For Joseph (from Group W Bench & the Romantics); why Alice closed the dump on Thanksgving and other Komspiracies from the Left

[Robin Landseadel]

Yeah, but still it's a bit like the Tristero, everything boils down to  
a single study that---who knows, may have been underwritten by Merrill  
Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith with a particular emphasis on "Pierce,"  
the company that picked up Pynchon & Company for a song back in 1931.

It isn't that what you're pointing to  doesn't have anything to do  
with Pynchon, it has a lot to do with Pynchon.

But I'll bet anything that "Meritorious Price" has one whole heck of a  
lot more to do with it.

Seriously, catalogue all the heresies in "V.", that ought to keep you  
occupied for a while.

On Aug 30, 2010, at 7:46 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

> From Deborah L. Madsen, "Pynchon's Quest Narratives and the Tradition
> of American Romance," Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's The Crying of
> Lot 49 and Other Works , ed. Thomas H, Schaub (NY: MLA, 2008), pp.
> 25-30:
>
>   "Students who have never studied American literature as a coherent
> body of knowledge evaluate Pynchon's achievement in terms of their
> familiarity with the canon of British literature.  Consequently, their
> perception of what constitutes a novel in English is shaped by the
> classic nineteenth-century British novelists ....  Thus, these
> students anticipate that Pynchon's language will conform loosely to
> E.M. Forster's prescription for 'round' or 'flat' characterization and
> who will inhabit fictonal settings recognizably related to the world
> ....  The structure of the narrative, they expect, will be based on
> the interaction of characters and the development of relationships
> among them that represent significant aspects of their culture and
> society.
>   "Given these assumptions, students encounter difficulties with
> Pynchon's deployment of the quest structure, his use of language and
> symbolism, his types of characters, and their settings.  Richard
> Chase, in his classic study, The American Novel and Its Tradition
> (1957), observes that differences such as these mark American as
> opposed to English novelistic conventions.... Chase identifies what he
> calls the American 'romance-novel,' a generic classification that
> accounts for the distinctive features of the narratives that form much
> of the American literary canon: works by James Fenimore Cooper,
> Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and ... Thomas Pynchon.
>   "Chase stresses the importance of a shift in the attitude toward
> characterization: from the novelistic emphasis on comprehensive
> characterization to the romancer's interest in action and plot at the
> expense of detailed character portrayal.  'Character itself,' he
> writes, 'becomes ... somewhat abstract and ideal, so much so in some
> romances that it seems merely a function of plot' (13) [ellipsis in
> text].'  ..." (p. 25)
>
>   "The subject matter of the quest romance is abstract moral truth
> ... as opposed to more particular sociological kinds of truth that
> arise from the ordinary or probable experiences in the novel.  As a
> consequence, the romance is set not in the recognizable world of real
> life but in some neutral space where the marvelous and the ordinary,
> the imaginary events and actual locations may meet.  The laws of
> possibility are suspended ... so that the truths of human experience
> may be acted out in the narrative.... the highly stylized, fictional
> world of the romance: all is symbolic, but the symbolic meetings are
> not simple and obvious; rather, they are as ambiguous as the human
> situations being represented." (p. 26)
>
> "When a romance is read as a novel, inevitably the romancer's attempt
> to dramatize the hidden truths of the human condition becomes but a
> weak 'paint and pasteboard' representation of social reality....  Like
> Hawthorne, Pynchon creates characters to represent moral ideas, just
> as he uses social history ... as idea rather than as event." (ibid.)
>
> "Indeed, several of the features that supposedly define Lot 49 and
> other Pynchon works as postmodern are actually characteristics of the
> American quest romance: the self-conscious foregrounding of narrative,
> the infinite deferral of meaning, the self-reflexive concern with
> reading and textuality...." (p. 30)
>
> see  ya, Josesph...not that I expect you to understand any of this
> either, but I'm sure Robin will exaplin it all tpo ya.