CH 15 the hard on

[Joseph Tracy]

On Nov 22, 2009, at 4:12 PM, alice wellintown wrote:


>> Joseph Tracy wrote:> > I think you have been too swayed by the  
>> style and tone to take the text > seriously.
>>
>
> In IV, characters are postmodern (the terms flat and round don't
> really apply to postmodern texts), that is, they are not stable (they
> may warp or morph or change or die and live as zombies or flash into
> tube De-tox or into unconscious imitation of TV heroes and so on),
> and yet postmodern texts require grave and serious analysis of their
> deeply self-divided characters.
>
Gee, I hope next time he's going to write a novel that dumb Mr.  
Pynchon reads your great manual on how to write a post modern novel,  
and thanks for all the keen information.

> So the cheesy pimp in IV is not, as
> Robin would have us believe, simply a comic figure who slips on a
> banana and slides off the text when the more serious political stuff
> takes center text. There is no center text.
>
Whether there is a center stage or not has nothing to do with whether  
Pynchon is purposefully including clues and references to real  
politically important events. Maybe the approach to nuclear warfare  
in WW2 is and maybe it isn't the "center text" in GR but it would be  
wacky to argue that the banana scene in GR is of equal importance.  
There may not be center text; I have argued the idea of a kind of  
democracy of levels ( which I parse as 1)mythic/collective  
unconscious, 2)fictional world of created characters, and 3) history   
with real historical persons) and a democracy of nonjudgmental  
reportorial style.

> Moreover, because P
> elected to write a parody of the hard boiled detective genre, and
> chose to filter the narrative through a single consciousness, while
> employing all the other postmodern experiments with time and straight
> line plottings, the text is flatter still; that is, because we see the
> world, and we must read literature with our ears too--so we hear the
> text as well, through Larry's eyes and in Larry's voice.
>
You didn't finish your second clause here, English teacher

> That voice
> doesn't work.
>
I thought it worked very well .

> Try as P may, Doc is simply not a great narrative voice.
>
Not supposed to be great. Supposed to be a fucked up, aspiring Holmes/ 
Chandler detective who likes sex drugs and rock and roll. He turns  
out to be far more interesting than that though, as he faces inner  
conflicts and sees himself and his world more accurately.

> What's worse is that Larry is not interesting enough to hold our
> attention. Shasta is, arguably the least interesting of P's dark
> ladies. Bigfoot is the Falstaff of this work, but he too is far to
> Juvenile. I think that P's addiction to TV is evident in these works;
> his characters are Jewish Sitcom, loud and not funny,
>
  I laughed quite a bit. And the 2nd time through and with closer  
attention and some research I found a layer of humanity grace and  
suffering along with historical intrigue that confirmed that it  
really was Pynchon.

> infantile, dumb,
> not a patch on the women who keep them together.
>