Meet the New Boss (Pynchon's THEY or The Firm is Dead)

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 29, 2010, at 12:08 AM, Phillip Grayson wrote:

> Wait, I'm confused, how is this about Henry Adams?

I'm sure we'll get get there eventually.

> On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 8:28 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com 
> > wrote:
> > He says he published a novel, thought he knew a thing or two, uses  
> the past
> > tense—get it?
>
> Of course I get it, but you are confused.
>  but why do you attribute your confusion to the author?

Syntax it think they call it. Word order, word choice, that sort of  
thing.

> you can't
> even follow him or make out what book he's talking about. and you read
> this Introduction several times?

A lot more than "several" times.

> Geeez, maybe you should give up
> trying to make sense of Pynchon.  It follows, you just have to accept
> what he's written and you seem reluctant to do so.

You make it sound like I'm committing heresy by applying the standards  
the author is speaking of in the introductory essay to the works  
written within the time frame of that essay:

	"As NEARLY as I can remember, these stories were written between 1958  
and 1964."

> He was, he admits,
> a slow learner; he wrote some college tales and apprentice stuff that
> he can look back at and laugh about. Hey, we all have such projects;
> we think we're good enough or we hope we are, we might even fool some
> people some of the time, but we're not foolish enough to look back at
> them and not cringe a bit at how bad they really are. He wrote a
> novel. It won some praise and some awards and people read it and it
> even got picked up, along with Entropy, by the academics. An ambitious
> project, not a failure, but still the work of a young man learning the
> craft of fiction.

It has horrible passages, particularly when he attempts to put words  
in the mouths of his characters. The author spends a lot of time  
focusing on that particular fault in that short essay. With good  
reason, his dialog was that bad. While what he does now is not good  
dialogue by "Austen" standards, those standards do not apply to Pynchon

Why you have this need to validate Pynchon's stature as a writer by  
hog-tying TRP to Longfellow and Melville? Doubtless you can make these  
connections, doubtless there's a certain validity in what you're  
saying, but that never was what the author is really about. He's a  
20th/21st century writer. Nearly fifty years have passed since "V."  
came out, there's other possible angles of approach to this writer.  
You have this pathological need to shoot down any other ideas.

> Of this period, one story, TSI is favored,

By you, I've read it, several times. Sorry, it's your favorite,  
probably the favorite of academics. But it's not really good, now, is  
it?

> but it is
> still not very good; it has diamonds in the rough, but it is a novel
> and he published it and he learned a lot from the project.

He doesn't really say that, he says he "thought "he learned something.  
After CoL49 he is not so sure. That is what he said, project what you  
like if it makes you feel better.

> Then, after
> the novel, he goes at it again, seems to have forgotten all he learned
> from the previous projects, published Lot49, not a very good work.

He does not say that CoL49 is a bad work in the introduction. Like it  
or not, the passage is confused by the author. I suspect the passage  
is deliberately confused—this is not the sort of man who has something  
published without noticing such details. Here's the passage again,  
I'll expand to the entirety of the final two paragraphs:

	By the time I wrote "The Secret Integration" I was embarked on this  
phase of the business. I had published a novel
	and thought I knew a thing or two, but for the first time I believe I  
was also beginning to shut up and listen to the
	American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed  
sources and take a look at American nonverbal
	reality. I was out on the road at last, getting to visit the places  
Kerouac had written about. These towns and Greyhound
	voices and fleabag hotels have found their way into this story, and I  
am pretty content with how it holds up.
	Not that it's perfect, understand, not by a long shot. The kids, for  
example, seem in some areas to be not very bright,
	certainly not a patch on the kids of the '8o's. I could also with an  
easy mind see axed much of the story's less responsible
	Surrealism. Still, there are parts of it I can't believe I wrote.  
Sometime in the last couple of decades, some company of
	elves must have snuck in and had a crack at it. As is clear from the  
up-and-down shape of my learning curve, however, it
	was too much to expect that I'd keep on for long in this positive or  
professional direction. The next story I wrote was
	"The Crying of Lot 49," which was marketed as a "novel," and in which  
I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought
	I'd learned up till then.

	Most likely, much of my feeling for this last story can be traced to  
ordinary nostalgia for this time in my life, for the
	writer who seemed then to be emerging, with his bad habits, dumb  
theories and occasional moments of productive
	silence in which he may have begun to get a glimpse of how it was  
done. What is most appealing about young folks, after
	all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character  
but the movie, the soul in flux. Maybe this small
	attachment to my past is only another case of what Frank Zappa calls  
a bunch of old guys sitting around playing
	rock'n'roll. But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and  
education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on
	forever.

What the author seems to be saying is that he improved with TSI, then  
fell apart with CoL49. But that's not what he's saying. Typical  
Pynchon. He says that his next story was marketed as a novel, then  
speaks of his fondness for this last story. He never clarifies which  
is the "last story", TSI or CoL49. You can rattle on all you like  
about what you "Know", but I suspect you don't know how to read Pynchon.