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

[Mark Kohut]

Well....always worth encountering here....and I think redcomrad's "middle 
ground, golden mean, intolerable double vision stuff"---is
a good line......

And I like the scholar who talks of that loose-limbed prose......

But 'crystalline' ain't the right word, is it. for P's allusive prose?...

And, no, no, no, no, no.......his prose does not swing free of referents........
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes there are multiple, multiple referents

Like most great writers...................?






________________________________
From: redcomrad <redcomrad at zoho.com>
To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, February 5, 2011 9:30:20 AM
Subject: Young P's Prose & the golden screw to turn the time in the Stencil 
chapters


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 Postmodern
Parody in Thomas Pynchon's V. Stefan Mattessich. 

"No one who reads Thomas Pynchon can deny the force and
inventiveness of his prose. His prolix imagination verges on
the uncanny, and his mastery of various discourses awes all
who experience it. But if Pynchon is an exuberant writer, he
is so only by virtue of a counterforce acting upon that
forcefulness, interrupting its flows in particular
ways--cutting into a dramatic sequence with an absurd song,
modulating from a clipped comic diction and tone to epic
sentences a page long, mingling tragedy with pornography,
melodrama with slapstick. The diffraction of modes and
genres through the disjointed narratives of V. reflects a
highly organized, crystalline structure that is nonetheless
anarchic, patterned and intricate yet loose-jointed and
expansive."

Mattessich continues:

A subversion of expenditure takes place within the mutations
of narrative form, undermining the illusions of continuity
and depth, frustrating the possibilities of coherence and
closure. A peculiar emptying out of content attends this
subversion in V., marking in the language a lightness and
strange insubstantiality that is often difficult to gauge. 
This quality in Pynchon's prose corresponds to what
Baudrillard calls a logic of simulation, in which, through
successive orders of abstraction, the "real" withdraws into
a permanent elsewhere, and systems of meaning (signs,
images, discourses) no longer bear any relation to a stable
referent, but instead float in the medium of their own
"divine irreference," a hyper-real which "envelops the whole
edifice of representation." 1 This breakdown of meaning is
variously described by Baudrillard as a process of
"satellitization," as a proliferation of signs incapable of
dissimulating their own hollowness, as an implosion or a
"non-distinction of active and passive" opposites, as a
neutralization or "annihilation of stakes" in the political
and social spheres. 2 In the postmodern world Baudrillard
describes, 


    All events are to be read in REVERSE (my caps), where
one perceives . . . that all . . . things arrive too late,
with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they have
exhausted their meaning long in advance and only survive as
an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events
follow on illogically from one [End Page 503] another, with
a total equanimity toward the greatest inconsistencies . . .
--thus the whole newsreel of the "present" gives the
sinister impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at the
same time.3 

Although Baudrillard is here speaking about the effect of
the news media on contemporary culture, it could be said
that V. exemplifies this exhaustion, this artificial
effervescence of signs exactly. Pynchon's novel enacts a
search for meaning or substance behind the initial V., which
stands for a whole range of possible signifiers, partial
objects, fetishes, puzzles, secret codes,and for the novel
itself: V. as the signifier of the desire for "real" or
authentic writing. But in
what McHoul and Wills call V.'s "eternal condemnation to the
signifier," the necessary failure of this voicing becomes
itself an obsession of the text.


      
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