Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[Ian Livingston]

But I'm pretty sure the "WTF" moments in IV are there to piss off the
lit-crit crowd.

I'm easy to correct, but I've had the impression over the years that
P. has not much liked post-modernist critics, theory or his
classification as a post-modernist. He has thrown some lovely barbs at
the post-moderns. Maybe he, like some others of us, has grown
optimistic that pomo is nearing the end of its run. Maybe some critic
will actually assess his work from a somewhat larger perspective soon.

I see IV as another integral facet of the breathtaking depth and span
of P's opus. The scenes of LA are LA, the richness of the symbolism is
tres groovy, and the sense of the times is delightful. That others
have walked the same street does not detract from the evidence that P
sees things along the way others have missed. It is not perfect, but,
even I should someday find a perfect novel, I am glad to have IV in my
library.

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 9:10 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Oct 23, 2009, at 5:27 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
>
>> I also *really* do not like it, though I'm willing to pick through the
>> carcass, looking for shreds of
>
> Smegmo?
>
>> ... ick, I'll drop that metaphor -- not enough caffeine in the system to
>> think it through.
>
> Is there ever enough caffeine to think through Pynchon's mazes?
>
>> Anyway, I'd place IV solidly at the bottom of any ranking or rating of
>> Pynchon's works [haven't read his Minstrel Island script, admittedly]. I
>> certainly hope nothing else dislodges it from that position.  Is there
>> anyone here who'd disagree?  Speak up!
>>
>> Laura
>
> [raises hand with trepidation]
>
> I don't know where—or why—I'd place Inherent Vice. Probably next to
> "Vineland', another "failure" of Pynchon's that I enjoyed from the date of
> issue to the present. Seems like the book is a bit of a rorschach test. From
> my angle, having witnessed a lot of L.A. from the perspective of living
> there, often viewing the lay of the land from a moving car with the radio
> on, Inherent Vice strikes me as the most successful of all of Pynchon's
> books in catching the flavor of "The City of The Angels." Having been a fan
> of Raymond Chandler long before I "got into" Pynchon, I can see how his
> "strategy of transference" works particularly well with an author he clearly
> venerates—or at least has been consciously stealing routines from the
> get-go.
>
> The bits of Pynchon I like the least are in his earliest stories. I find
> cringe-worthy passages a-plenty in the stories collected in "Slow Learner,"
> & moments in "V." where I'd rather be reading the phone book. There's a few
> passages in CoL49 where I have to ask—"Why did he do that?"
>
> But I'm pretty sure the "WTF" moments in IV are there to piss off the
> lit-crit crowd. Those "high culture/low culture" themes found in Raymond
> Chandler's mysteries—"The Long Goodbye" in particular—are alive and well in
> Inherent Vice. Much as the New England Transcendentalist/"Great American
> Novel" themes found in Gravity's Rainbow are deliberately forced to bump up
> against the commercial, the ephemeral, the quotidian, the tawdry in
> Gravity's Rainbow so here we have a Mise-en-scène that corresponds to where
> the author was during the writing of GR. Gordita/Manhattan Beach in the
> spring of 1970 looks/sounds/feels like a spectacularly paranoid place. For
> me, it makes it all the clearer where GR came from. So, knowing where the
> author is pointing, I find Inherent Vice  particularly fascinating.
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
Ian Livingston

"liber enim librum aperit."