IVIV (8): An Occasional Certified Zombie

[alice wellintown]

Thank goodness logicians don't get to edit writers and poets;
repetition is an important poetic and rhetorical device. The use of a
"tautological phrase"  can be quite effective. Like ending a sentence
with a preposition or using or choosing not to use parallel grammar or
rhetorical structure. Grammar is a useful too, so is logic. But in the
hands of sophomores, most tools are weapons of mass obstruction.  I
wrote a paper on the preterit in Aristotle when I was a graduate
student of philosophy. Got a B-  Tough teacher. Infamous for his
rigour and tough grading. Almost made we want to go fix motorcycles
for a living.

Look, it's not a matter of a definitive correct reading of a text, but
some are better than others. The first reading is great but the second
is better. An active reader who looks things up is kind reader
(Nabokov).

Don't want to bore you with the Preterite stuff. I could dig it out,
but it has nothing to do with IV. IV is not a novel about these
Calvinistic ideas at all.



On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> The mind is a terrible thing. In any case, I removed the offending repeated
> word.
>
> My other thought about "Preterite" is Captain Beefheart's "The Past Sure Is
> Tense":
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot5Ho7dXSNc
>
> Lots of space in Pynchon's novel's is taken up by things certifiably in the
> past. Like a lot of Pynchon's favored words and phrases, this is a concept
> that goes in many different directions. Preterite, in addition to being
> Calvinist doctrine, the word Preterite is also a tense and
> pastness—glorified in Against the Day—is always on Doc's, I'm sorry,
> Pynchon's mind.
>
> Claiming that there is a "right" or a "wrong" reading of Pynchon misses that
> "misdirection" has always been a core tactic of Pynchon. If it feels dense
> and confusing and misleading at times, it's because it is, it's supposed to
> feel dense and confusing. If one is led on a literary snipe hunt it is
> because that's an essential part of the novel's design.
>
>
> On Sep 29, 2009, at 5:23 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:
>
>> On Sep 29, 2009, at 3:49 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>>> the "since he is not a Calvinist" argument doesn't make any
>>> sense.
>>
>> Seems like Pynchon inserts some family history into the mix from time to
>> time. I'd say that ancestor William Pynchon of Springfield Massachusetts
>> figures  pretty heavily in the author's thoughts. TRP is certainly aware of
>> and comments on the Calvinistic view about entitlement and ownership, who's
>> in the club and who's not. William Pynchon's public opposition to Calvinist
>> dogma concerning atonement resulted in "America's" first book to be publicly
>> burned for heresy—in Boston to boot.
>>
>> And just in case you didn't notice, Pynchon is coo-coo for heresies.
>>
>> I think that Pynchon's ideas about them's that got and them's that not is
>> pretty consistent whether or not he's using any given specific & particular
>> one-sided transaction to illuminate a core set of Calvinist beliefs or
>> simply to demonstrate Vegas odds.
>
>
>