IVIV (8): An Occasional Certified Zombie

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 30, 2009, at 5:01 AM, Ray Easton wrote:

> Robin Landseadel wrote:
>>
>> 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.

> Clearly, there is no "right" reading of Pynchon.  But there are  
> readings which are just plain wrong.  The use of rigid Jamesean  
> lenses, for instance, results in such a reading.   Your own railing  
> against critics who dismiss his post-GR works appear to argue that  
> these readings are not just different than yours, but are in fact  
> wrong.

My sense is that there is a quality of despair in the first three  
novels along with a backlog of Lit-Crit work in the seventies and  
eighties that tends to overvalue the "seriousness" of Pynchon. I find  
that complex critical analysis usually undercuts Pynchon's humor and  
tends to assign it to the category of—"oh wasn't that silly, now let's  
move on to something that's really important."

Death is easy, comedy is hard. Pynchon's writing is becoming more  
comic over time.

> Not every literary snipe hunt undertaken by every reader grows out  
> of the design of the work.  Readers are far too clever for that to  
> be true.

Don't forget crazy, there's plenty of Pynchonia I've read that makes  
zero attempt to communicate with the reader about Pynchon's writing.  
Alice/Terrance has a habit of whipping out an outlier opinion  then  
says something along the lines of "This proves that Gravity's Rainbow  
is not a postmodern work of fiction" when all it really proves is that  
there are outlier opinions that are out of skew with consensus reality  
and/or too clever for their own good. See "Postmodern Pooh" by  
Frederick Crews for more details.

> Someone posted a review or a blog entry or what not in which the  
> author claimed that the amount of activity on the IV Wiki was  
> evidence of the depth of the text.  I've no opinion on IV's depth,  
> but the quantity of digital ink spilled over it is not evidence of  
> such.  It testifies rather to the energy, inventiveness, and  
> imagination of IV's readers.

Not to mention that more people have more access to the internet than  
ever before. A billion word processors, a billion monkeys—voilà,  
you've got Hamlet. Again.

As regards the degree of depth within Inherent Vice; I say give it a  
few years before passing such judgements. It's only been out two  
months and lots of folks seem to be enjoying it right now. Some of  
those readers are discovering hidden depths in Inherent Vice even as I  
type, some are posting here at the P-list. Declarations that Inherent  
Vice is an abject failure demonstrate more about the critics making  
such comments than it does about the book itself.