V-2 - Chapters 9/10 - Sferic Music, part two

[Mark Kohut]

The Mondaugen style is the richest, fer sure....

If one wants to call the remainder of the chapters 'flat', Okay, but, again, 
maybe in comparison
to GR--and later works-- but it is still better writing than in most novels....

Perhaps the Mondaugen chapter is the first real "progressive-knotting into" with 
compacted 

prose in TRP....it is where the Historical vision first goes deep..

Perhaps the relative flatness of most of the other chapters is cause the world 
he was writing
about was flat in his vision? 



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, November 7, 2010 10:57:24 AM
Subject: Re: V-2 - Chapters 9/10 - Sferic Music, part two

> I suppose if I gave "V." as much attention as I've given to all of Pynchon's
> other novels there would be more postings coming from these quarters. But
> when I move back to the main body of "V." -- I consider Mondaugen's Story an
> outgrowth that later metastasized -- the language flattens out, again. I'm
> back on the street and I don't like it. The issue is the sheer quality of
> writing. Diving into Gravity's Rainbow last night underscores how much the
> author progressed from 1963 to 1973. The concepts might be in place, but the
> language isn't.

Why do you suppose the author produced only one GR-like chapter in his
first novel? To argue that he progressed seems both obvious and a
contradiction. If he could write all of V. in the style of Mondaugen,
he elected not to. If he couldn't, perhaps because it took too long,
perhaps because he didn't know that Mondaugen-style was vastly better
than most of the other chapters, perhaps because he wrote Mondaugan
last and had progressed to GR-like style but needed to get the book
sold ...., perhaps, and TSI seems to confirm this conjecture, the
author was still experimenting with styles or writing parodies of
existing styles chapter by chapter then weaving them together ....

There is no doubt that Mondaugen is better than any other chapter in
V., and more GR-like in style, but there is also a concomitant change
in the author's interests and his POV; for starters, he grows up. The
V-novelist is a wet behind the ears anxious thief and show-off who
satirizes what he can't understand and fakes it most of the time.
Still, he has the gift, the intuition, the eye for Adams and for, Love
in the Western World. That's where this chapter, people getting
together is taken from .