Best Essay on Inherent Vice Yet

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Thanks for this, John.

Bill presented another admirable piece, on M&D, at the IPW 1998.
http://www.columbia.edu/~wbm1/snovian.html


Heikki

On Mon, 21 Jun 2010, Carvill, John wrote:

> I know we're plunging headlong into 'V.', meaning a reconsideration of Pynchon's first novel is taking precedence over whatever lasting impressions we've all taken away from his last ('last' in the sense of 'latest', hopefully not final) book. Nevertheless I urge you, as strongly as I possibly can, to circle back just one more time, and read this essay which is, (imho) without question, the most thorough and insightful piece of criticism thus far written on 'Inherent Vice'.
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> Not only that, but it's by someone who was once - long, long ago - a sometime contributor to the p-list.
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> I hate it when people just contribute un-annotated URLs (though I am aware that some folk actively *like* that format), so I've clipped out a couple of very short excerpts below, which provide a hint of what's involved, particularly in the areas of (a) architecture and land use as themes in IV, and (b) a heartfelt refutation of the James Wood-type 'hysterical realism' school of Pynchon criticism:
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> 'Pynchon's Coast: Inherent Vice and the Twilight of the Spatially Specific'
> by Bill Millard
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> [...] Wolfmann's pair of properties, Arrepentimiento and Channel View Estates, represent antithetical ways of organizing American land in pursuit of contrasting utopian impulses: as an admirable if financially doomed exercise in architectural innovation and charitable housing, or as a conventionally profitable, predictable, environmentally disastrous and socially/culturally/aesthetically soul-crushing sprawl-burb. The name Channel View carries multiple connotations, none complimentary. Channelview, Texas, is an oil-refinery suburb of Houston infamous for the 1991 "Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom" case, in which a woman hired a hit man to kill the mother of her teenage daughter's rival for a place on a pep squad. The "channel view" function in major audio or graphics software packages such as ProTools, Logic Studio, or Photoshop narrows down a user's visibility to a single audio track or color within a multicolor image. But the name's primary and obvious implication involve!
 s the compulsive watching of television. Sportello's taunting nemesis Bjornsen overtly acknowledges this, greeting the detective in custody as he awakens from a head blow, telling him he is at "Channel View Estates, a future homesite where elements of some wholesome family will quite soon be gathering night after night, to gaze tubeward, gobble their nutritious snacks..." (22). The combination of spatial isolation into private homes and television proved through the later twentieth century to be conducive to popular auto-anesthesia, narrowing people's access to independently sourced information and to each other. The auto and the Tube: a pair of technologies optimized to propagate mass autism. Those snacks will undoubtedly be mass-market junk food, not the equally cheap but more distinctive fare available from one-of-a-kind joints like The Price of Wisdom or the surfer shack Wavos. The constriction and control of vision in every sense is essential to life in a place like Ch!
 annel View Estates.
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> The way California was physically developing in 1970, the way the U.S. has largely continued to develop-sprawling laterally to an extreme degree, maximizing energy consumption and vehicular miles traveled, locking much of the population into the addictive network of homeowner debt, spewing greenhouse gases, postponing accountability for the population-wide insistence on maximal convenience, and generally mismanaging its physical inheritance for private profit-demonstrates a systemic inherent vice, well beyond what any individual can influence. Of course, if American civilization is an ark of sorts, certain parties are in fact captaining it. Smilax notes, a few pages later as they watch the Preserved (the real schooner this time) hitting a wave so anomalously large that it scuttles her, that whoever is navigating is "committing either suicide or barratry here" (358). Barratry in admiralty law is gross misconduct by a vessel's master or crew, stealing, scuttling, or otherwis!
 e damaging the vessel or its cargo. Smilax's observation is too potent a metaphor to be limited to a single schooner.
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> Inherent vice is a broader concept than original sin or criminal culpability; it is about the world more than it is about us. The ways of complex systems (physical, ecological, or socioeconomic), Pynchon seems to be stressing, are not reducible to the desires, concerns, self-regard, or beliefs of individual human beings, though they do respond in some degree to individual choices. Those individuals nearly always deserve mercy and second chances, he intimates, and the worst offenses in his world consist of the denial of mercy to those in need of it. But individual fates and fears do not loom large enough to overshadow larger things. Pynchon observes a distinction between being humane and pretending that humanist values comprehend everything. It may be that the objections raised against Pynchon by readers with a strong allegiance to the values of earlier phases of fiction-sometimes overall admirers or former admirers like Miller, sometimes less patient readers like Wood, wit!
 h his powerful if intemperate castigations of the genre he calls "hysterical realism"-are essentially attempts to use nineteenth-century criteria to evaluate twenty-first century phenomena. That moral gravity can extend to matters beyond the scale of individual human morals is a difficult concept to grapple with (perhaps one with structural analogies to a certain architectural trope that Pynchon has used repeatedly, once in Mason & Dixon and twice here, Chick Planet [21] and the Arrepentimiento zome [251]: a space that appears larger inside than outside). But it is precisely the flexibility and expansiveness of postmodern fiction that makes it possible to consider and perform the cognitive gymnastics such an idea demands.
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> http://www.collegehillreview.com/004/0040501.html
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