Linguistic question re IV

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 10.08.2011 01:50, alice wellintown wrote:

> One of the reasons IV is not worth the trouble is that it is written
> in a style of the idiomatic speech of the characters and they are not
> worth listening to, and while this is a common Pynchon problem, his
> bad ear often slides into his character's mouths, it is fatal in IV.

Yes, it definitely lacks the stylistic elaboration of GR or CoL49. And 
the whole story, already leering at its movie adaption, is - even in 
comparison to VL - not complex enough to entertain the reader for more 
than one read. Big difference to AtD which - despite all that is not so 
good in it - keeps me thinking and rereading. Its - pardon my French! - 
'discourse archeology' of Europe sliding into WW I is an American 
counterpart to the one done by Thomas Mann in "The Magic Mountain", a 
novel AtD pays homage to on page 664. Pynchon's historical novels do not 
really have that bad ear problem, since setting and language are highly 
artificial anyway. And CoL49, with its beautiful poetic prose, is not 
"written in a style of the idiomatic speech of the characters". But why 
is VL so much better than IV? I think this is because the generational 
conflicts are pictured convincingly. Vineland  is also the novel in 
which our author actually undertook the transformation from Pynchon 1 
(early stories till GR) to Pynchon 2. He worked hard on the dialogues 
and shook off some intellectual luggage. Only in this book the new 
approach, as explicated in the SL-intro, found an adequate shape. The 
later novels - this goes definitely for M&D and AtD, but likely also for 
IV - are elaborations of typoscripts being in the work before GR got 
published. What I still like about IV is the title. Its combination of 
insurance-technical and catholic (original sin) meaning.  And it sounds 
very good. By now it might be already the title of a song.

> It is actually quite funny, if you think The Simpsons are funny, but
> as slick as the Pyncher is with his Tube saturated scenes, Pynchon is
> not that funny. He can't write this kind of comedy in a book. If he
> were writing for The Simpsons...well...why hire him when there are a
> million people who can do The Simpsons stuff better than he ever will.
> Anyway, the jokes on the poor bastard who is caught between two clit
> lickers and the law. Were the ladies to go down on the fuzz, perhaps
> they would not rat on the poor bastard who gets fingered or has to
> finger himself.

Two clits go to the meat-market: "We wanna buy one kilo of tongue!"

> 2011/8/9 János Széky<miksaapja at gmail.com>:
>> There is Jade apologizing on page 84: "...the cops told us they'd drop
>> charges if we just put you at the scene, which they already knew you
>> were so where was the harm..."
>> The syntax seems to be elliptical here so please tell me what 'which
>> they already knew you were' means exactly.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> János
>>
>