V-2nd C3

[Mark Kohut]

Back to V.

Early in Chap 3, the eight impersonations

"to put off some part of the pain of dilemma"....
allusions to Adams lifelong dilemma of what to do? 



----- Original Message ----
From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
To: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, July 15, 2010 2:31:52 PM
Subject: Re: V-2nd C3

I, too, agree with Laura, that these exercises are attempts to get a
feel for V-dub's world. But it is also clear that he is trying to get
a feel for Sidney's world, yes? Or could it be that all this is a
means of creating a parallax measure of V's location somewhere between
the two? It seems altogether likely P would have had some awareness of
the uses of stellar parallax by this time in his education.

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 4:06 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> Stencil's "forcible dislocation of personality" seems a precursor to Pirate 
>>Prentice's "gift" (in GR) of acting as a "fantasist-surrogate," or channeler of 
>>other people's dreams.  In GR, this is presented as a mystical ability (and 
>>therefore co-optable by the War Office).  But in the earlier V. it's merely a 
>>writer's technique.  Stencil's quick changes are Pynchon's quick changes.  The 
>>thrill of being a writer (or, alas, for some of us, wanna-be writer) is to 
>>completely immerse oneself in another person's situation and mentality.  Young 
>>Pynchon has the fun of creating characters out of the "automata" provided by 
>>Baedeker's.  Each character (Aieul, Yusef, Maxwell/Ralph, Waldetar, Gebrail, 
>>Girgis, and Hanne)of Pynchon's/Stencil's is a working person or indigent, a mere 
>>prop for tourists.
>
> I agree that stencil is a precursor to narrative techniques P develops
> and employs with great skill in later works, including GR, M&D, AGTD,
> but I don't agree that Stencil is a precursor to Pirate. Stencil and
> the Baedeker owe a great debt to Nabokov, who, when he came to the
> United States, had to create a new fictional landscape or setting and
> found it rough going. Lolita is the result of Nabokov's baedeker
> method. The Baedeker is also used by Fitzgerald and, as I noted in a
> prior post, the Baedeker girls are on Nick's list of decadent party
> people who frequent Gatsby's siege parties. P spent a great deal of
> time reading and re-reading Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, of course, was
> profoundly influenced by a Catholic priest who turned him on to Marx
> and to Adams. But back to the narrative technic. The dreaming a yearn
> narrative is quite old and not that inovative, so Pirate has quite a
> few precursors, like the long chapter in Melville's Moby-Dick, The
> Town Ho's story, a tale in the tradition of gossip or telephone it's
> difficult to trace because it has changed hands so many time and
> because most of it was taken from a man talking in his sleep. Of
> course, this technic is used by P again and again, narrators like
> Mason spin yarns while sleeping that are apparently the hauntings of
> Native Americans, for much of what Mason tells in his sleep is in an
> Native American language he neither speaks nor comprehends. In any
> event, Pirate's dream, while it may be another person's as well, is
> not the stuff that Stencil is made on. Stencil is a parodic Adams.
>
>>
>> Stencil is trying to get a view of V. by immersing himself mentally in her 
>>world.  She barely appears in some or most of these vignettes (assuming Victoria 
>>Wren to be her earliest incarnation).  It's not important.  What is important is 
>>that Stencil's trying to "get" the mentality of a time and place that might have 
>>created the who/what of the V. he's pursuing.
>
> Yes, I agree with this. And, of course, this is all Henry Adams does
> for 500 pages.
>
>  In doing so, he's copying Pynchon, who's reading the flat descriptive
> prose of a travel guide as a starting point for creating a (lush, he
> hopes)fictional world.
>
> The self-consciousness of P is parallel to Adams's self-consciousness.
> P, like Shakespeare, since Mark brought him into this, lets the reader
> know that there is a play within a play and that all the world's a
> stage and men but players. Poor players? Macbeth might say so. The
> bastard in Lear might claim that his part is too restrictive and he
> might bite his thumb at the playwrite, while Bottom might make every
> part a fool. Hamlet may give directions to professional actors only if
> he speaks as SHakespeare's mouthpiece and he may hold a bare bodkin or
> a skull only if the grave and serious art of tragedy purges when the
> curtain falls and the spell of Prespero is lifted. Shakespeare made
> all manner of persona for the stage, a good many do not suck air or
> eat at the table, but this lack of emotional involvement or
> identification or whatever, makes them nonetheless brilliant.
>
>
>>
>> As Mark's pointed out in a previous post, Pynchon's unsuccessful (unlike 
>>Shakespeare) in animating his minor, and even major, characters.  They remain 
>>Baedeker automata, there for our entertainment, but emotionally uninvolving.
>>
>> Laura (trying to catch up)
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>>From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
>> Holy smokes that’s a long address!)
>>>
>>>We learn, similarly, that Herbert's is a mere pastiche of sleuthing
>>>and that it is more important that he is Stencil, than it is that he
>>>bears some superficial resemblance to Henry Adams. His use of the
>>>third person is neither out of a an affected self-reflexion, nor a
>>>pretension to royal superiority, but a "forcible dislocation of
>>>personality"(62), and even this is apparently meaningless. Of course,
>>>there are hazards to too readily dismissing any reference Pynchon
>>>offers. I think it is safe to say that if he refers or alludes to it,
>>>he likely read it, and it can likely, then, be counted as an influence
>>>on his work. The degree of that influence is open at all times for
>>>debate.
>>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."