Young P's Prose & the golden screw to turn the time in the Stencil chapters

[redcomrad]

Kind tired of this Robin deflated crap about young P's poor prose. What a bunch of stupidity. Are there weak spots. Yes. Are there scenes the author reads without blushing? Some. Is the book poorly composed? Hell no.    How did young P manage to fool so many professional readers and non-professional consumers of literature?  In his useful Companion to V., Grant quotes Schaub (xiii) on the middle ground, golden mean, intollerable double vision stuff.    see Alan Wilde too.    Theodore D. Kharpertian too.       see   ELH 65.2 (1998) 503-521 Imperium, Misogyny, and PostmodernParody in Thomas Pynchon's V. Stefan Mattessich. "No one who reads Thomas Pynchon can deny the force andinventiveness of his prose. His prolix imagination verges onthe uncanny, and his mastery of various discourses awes allwho experience it. But if Pynchon is an exuberant writer, heis so only by virtue of a counterforce acting upon thatforcefulness, interrupting its flows in particularways--cutting into a dramatic sequence with an absurd song,modulating from a clipped comic diction and tone to epicsentences a page long, mingling tragedy with pornography,melodrama with slapstick. The diffraction of modes andgenres through the disjointed narratives of V. reflects ahighly organized, crystalline structure that is nonethelessanarchic, patterned and intricate yet loose-jointed andexpansive."Mattessich continues: A subversion of expenditure takes place within the mutationsof narrative form, undermining the illusions of continuityand depth, frustrating the possibilities of coherence andclosure. A peculiar emptying out of content attends thissubversion in V., marking in the language a lightness andstrange insubstantiality that is often difficult to gauge. This quality in Pynchon's prose corresponds to whatBaudrillard calls a logic of simulation, in which, throughsuccessive orders of abstraction, the "real" withdraws intoa permanent elsewhere, and systems of meaning (signs,images, discourses) no longer bear any relation to a stablereferent, but instead float in the medium of their own"divine irreference," a hyper-real which "envelops the wholeedifice of representation." 1 This breakdown of meaning isvariously described by Baudrillard as a process of"satellitization," as a proliferation of signs incapable ofdissimulating their own hollowness, as an implosion or a"non-distinction of active and passive" opposites, as aneutralization or "annihilation of stakes" in the politicaland social spheres. 2 In the postmodern world Baudrillarddescribes,     All events are to be read in REVERSE (my caps), whereone perceives . . . that all . . . things arrive too late,with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they haveexhausted their meaning long in advance and only survive asan artificial effervescence of signs, that all these eventsfollow on illogically from one [End Page 503] another, witha total equanimity toward the greatest inconsistencies . . .--thus the whole newsreel of the "present" gives thesinister impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at thesame time.3 Although Baudrillard is here speaking about the effect ofthe news media on contemporary culture, it could be saidthat V. exemplifies this exhaustion, this artificialeffervescence of signs exactly. Pynchon's novel enacts asearch for meaning or substance behind the initial V., whichstands for a whole range of possible signifiers, partialobjects, fetishes, puzzles, secret codes,and for the novelitself: V. as the signifier of the desire for "real" orauthentic writing. But inwhat McHoul and Wills call V.'s "eternal condemnation to thesignifier," the necessary failure of this voicing becomesitself an obsession of the text.
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