IV and cultural assimilation

[alice wellintown]

Yes, as Nabokov advises or admonishes, a good reader is an active
reader and a good reader looks stuff up.  But, and this is why I call
IV crap and I advise or admonish those who have or would argue that
only a reader who does a Weisenburger or Hollander on it will or can
see its merit, it genius, its beauty, its greatness ...its message
...so on to read it without all the looking up. Stop reading it in
Stenzil mode and start reading it in Benny Profane mode: don't learn a
G-d Darn thing. Now how much merit, genius, beauty, greatness does the
work have? Not much. An alternative is to, as J. Kerry Grant sez,
"tune into the postmodern frequencies." This, as far as I can tell, is
an excellent suggestion. It makes a work like IV almost readable. But
IV is not, what is called, "a reader's novel." Readers do not like,
let alone love such writing; it makes them feel like they have been
playing a video game, as one post noted--Grand Theft Auto. Its
cartooning and pornographing and parodic post eroticisms are not what
readers of beautiful literature or haunting literature or, what we
have come to expect from P most, Romantic literature that, while it is
married to the comic and satirical, is picturesque and sublime and
aesthetically terrible and awesome.  The stained glass, it seems, has
been covered with concrete blocks.


> Despite no doubt being the prime target here, I've explicitly long
> agreed here with this nonetheless, with teh caveat that, while
> Pynchon's novels--wile most anyone's--are first and foremost of course
> of their own times, whether they know it or not (cf. that jamesonian
> political unconscious), and hence what I've characterized herebefore
> [sic, but I like this slip, so ...] as my New Historicist approach
> even to "contemporary" (postwar?) literature, it's still well worth,
> as Hollander, Weienberger, et al., have shown, looking up the
> references (at very least ...) ...
>
> Meanwhile, think, perhaps, stained glass (and cf. overal Cleanth
> Brooks' well-wrought urn), not in the least in both its prismatic
> properties and its allegorical functions ...
>