IVIV20: Gateway to the past, 351-352

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Maybe for guys, but for women, I think COL49 retains its status as the gateway drug to Pynchon.  No matter how much "Alice" calls IV Pynchon's "most feminist work," it simply isn't.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>

>
> I don't think the book can handle such weighty things or add all that
>much insight to Pynchon's other works since its focus is surface.
>However, I think IV would be a great book for readers new to Pynchon
>to start. Do you find it strange Pynchon would write an primer to his
>work at the end of his career?  Maybe it isn't so strange
>
>This is my list of books to be read order wise
>
>IV
>Vineland
>Lot 49
>V
>GR
>M&D
>ATD
>
>rich
>
>On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Well, whatever meanings, as we know from Pynchon's work, resonate beyond
>> the symptomatic, it does seem to me that California as "the ark'--as Cailifornia goes, so goes the nation (in his work), so to speak---is one
>> layer of meaning. The Golden Fang boat is how America was 'saved', he says with the deepest irony....
>>
>>
>> --- On Thu, 1/14/10, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>
>>> From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
>>> Subject: Re: IVIV20: Gateway to the past, 351-352
>>> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>>> Date: Thursday, January 14, 2010, 2:07 PM
>>> From Mike:
>>>
>>> <<hearkening back to Susan Sontag's essay "Against
>>> Interpretation"
>>> (which it's quite possible you're alluding to here, anyway)
>>> which might be
>>> apropos here - "instead of a hermeneutics, we need an
>>> erotics of art">>
>>>
>>> I wasn't in particular, but you might consider the
>>> following online extract
>>> from Sontag's essay:
>>>
>>> The old style of interpretation was insistent, but
>>> respectful; it erected
>>> another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style
>>> of
>>> interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it
>>> digs "behind"
>>> the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The
>>> most celebrated and
>>> influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud,
>>> actually amount to
>>> elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious
>>> theories of
>>> interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in
>>> Freud's phrase,
>>> as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed
>>> and pushed aside
>>> to find the true meaning -- the latent content -- beneath.
>>> For Marx, social
>>> events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of
>>> individual lives
>>> (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as
>>> texts (like a
>>> dream or a work of art) -- all are treated as occasions for
>>> interpretation.
>>> According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be
>>> intelligible.
>>> Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To
>>> understand is to
>>> interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon,
>>> in effect to find
>>> an equivalent for it.
>>>
>>> http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/againstInterpExcerpt.shtml
>>>
>>> And back, a return to, my original post:
>>>
>>> However, before taking the bait, we might consider the
>>> context and
>>> acknowledge the failure of interpretation: the "glittering
>>> mosaic of doubt"
>>> is "[s]omething like ... inherent vice", and then "like
>>> original sin", or
>>> even "[l]ike the San Andreas Fault". A few lines further
>>> Sauncho's "boat"
>>> has become Doc's "ark", which is how, over the page on 352,
>>> Doc describes
>>> California itself. Meaning is always elsewhere, and this
>>> explanation of the
>>> novel's title provides little satisfaction if intended to
>>> provide closure.
>>>
>>> Against modernist interpretation? Allon White's The Uses of
>>> Obscurity has
>>> long been a text I admired: he discusses the way in which
>>> modernist writers
>>> like James tried to resist what White calls "symptomatic
>>> reading".
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>