Someone (else) speak on Inherent Vice..?

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jan 5, 2010, at 10:53 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> On Jan 5, 2010, at 10:59 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
>> the point remains
>> that you all have not been able to provide any text evidence for the
>> claim that the author has written a text that reflects or expounds or
>> in any way truly shines a light on his project as author. IV is an
>> abortion when set next to AGTD and GR.
>
> Plenty of evidence and argument,  but it's hard to hear with a pair  
> of frozen chocolate bananas in the ears.
>
> My general sense is that this was written as a brief fishing  
> expedition for new readers. For my son it was his first Pynchon book  
> and he liked it, found it amusing and intriguing and structurally  
> unusual and is now reading Vineland and is interested in GR. I will  
> not be surprised if it is made into a movie by the Cohen Brothers.
>
> Also, no matter what lit freak and art for art's sake devotees  
> think, I think there is a political and historic intent that  
> connects all TRP has written.  This is a dark book about a society  
> at war with it's own ideals, seduced by pornographic fantasies,  
> where even basic human freedom is a bought in a devil's bargain.

My general sense is that TRP has always folded Noir elements into the  
mix. Following the encyclopedia of genre experiments known as "Against  
the Day," the author narrowed things down to this "psychedelic noir."

"Alice" yammering about "narratorial authority" and "the American  
Romance" requires specifics from the texts to be properly Illuminated.  
It's T 'n A's personal bailiwick and while there may be something to  
it, it's far too narrowband to cover Pynchon's more expansive  
concerns. I wanted examples from Terri because his spin on these  
things is so personal, a singularity. While I've no doubt there's  
something to the concept of "The American Romance" as explicated by T  
'n A, it's far from the only thing going on in TRP's writing and from  
this perspective, far from the most important.

My example starts with the fly-leaf blurb, in particular:

	In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an
	unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the
	principle that if you can remember the 60's you weren't there .
	.  or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it . . .

Now if you were there then most likely you remember:

http://www.comicsreporter.com/images/uploads/fatfreddyfff.jpg

. . . and I don't know [and to be honest, don't care] if this level of  
narratorial confusion has anything to do with T 'n A's theories. Of  
course, as I'm not married to those theories it hardly matters if they  
do or they don't. My point is simple and often repeated throughout the  
text—Doc Sportello is beginning to doubt his memory and that doubt  
creeps into the narrator's telling of Doc's tale.

There are so many examples of this throughout the text. Favorites are  
the references to the Bonzo Dog Band—when Doc is driving towards the  
Wolfmann Mansion, the the Vibrasonic is playing the Bonzo's "Bang  
Bang", a tune that didn't see the light of day till 2007. Later on,  
when Doc returns to his office only to find Clancy and Tariq getting  
it on, Doc exits, re-enters and find the happy couple playing gin  
rummy and playing "a Bonzo Dog Band album which to his knowledge Doc  
didn't own." Doc's confusion of memory and history is leaking into the  
narrator's telling of the tale. This is but one of many examples of  
the sort of long-term-short-term memory loss that comes from chronic  
smoking of the chronic that Pynchon  displays from end to end in IV.