P defends V.: more break-dancing (from an unathletic old man)

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 31, 2010, at 7:27 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> As I do some Shake sceneing, I am reminded of his near contemporary,  
> Edmund
> Spenser, of Faerie Queen fame, not that there's anything
> wrong with that. Spenser, romance in poetry with (at least) semi- 
> allegorical
> characters and actions full of meanings in the plurals.....Reminds me
> of an American writer I've read.

Didn't the essentially allegorical Masque scare Shakespeare's dramas  
off the stage? Wasn't "The Tempest" a masque?

> No one ever seemed to accuse ole Spence of character creation via  
> single
> speeches and, sometimes, extended tropes and a bit more for them  
> characters
> so much rounder than even flabby Benny and Slothrop, like that  
> ununiversitied
> Stratford player who 'created the human "being of the world
> beyond the Middle Ages on the stage and in the white folio, what a  
> visitation,
> some say, like Bloom. Character ripeness isn't all all the time, ole  
> Spence
> probably said and Milton echoed, perhaps divinely.

More to the point are issues like the writing style, word selection,  
overall musicality and poetic qualities in writing. It doesn't matter  
if your dialog/ue is "realistic." Plain old-fashioned quality of  
writing is the real issue. Shakespeare's speeches aren't / can't be  
realistic, but they sure are dramatic. Pynchon's speeches can't be  
realistic—no way in hell, no more than you could call "Hare Tonic"  
realistic.

And that's kinda the point.

> Which is just to segue into: categorization comes after creation,  
> ask Aristotle
> who wrote his Poetics to lay down his sword and shield and the  
> patterns
> of them great Greek scene makers, who did not even know they were  
> writing
> tragedies via the unities....

I had no idea until last week that I was trying my hand at farce.

> I've read me some Chase once upon a time and i kept remembering that  
> whatever
> it was that Melville was writing  only his first exotic "travel"  
> novels, books,
> romances
>
> ever sold

I can always remember Moby Dick 'cause I heard the Firesign Theater's   
"20 Years Behind The Whale" on KRLA in the fall of 1967. "Yo-ho-ho and  
a bottle of rope." The crew had heard that the ship was rigged with  
hemp rope! The crew then proceeded to smoke down the ship.

You just don't forget shit like that.

Oh yeah, loved the book, didn't care for the movie, Seth McFarland  
ought to consider a remake.

I remember "The Scarlet Letter" as I was having a semi-adulterous  
affair at the time we were both turned on by the story

You just don't forget shit like that.

> and Chase woudda had nuthin to categorize if HM's genius had not
> been belatedly recognized like the deferral of infinite meaning,  
> thanks Deborah,
> can i call you that?

What, you want her phone number?

> and I also remember Chase wanted some high belated
> recognition for Twain's-------------Puddinhead Wilson(!), a courageous
> fence-painting attempt I guess but he did not get this muttonhead to  
> read it
> nor, I think, many of his leadheaded colleagues, who were not him.

I'd make an argument that Twain's hyperbolic screeds -- "Letters to  
Earth" comes to mind --  predate and echo Hunter S. Thompson's.

Does this make Twain Gonzo?

> I guess I fall on Robin's swordside when I most like Mendelsohn's  
> "encyclopedic'
>
> categorization of Pynchon who transcends even romance and that satiric
> group known as menippean, as it always sounds like to me, although I  
> apologize
> to any descendants of Mr. Menippean if it is his one and only family
> name but anyway, is "encyclopedic" any kind of defining  
> characteristic anyway
> when it seems to mean mucho pagination and full of about everything  
> which
> is where we are always starting with TRP, yes?

In my case no.

Used to feel that way, used to feel that this Dude's knowledge was  
infinite, drove myself batty over that.

But after a while I picked up a lot of references to family history in  
Pynchon's texts, increasingly so as he grows Up.

The first novel deploys Pynchon's "Strategy of Transference" to a  
rather alarmingly sloppy effect. Gravity's Rainbow also uses this  
strategy, but now the details are more precise, the language more  
evolved.

	Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to
	me. Displacing my personal experience off into other
	environments went back at least as far as "The Small Rain."
	Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then
	to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with
	the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with
	fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct
	opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me,
	though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published
	and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as
	now was precisely that which had been made luminous,
	undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up,
	always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we
	all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively,
	understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case,
	stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.

The most Baedeker is in "V.",

	Could Willy Sutton rob a safe? Loot the Baedeker I did, all the
	details of a time and place I had never been to, right
	down to the names of the diplomatic corps. Who'd make up a
	name like Khevenhüller-Metsch? Lest others become as
	enchanted as I was and have continued to be with this
	technique, let me point out that it is a lousy way to go about
	writing a story.

the least is in Inherent Vice. I guess the Pynchon you'd want a drink  
with -- the quiet, stuttering paranoid young man, or the more  
avuncular smoking jokester of the present -- is an indication of how  
well that strategy works for you. I'm finding a lot of "V." in  
"Against the Day", very often in the form of a joke concerning some  
literary crime of the author's youth. I'm also finding sketches in  
"V." opening up into big, impressionist paintings in "Against the  
Day." "V." in Venice comes to mind.