IVIV (10) page 157

[alice wellintown]

>> It has nothing to do with P's take on Obama.
>
> Maybe tenuous, but I find a certain comic symmetry.

There is a lot of symmetry in the world: fracals and the human face
divine. A-and glory be to G-d for Pied Beauty and dappled things (GM
Hopkins)

Do you think P's characters are, perhaps, like Rorschach, the graphic
novel character in Watchmen (1986)?

Of course, what you read while employing a pure reader response
approach to a text like IV, looking at ink blots on a page, is what
you project on the text and will, therefore, read as subjective and
ideosyncratic to others. Groooo V..

William Empson, 7 types of ambiguity, after a long career, changed his
mind about how characters, including those in Shakespeare and Milton
should be treated; he decided that, while they are not real, we should
treat them as such. And not too. Not a bad idea when reading IV.

So, do I contradict myself? Does Yogi cash Who's cheque?

Third Base


>> 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).
>
> Didn't say a thing about obscurantism and I thing you are flying solo on the
> Hester Prynne connection. Anyway, my  comparison would certainly constitute
> a moral comment on the world.
>>
>>  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?
>
> You are the one who calls it crap. I like it.
>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>
> Yes well so I presume, but that seems somewhat disconnected from your
> argument, and I see very little TV.  You said
>>
>> It's important to remember that we are reading a TV. That is, all of
>> the characters are actors or wanna-be actors or were actors or are
>> collecting SAG money or aping they favorite star or swagger. They all
>> talking like them Tube-headed dudes, those Thanatoids.  This novel, if
>> that's what it is, is Pynchon on the Simpsons--a TV Program about TV
>
> Then you want to say it is in the tradition of great american Lit.  I don't
> think it has to be either or, but you seem to go at it one way, then the
> other.
> Basically whether Velveeta and Obama bear an intentional comparison is not
> that important. What is obvious to me is that Pynchon makes jokes at the
> expense of high mucky mucks of all kinds and what is important is that he
> thinks history and politics and especially the untold history of the losers
> are worth thinking about.
>
> JV is not key to the book but I think prostitution is an important theme
> that P touches on frequently.
>
>>
>>> 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)
>
>