[alice wellintown]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:51 AM, Carvill, John<john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:
>> Josiah
>> I couldn't help thinking about Dick the whole time I read IV.
>
> Really? I kept thinking about pussy.

Pynchon, unlike Roth (A Dying Animal, which packs more than Pynchon
can into a novella)  or Marquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores,
which) & other horny old men, doesn't write about Pussy or Dick. Or
sex for that matter. It's not absurd for an old man to write about
licking pussy and spotted dicks. Is it? I don't think so. Let them
write. Let us read. But IV is not about flaccid old dicks and young
sweet snatch. It's about an old writer who is trying to write
un-conventional cultural-historical and topical,  so he has to act as
if the available novelistic methods and ideas are continually about to
turn into mere convention,  and so has to try to outwit that
inevitable aging of his art. But Pynchon's art, when it rewards our
efforts to read it, and we must read it with careful, even active and
imaginative cool, and then re-read it (Nabokov) and we need to "read
musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening
for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to
the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes,
deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging
how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a
sentence with mathematical finality" (Wood), takes time to read
because it takes time to write. Sure, the young Tom, as some letters
suggest, was not so slow of study or composition, but the positive
paranoia of his texts, the cultural-historical connections,  and the
imaginative trips, the poetry and prose that grabs a reader by the
love beads and pulls her into a paranoid adventure, take time to
compose. IV is a rushed job. It's plot lines are frayed not worth
tying together. Not that plot lines in postmodern parody should tie up
in an Aristotelian bow, but Pynchon does it anyway, with characters
who fill us in,  and fill us in,  and fill us in, (the narrative
choice problem again)  until we a so full of fill, so exhausted by the
telling,  that we are desperate to be shown anything. Even Shasta's
acting under the influence of junk in her beautiful body and stars in
star struck eyes.

 If a feminist is willing to hump his/her way through IV, he/she will
discover that it is more feminist tract than VL. That the novel buries
the feminist message (again, the feminist movement was a very positive
contrast to the violent male dick wagging and rocket launching in the
plotted months of the novel) under reels and reels of film and TV
smack & snack munchie attack and Pynchon's masturbating the boy
readers with girls on leashes down on their knees, cocks in their
mouths, as in VL, is another problem. As noted here when Rich Romeo
asked why we would dig into this pile of crap and explicate it as if
it were Shakespeare, the training, or total lack of training which may
be better (hang in there Robin) that teaches readers to read for the
substrative message, that is, that the surface reality of the text is
not the reality of the text, not only because, as encountered or
perceived it involves a contribution from ourselves as well as from
the text or object, or because something in the text or object
produces individual or existential effects in readers, but because the
world as it appears to each existential reader is the manifestation of
some underlying reality or substrate buried in the deep text that must
be un-earthed by the clever reader. Not only does reading this way
smudge everything into shades of grey and both/and moral ambiguities
and indeterminacies, it is without an objective criteria for the
classification of texts and the evaluation of them, and this is the
end of reading. Go watch the Tube.