V-2nd - Chapter 10: Partridge in a Pear tree

[alice wellintown]

Pynchon obviously studied the development of American Literature &
American Philosophy from Puritanism to Postmodernism (for a book
Pynchon did not use when writing V., but a text that provides and
excellent introduction see From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History
of American Literature by Malcolm Bradbury & Richard Ruland ). That he
got hung up on the Romantics should not surprise us. That so many seem
reluctant to admit that Pynchon is, for lack of a better phrase, and
sorry because I know that dropping this name will piss some off,
exactly what James Wood says he is, "the inheritor of Melville's
Broken Estate" is surprising. Of course, Wood doesn't quite know
Melville well enough to know what, serendipitously, he discovered in
this phrase. Melville, like Hawthorne, Poe, Brown, others, is what
some call  "dark romantic". The Calvinitic TULIUP informs these works.
And, we don't need to be rocket scientists, in fact Pynchon is no
rocket scientist and, althoguh people like Hale (great critic of
Pynchon and other texts), reading his texts as science books is more
often a distraction. ANd, though he tells readers that he is a student
of Bartleby and Byron and Blake and Emerosn and Whitman .....they
simply refuse to take him at his word. anyways....

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 6:33 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Earlier on, I'd said in a post that Pynchon's later reverence for Nature isn't so evident in V.  Well, here's evidence to the contrary.
>
> In former Catatonic Expressionist Slab's latest painting, Cheese Danish No. 35, Slab thinks he's portrayed a perpetual motion machine:  a partridge in a pear tree.  "The partridge eats pears off the tree, and his droppings in turn nourish the tree which grows higher and higher, every day lifting the partridge up and at the same time assuring him a continuous supply of food."  It's a fully animate machine.  The problem for this machine isn't entropy, however, it's The Inanimate, specifically the man-made inanimate.  Slab's added a pointy-toothed gargoyle on which the partridge will inevitably be impaled, but he says it could just as well be a telephone wire an airplane or any other man-made object.
>
> Obviously, Pynchon's having a laugh at Slab's expense - he doesn't understand entropy.  But there's still a hint of the romantic view of Nature as beautiful and self-renewing, until Man comes in and ruins everything.  No hint that Nature, via entropy or its own evils - lightening bolts, forest fires, soil erosion, mortality, is its own worst enemy.
>
> This chapter is a treasure trove of the clash between the animate and the inanimate, and the frighteningly thin line (if any) between the two.  The Partridge is just the first of many puzzles Pynchon (via Benny) works through in this chapter.
>
> Laura
>