Linguistic question re IV

[jochen stremmel]

Alice I believe you are way to harsh with IV and its author. (What he
did is harder than you think.) After M&D and AtD he had every right to
relax. I enjoyed it; it captures the tone of the time. Unfortunately I
had only time to read it once, but I seem to remember that the novel
is told out of Doc's point of view. And he's worth listening to, at
least for me.

And please give me some evidence for his bad ear. In my ears Jade sounds real.

J

2011/8/10 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>:
>
> 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
>>>
>>
>
>