Linguistic question re IV

[Keith Davis]

Say what you like, I loved IV and plan on reading it again.

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> 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
>>>
>>>
>>
>


-- 
www.innergroovemusic.com
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