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

[alice wellintown]

Robin,

You don't like early P for a number of reasons; most of all, you find
the dialogue is weak or ugly. But the kind of fiction Pynchon writes
doesn't depend on and has never been read for its dialogue. If you had
some knowledge of the history of American Literature and of the
American Romance in particular, you would understand that I'm not
strapping P to American Romance (Irving, Cooper, Poe, Brown, Melville,
Hawthorne), Pynchon has strapped himself to them. He writes Romance
and like all those who come before him, he can be hog-tied and whipped
for his heroic-clown and his weak and ugly dialogue or what some
critics call his hysterical prose and his cartoon-like characters
readers can not much care for. But, the problem is Pynchon's dialogues
so much as the critical lens used to read, critique, evaluate his
dialogue and use of characterization. Of course, one can widen this
lens and blow up all the errors Twain finds in Cooper, as many a
critic of Pynchon have--so he makes too many lists, has too many plots
and cul-de-sacs, too many characters, too many doubles ...too many too
long too... II... 2... TWO... now here come a drum role & a Led Zep
Lin with parody and pastische and a pugnacious pooch reading Henry
James ...Moby-Dick.

cyber punk? magik realism? meta-historical-postmodern romance?

It's just a whol lotta sublime romance, man, and P, as early as V.,
read his Wigglesworth and his Irving and his Melville...and he was
just following the tradition of the cool the same way his brother
Farina was only P tapped into the Davy Crocket clown-hero and the
language and he wanted to lay it down and he tried and I think he
succeeded and if you are willing to look at these early workd thru the
right lens, the American romance lens, you too can feel that vibe,
dude.

http://www.beatmuseum.org/pollock/moby.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRuTcnd8YLU


NOTE:

see Daniel J. Boorstin The Americans: The National Experience
"American Wayss of Talking" and "The search for symbols" and Richard
M. Dorson cited by, and AGAIN, see that Melville and Repose on the
humor of American Romance and Satire.