James Wood On Pynchon's Characters

[Mark Kohut]

BIAS: I can never get anywhere thinking about what might be drug-induced. I would ask what's the point? How can we prove it or learn anything in the text? Learn anything about his vision? It is there in the text or it isn't.  It seems TRP experienced pot---he seems to say so in a non-fiction piece---and LSD, maybe.  I think we can see what he thinks of the drugs we
talk about IN THE TEXT.  

as Lionel Trilling wrote of the great American drunks who were writers of genius: They weren't drunk when they were writing in full control of their words.

I'd argue that about TRP. Anytime. 

But, whatever you think is wrong with IV and AtD, you are expressing felicitously enough. So it goes. Most of us are arguing otherwise, in general. 
THIS, to me, however is plain wrong, very wrong so I speak: In IV and AtD that quality, that sense of vibrancy or enthusiasm or enjoyment (of the writing process as much as the drug-taking) is missing.


 The man is essentially the same over time, another deep theme. He conceived most of his major works back in the day. Your words,  to me, are some kind of strange argument that the books that you do not think work were not written enthusiastically or under drug use: 

IV may have been written with too much enjoyment......TRP had an obvious blast writing it as almost everyone sees...............And, I would argue that after V., he enjoyed every word he put down, every word. (I think V. was partly an earnest struggle) 

And AtD has sublime connections ala Byron the Bulb that we have yet to plumb.....

To praise the works you think best as partly drug-induced, drug-inspired, etc. is to greatly reduce TRPs talent, discipline and vision.

imho. 


--- On Mon, 11/9/09, Robert Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> From: Robert Jackson <jbor at bigpond.com>
> Subject: Re: James Wood On Pynchon's Characters
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, November 9, 2009, 5:24 PM
> I was thinking also of episodes
> like the Advent sequence or Byron the Bulb where there is a
> visionary quality to the writing, the train of connections,
> the imagery, that I'd guess was drug-inspired; obviously
> edited and polished later on in a clearer and more
> professional (let's say) headspace. In IV and AtD that
> quality, that sense of vibrancy or enthusiasm or enjoyment
> (of the writing process as much as the drug-taking) is
> missing.
> The turning away (or being turned away) from any
> real activism is an ongoing theme, the exhortation to
> Slothrop to engage in eco-activism or Dixon's violent
> assault on the slavedriver notwithstanding. They are
> exceptions, depicted as acts of exceptional bravery or
> fortitude. Denis is goofily likeable enough; Doc doesn't
> seem to have much follow-through in terms of wanting to do
> something about the corruption in high places or the evils
> of the corporate world which he uncovers either. He remains
> willingly allied to Bigfoot (just like Zoyd to Hector)
> despite all the protestations. It's cartoon fare ... as
> much Scooby Doo as it is Hammett, Cain or Chandler. Compared
> with the way that German Expressionist modes and style are
> embraced in GR, IV really is weak pastiche, both a cop-out
> and a sell-out, a parcel of parsley rather than hashish in
> your hollandaise.
> Wood correctly points out in his letter how
> Thomas Jones' review of IV does pay the novel some
> backhanded compliments, both deliberately ("Inherent
> Vice lacks much of the menace and the passion of
> itspredecessors ... this flattening of affect
> .... Squint the right way, and what looked like
> wry indulgence morphs into nihilism.") and
> inadvertently in those last two grabs:
> 	And what Pynchon does with
> his characters,  	increasingly, is juvenile
> vaudeville. If you like that, fine. But in
>  	his review, Jones
> unwittingly gives two reasons why one might not:
>  	reading Pynchon’s new
> novel, he writes, ‘is probably as close to
>  	getting stoned as reading a
> novel can be’ (which he takes as high
>  	praise); and – apropos of
> Pynchon’s relentlessly jokey treatment of
>  	1970s California – ‘But
> there’s something profoundly bleak about the
>  	inability to take anything
> seriously’ (which he also envisages as a
>  	compliment, of
> sorts).		James Wood	Cambridge,
> Massachusetts	with best
> wishes
> On 10/11/2009, at 12:42 AM, Laura
> wrote:
> Good point.  GR encourages drug use.
>  I've never dropped acid, but after reading GR I
> sure wanted to.  Slothrop stretching out on the
> crossroads, disintegrating, becoming one with Nature, is the
> sort of turning on, tuning in, etc. that was the purported
> heart of the '60s (drug, anyway)trip.  By contrast,
> reading IV is as meaningful as being the lone straight
> person in a roomful of stoners -- it'd make anyone want
> to run out and flush their stash.  The book makes any
> drug use seem damn unattractive.  It seems deliberate,
> but I don't think Pynchon's merely being priggish in
> his old age. Pot-smoking led to the dippy idealism
> (personified by Denis, in particular) that deflected any
> real social/political activism on the part of those who
> copiously partook.  Maybe the paving stones covering
> the beach, in the opening quote, are bricks of heroin,
> covered by a thatch-work of
> marijuana.
> Laura
> -----Original
> Message----->From: Rob Jackson
> <jbor@[omitted]>
> 
> >In IV, Pynchon seems to write alot about
> the processes of getting  >stoned,
> describing it as an outsider or wannabe would, and it feels
>  >and sounds pretty stale and humdrum as a
> result, whereas some of the  >most beautiful
> passages and sequences in GR and M&D for example are so
>  >obviously trip-inspired. And there is a
> true and authentic sense of  >immediacy to
> the experiences described (the getting, having, not
>  >having, needing, wanting, not wanting,
> etc., of the illicit product of
>  >choice) in the earlier novels which is
> absent from IV.
> 
>