IVIV20: Maybe then, 368-369

[Mark Kohut]

Hey Foax,

We've waned.....jump in on Paul's annotated ending with some obs, I cheerlead.  Particularly, what do we all think about the ending??

I wrote, hypingly, "almost-sublime" about it, but that is hype....it is smoothly fine, smoothly sweet, so nicely meshed with story and many of P's themes, I think.

What do some who did not like the book as much as many think just of the ending?

Mark

--- On Sat, 1/30/10, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:

> From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
> Subject: IVIV20: Maybe then, 368-369
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, January 30, 2010, 11:24 AM
> The chapter began with Doc, inspired
> by sporting loss, leaving home to seek
> company, "tak[ing] his disappointment out on the road"
> (364). On 366 he asks
> Sparky if he can "look in here once in a while".
> 
> Here, returning home, he thinks of those he might know in
> the same situation
> (368). Up the page, anonymity, "a convoy of indeterminate
> size", and no way
> of knowing anyone. At the start of the twentieth century
> modernist writers
> like Durkheim and Tonnies described the alienation inherent
> in urban
> societies; in the 1960s alienation was inherent in the
> consumer society
> described by Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. IV ends with
> the attempt to
> reconstruct some kind of community, however ironic his
> speculations (the
> "alumni associations" that return again and again to a
> meaningful moment).
> 
> From speculating about an indeterminate future, "phones as
> standard
> equipment in every car ..." etc, Doc wonders about what
> he'll do here and
> now "if he misse[s] the Gordita Beach exit" (368). Doc's
> reading of
> landscape (a nod at documentary realism: "He knew that at
> Rosecrans ..."
> etc) is succeeded by speculation: "Maybe then it would stay
> this way for
> days ..." etc (369). There are alternative endings on offer
> here, the
> fantasy that offers anonymity as a kind of liberation
> ("across a border
> where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican,
> who was Anglo,
> who was anybody") set against passivity, not for the first
> time Doc
> "pull[ing] over on the shoulder and wait[ing]". The latter
> option has cops
> and "a restless blonde", the citizen still a PI.
> 
>