IVIV20: Maybe then, 368-369

[Robin Landseadel]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk8_a0eh2O4&feature=related

I humbly offer myself up as the greatest and probably most obnoxious  
of Fanboys on this list and in so doing declare that I'm not anywhere  
near finished with Inherent Vice. Many have declared Inherent Vice to  
be "Pynchon Lite." I offer up "Pynchon Brut," where the text pushes  
the narrative harder and everything's a whole lot less overstuffed  
with florid descriptions of scenery, belabored explanations of  
obsolete technical terms and machinery, bumps in the narrative flow  
thanks to transformations of the narrator's voice [s], randomly placed  
ellipses . . . . What is going on in Inherent Vice is all very much in  
the tradition that the author is celebrating as he's parodying it—good  
ole' hardboiled noir [sounds like grandma's cookin', don't it?] always  
had a low-down, naturally preterite sound to it. Those that are  
appalled by Pynchon's little bagatelle of a noir exercise uniformly  
bemoan the lack of poetry. I say that the [comparative] lack of poetry  
makes for an interesting stylistic change-up, kinda like when the  
Beatles played at being the  Bonzo Dog Band in "Magical Mystery Tour."

I offer up page 117 of Against the Day as further commentary.

	Their fateful decision to land would immediately embroil them in
	the byzantine politics of the region, and eventually they would
	find themselves creeping perilously close to outright violation of
	the Directives relating to Noninterference and Height
	Discrepancy, which might easily have brought at official
	hearing, and perhaps even disfellowshipment from the National
	Organization. For a detailed account of their subsequent narrow
	escapes hm the increasingly deranged attentions of the Legion
	of Gnomes, the unconscionable connivings of a certain
	international mining cartel, the sensual wickedness pervading
	the royal court of Chthonica, Princess of Plutonia, and the all-
	but-irresistible fascination that subterranean monarch would
	come to Gert, Circe-like, upon the minds of the crew of
	Inconvenience (Miles, as we have seen, in particular), readers
	are referred to The Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth
	—for some reason one of the less appealing of this series,
	letters having come in from as far away as Tunbridge Wells,
	England, expressing displeasure, often quite intense, with my
	harmless little intraterrestial scherzo.

	"If you're not into that whole brevity thing, man . . ."

I realized months ago that the only way to really get anything out of  
IV would be by reading Gravity's Rainbow again. I'm a third of the way  
through. The really shocking scenes continue to shock—completely  
passed over Pudding's little scene over in the D wing, wouldn't you  
know? I figured there would be plenty of parallels—there's that whole  
"Nick Danger" shtick of overlaying Noir conventions on top of current  
topicks, just like you find in every other book by TRP, most notably  
in Gravity's Rainbow, a book just bursting with what the Firesign  
Theater would later call "Dope Humor of the Seventies!!!" Try out this  
genre exercise: take the total number of pages of Gravity's Rainbow,  
divide by two—it's the passage where Rocketman gets his lights knocked  
by Vaslav Tchitcherine and a chunk of his hash is taken away, right  
smack dab in the middle of the book, wouldn't you know.

What this little community that we're in really needs is a  
pharmacological guide to Thomas Pynchon.

Meanwhile, back at der platz, there's twenty-one trumps in a standard  
Tarot deck, along with the four suits from ace to king and one more  
card, known as "The Fool" that, as noted Tarot expert Thomas Pynchon  
points out, has no assignment in the deck. The twenty-first trump is  
usually assigned the title: "The World." I sense that a possible  
reading of the twenty-first [and final] chapter of Inherent Vice would  
make one look at how "The World" card is scryed in Gravity's Rainbow:  
what will come to Weissmann is "The World." The world that was  
projected by Weissmann was imprinted upon L.A., in the fifties and  
sixties, notably over in Manhattan Beach & environs. All that  
paranoiac obsession with being spied upon—the hallmark of GR and the  
one thing that separates it from all of Pynchon's later books—was born  
of the author's prescient extrapolation of what was going down at TRW.  
GR's exploration of Gnosticism obviously points in multiple  
directions. I offer up the omniscient & electronic "Eye in the Sky" as  
one possible interpretation/explanation of gnosticism's presence in  
these novels. In any case, that world—that fog that Doc is entering  
into in chapter twenty-one—is the world Weissmann made.

	"The system has no use for souls."

	"Someday everybody's gonna wake up to find they're under surveillance  
they can't escape."

http://tinyurl.com/yk2vnws

On Jan 30, 2010, at 8:24 AM, Paul Nightingale wrote:

> 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.
>