COL49: Why the Negativity, TRP?

[alice wellintown]

Michael Bailey wrote:
> I mean, there's a reason for ornate and intricate writing and it's not  just to show off.

The rhetoical question I like is: How does the text mean? What Eliot's
Wasteland means is, for anyone willing to read it with the old "close
reading" method, which is making a huge come back now that the
rootless and endless rooting of, for lack of a better term,
postmodernism's exhaustion has been exhausted if not buried with the
roots that clutch and the branches that branch, is not too difficult
to discover. How it means is a horse of a different gender or a mule.
But, and this butt is is a big as my mama's ass--when she backs it up
her beeper go off, but, what Pynchon means is often not dicoverable.
So, that he combines the Modernist methods of Eliot & Co., loading up
his prose with allusions and intertextual parodies and narrative
ambiguities--and a dozen or so other major modern methods 1. (as
stated here before, My Definition of Modernism) with postmodernist
techniques (Brian McHale) renders the reading of P one that is focused
on a how that disallows a what. This is fun, for those of us who love
a pale fire, but it can be quite tiresome if the game, the play on the
tradition is trumped by (to use Eliot's phrase) the individual talent.
This is Lot49's problem and GR is the solution to it. Beautiful
imaginative poetic prose. This is why, in my never humble opinion, the
California novels are crap. Well, VL has lotsof great corn stuck in it
and it floats in the bowl, Lot49 suffers from thinning hair and legs
and arms and rolled trousers and dead mermaids shored upon the ruins
of a great idea and, of course, Inherent Vice is a jump on the book
wagon hardboiloed boyz book that falls off and is mecifully run over
by a tuna truck then flushed down the toiloet with a couple of junkies
on the boarder of mexico.

1. Modernism: diverse cross-fertilization between cultures, between art
forms and between disciplines---the need to confront violence,
nihilism, and despair; the fascination with, but fear of, the
unconscious; the centrality of a dramatized narrator who is not
omniscient but rather himself searching for understanding; a symbolic
richness which invites multiple interpretations (influence of French
Symbolism), radical redefinition of the real (W and H James, Freud,
Bergson) Colonial programs, ruthless exploitation, journey (up the
Congo) or Modern (T.S. Eliot secularized) quest or symbolic
exploration into the darkest heart (consciousness) of Man,
manipulation of the reader's experience of time and space by means of
disruption of narrative chronology and ontological/epistemological
differentiation and the representation of consciousness (stream and
multiple) by the description of events, and the use of the
reflexivity and self-consciousness.