Linguistic question re IV

[alice wellintown]

What looks large from a distance,
Close up ain't never that big.
-Dylan
Like Dylan,like lotz of artists and lotz of people in other walks of
life,  Pynchon works better from a distance, and his best works are
ironic meditations on death in America that maintain a romantic
distance.  Like Mann's works, P's better works are erudite, subtle,
ironic or satirical not funny though humorous, ambitious, but, most of
all, ambiguous.

And, ambiguity is the central ingredient of the American romance, and
has a very special function in the American form of the genre. As
Tanner sez in his brilliant essay on Hawthorne's BR (note that CH. 3
of H's SL is "The Recognition"), Romance & Hawthorne is a subject to
drown in, so we won't go back to it now, but it is essential to how we
separate P's major and minor works. Unlike the European, the American
uses the romance for a specific moral purpose and does not reduce
moral questions, as Chase notes of the European tradition, to give
primacy to other abstractions. But the moral purpose, for example, in
H's SL, that the sins of the father are passed on to the sons, is
never recognized or given recognition, but is always hidden and
complicated by art because, in part, it is is not real, or authentic,
or honest, it is a fake, a false and even diabolical good.  So the
Scarlet Letter Hester makes and fixes to her garments, while clearly a
moral purpose, Adultery, the A stands for is a masquerade, a black
veil, a cover dale over the grave, like those Puritan tombstones. The
A stands for America and for Art.

 Once Pynchon gets too close, and his California comedies all look bad
in close-ups, though VL, the best in the trilogy, does manage to get
the telescope turned round with the use of films and the Japanese
episodes, his prose stumbles on a too familiar dialogue that is too
often the stuff that make him read like your average NYC writer and to
add bad breath to a Brooklyn ear, this language stinks up the
narrator's story telling and too often falls into the political
garbage heap.
>
> 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
>>>
>>
>
>