,
	unregistered political parties, subemployed workers' councils,
	endo-exile colonies, glossolaliac fan clubs, acned anorexic
	primal hordes; zombie revenants, neo-fakirs, defrocked priests
	and detoxing prophets, psychedelic snake-oil shills, masseurs
	of overdiagnosed symptoms, bitter excommunicants, faceless
	narcissists, ideological drag queens, mystical technophiles,
	subentrepreneurial dealers, derivative derivistes, tireless
	archivists of phantom conspiracies, alien abductees, dupe
	factota, tardy primitives, vermin of abandoned factories, hermits,
	cranks, opportunists, users, connections, outriders, outpatients,
	wanna-bes, wanna-not-bes, hackers, thieves, squatters,
	parasites, saboteurs; wings, wards, warehouses, arcades, hells,
	hives, dens, burrows, lofts, flocks, swarms, viruses, tribes,
	movements, groupuscules, cenacles, isms, and the endlessly
	multiplied hybridization of variant combinations of all these, and
	more.

	Masocriticism, Paul Mann

Parodies of Postmodern discourse are ALWAYS more coherent than the  
originals being parodied:

	The immortal father of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan
	(Mort a credit) cries out: So you want to see me die, eh, is that
	what you want, speak up? We didn't want anything of the sort,
	however. We didn't want the train to be daddy, or the station
	mommy. We only wanted peace and innocence, and to be left
	alone to machine our little machines, O desiring-production. Of
	course pieces from the bodies of the mother and the father are
	taken up in the connections, parental appellations crop up in
	the disjunctions of the chain, the parents are there as ordinary
	stimuli of an indifferent nature that trigger the becoming of
	adventures, of races, and of continents. But what a bizarre
	Freudian mania-to relate to Oedipus what overflows it on every
	side and from all angles, beginning with the hallucination of
	books and the delirium of apprenticeships (the teacher as
	father-substitute, and the book as family romance). Freud
	couldn't abide a simple humorous remark by Jung, to the effect
	that Oedipus must not really exist, since even the primitive
	prefers a pretty young woman to his mother or his grandmother.
	If Jung betrayed everything, it was nevertheless not by way of
	this remark, which can only suggest that the mother functions as
	a pretty girl as much as the pretty girl functions as mother, since
	the main thing for the primitive or the child is to form and put into
	motion their desiring-machines, to make flows circulate and to
	perform breaks in these flows.

	anti-oedipus, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Again, Tom Lehrer comes to mind: "If they can't communicate, the very  
least they can do is to shut up." Ferron too, speaking of the wisdom  
that comes with age: "I realized I could have used fewer words."

Let's look at the page before us:

	ACCORDING TO TITO, THE KISMET, BUILT JUST AFTER
	WWII, bad represented something of a gamble that the city of
	North Las Vegas was about to be the wave of the future.
	Instead, everything moved southward, and Las Vegas
	Boulevard South entered legend as the Strip, and places like
	the Kismet languished.

	Heading up North Las Vegas Boulevard, away from the
	unremitting storm of light, episodes of darkness began to occur
	at last, like night breezes off the desert. Parked trailers and little
	lumberyards and air-conditioning shops went drafting by. The
	glow in the sky over Las Vegas withdrew, as if into a separate
	"page right out of history," as the Flintstones might say. Ahead
	presently at the roadside, much dimmer than anything to the
	south, a structure of lights appeared.

	"Place is a dump, man." Tito wheeled into the entrance and
	under a weathered porte cochere. Nobody was there to notice
	let alone greet them, in the reduced light. Once there must have
	been thousands of lights, incandescent, neon and fluorescent,
	all over the place, but these days only a few of them were lit,
	because the present owners couldn't afford the electric bills
	anymore, several amateur gaffers, sad to say, having already
	been fulminated trying to bootleg power in off the municipal
	lines.

	Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

Whatever is going on in this passage, the nature of this discourse is  
not related to the nature of the postmodern discourses or even the  
parodies of those discourses. The language offers few challenges. The  
'authorial voice' is still recognizably that of Pynchon, as is the  
voice of Vineland, but the author is not talking over our heads or  
indulging in Professor Irwin Corey styled confusion or misdirection.  
There's a story here, there are plenty of parodic elements but this  
book is not being pitched to the academy.