Someone (else) speak on Inherent Vice..?

[alice wellintown]

>
> "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.

You brought it up, again. I simply corrected your error or called you
on your misapplication of the narratrive technique. Thru this read you
and Mark have argued the biogrpahical reading. I have argued a
rhetorical one. Plenty of evidence has been provided for both
approaches. But your recent post tried and failed to explain how
Pynchon's use of narrative supports your reading. As far as covering
Pynchon's more expansive concerns we differ as what these are: I claim
they are artistic and you claim they are political. I've no problem
accepting that he is concerned with both. A glance at any of his
essays and at his more overtly polical writings, such as VL, suggests
that the author is at least concerned with politics in America. That
said, this interest, concern, or element of his art is hardly what
makes his them worthy of the kind of intense and rigorous study we
have subjected IV and other P works to on P-L and elsewhere. His
contribution to the novel or romance is far more important. Pynchon
politics are only of interest because of how he says what he says and
what he has to say. For what he has to say is niether unique nor
profound. As far as where Pynchon fits into the Ameicvan cannon of
romance, it's fairly obvious to anyone who has read the cannon of
American romance that Pynchon, as James Wood notes in his Broken
Estate, or you prefer Tanner notes, The American Mystery, right next
to Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe.


> 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.
>
>
>