Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[alice wellintown]

If P has reduced his project to pissing off critics, of whatever
school or approach, he has wasted his talent. But he's done no such
thing; to argue that he has,  is to engage in a critical conversation
or argument. The critic or reader may be pissed off or pissed on by
what other critics or readers say, but these pissings are purely
critical and not authorial.

That Po-Mo has ended, and indeed it has exhausted itself, matters
little, since we now know that it was yet another ISM of us Moderns.

IV is, by far, Pynchon's most Postmodernist novel to date.

This is one of the reasons readers, even those of us who love
postmodern fiction, don't like it. It's been done better by other
postmodernists and by P himself  in prior works.

ANd, while the direct and at times interesting parody of the hard
boiled novel/film holds our attention in a few scenes, his
postmodernist experimentation are no longer novel or exciting.

Moreover, P's tropes are worn out and tired, his ideas float on the
surface of a filthy and ugly pool of poisoned and polluted
prose-landscapes where zombies and manikins and thanatoids and
subversive stereotypes zap in and out of Tube-lands and Movie Sets and
drug induced trips down lost highways where the spilled and broken
battle the blind and all end up in the ditch.



On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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."
>
>