Wheat, chaff, stalks, seeds

[Michael Bailey]

alice wellintown  wrote:
>
> 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.

a lot of interesting stuff seems to fall under that rubric...

But I remain skeptical that Pynchon's texts
can be described fully satisfingly with those critical tools.

Some (but not all) of this is doubtless due to my incomplete knowledge
of them...

>
> 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

ah, but it's not a novel, it's a romance...

> 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.
>

3 responses, none of which is completely responsive, but taken together,
also don't completely answer your objection:

a) exactly!  what's not to like about that?

b) it holds the mirror up to life!

c) tropes worn out and tired? nah - his tropes keep
changing.  I don't find him guilty of stylistic stop-loss a-tall.

- "A-and" and "d'tn" only have brief cameos
- paranoia has been brevetted to drill-sergeant
- Every Bodine evidently has mustered out for the duration
- The call for revenge, the keynote of AtD, is barely sounded in IV.
- A completely different view of computers, not so much a synthesis
of "hostile paranormal Entity inspiring a bent hymn from Frenesi" versus
"and Good night to you gentle user" both contending in Vineland, as
a fresh perspective different from both those... "the 'ask me if I give
a f*ck' look Doc had noted [in others...]"

tired tropes?  I don't see it.
A-and, every now and then, there's a trope *surge*...




-- 
--- "Bearing in mind that either I don't know
or it'll be my ass if I tell you, what is it, man?" - Coy Harlingen