IVIV20: Maybe then, 368-369

[Mark Kohut]

yes, modern urban alienation....or anonymity in a community convoy......
"temporary communes to help one home through the fog"......all the events
of the times symbolized as ones that will be remembered....

car caravan, the singled up lines of California cars....I, for one, was reminded of the line of prospectors up and down the hill hunting for gold in Chaplin's "Gold Rush". 

But he can stop out, somwtimes and wait...................

(I think it is Doctorow who used this metaphor to describe the way of the writer: like driving a car in the dark, the headlights only need to show enough of the way, and as one traverses that, then the way ahead gets illuminated steadily until one is......there/home/finished. 

TRP knows how to end a novel, it has been said. 
I think this ending is so fine, so nice...I felt poignancy, feel it again. Quietly near-sublime.....The sense of what had been good, free, happy, now gone....

--- 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.
> 
>