IVIV (10) page 157

[alice wellintown]

> First you say jason is a tv character in a tv show about tv then you mock
> him like he was real, laughably foolish in his naive stupidity. But if
> Pynchon is purely mocking him and showing how believing tv turns you into a
> Steppin Fetchit fool, where does the Rolls fit in? Too flashy or not, "They"
> don't give those away. Why would Pynchon give him one? Maybe this is
> Pynchon's take on Obama.

It has nothing to do with P's take on Obama.

I guess one could make the usual argument that you try to make, the
deprecation of fiction like P's is justified because it is not serious
enough to sit on the same shelf with intellectual and moral fictions,
but the history of the American novel and, more important to our
discussion, the American Romance, where the greatest tragic (grave and
serious) and religious (moral and ethical) issues are examined, works
such as Moby-Dick, Typee, White Jacket, House of the Seven Gables,
Scarlet Letter, Beloved, Invisible Man, Cuckoo's Next, and so on and
on . . . and the critical industry that has developed around these
works, debunk this worn out and rather stodgy old Jamesian critique of
the American Masters of Satire and Romance from Irving to Pynchon.
"It is not necessarily true that in so far as a novel departs from
realism it is obscurantist and disqualified to make moral comments on
the world" (Chase xi).

 Able to earn his own Rolls but not able to manage his "team of
rivals". You are all ready to defend dream boy Obama. No way he
> could be pimpin for the demigod. But you get all worked up about  Doc's
> parents and anything that smells of Suburbia or TV. These are after all
> characters in a novel and not someone who sends drones and soldiers to kIll
> an Al Quaeda  long since moved out of town. I hear this was a great year for
> recruiting young people to "serve their country", what with the lack of jobs
> and all.  That and a peace prize should buy a lot of dead bodies. I also
> hear the bankers are going to be donating millions for American Democracy
> and most of it is going to the team of rivals. Maybe that's how he bought
> the Rolls.

This kind of reading seems to argue that IV is so bad that you can't
discuss it without discussing the latest google buzz?

>
> Actually I can see that what you are saying is a valid way to read the novel
> -TV about TV. But the novel  itself keeps shading into the real and some
> very real things are put front and center: the housing bubble, political
> murder, the rape of the seas, environmental petro-poison, global financial
> fraud, drug addiction, organized crime in government, globalization, the
> dark side of the computer revolution etc.

Have you flipped or surfed a TV recently? Lots of Real and some Very
Real Things on the Tube.

> I agree that he is mocking us, mocking a culture addicted to detective
> novels that can't seem to see the crimes that are affecting their lives but
> that  aren't  properly labeled  on TV.  But P does also name those crimes
> and tosses out leads to show the connections between the past and the
> present, between the crimes and the likely suspects, between our dreams, our
> realities and our stories and jokes. I don't watch TV but my limited
> exposure to the Simpsons seemed to show a sophisticated satiric sensibility.
> One could find worse models for effective satire, but I think Pynchon has
> his own.

Ever read that Oklahoma Law Journal that takes up the Law in P's
works? Check it out. It's online.
Oklahoma City University Law Review
Volume 24, Number 3 (1999)