"He thinks he's hallucinating" m

alice wellintown alicewellintown at gmail.com
Sun Jan 9 16:14:48 CST 2011


I don't expect to convince you because you refuse to even accept the
most obvious facts about the text. That is, what is on the page.

Why does the author give this character these speach patterns? A good question.
1. That's the way he hears California-surf-girl-speak (circa 1970) and
he wants to imitate it.
2. Shasta is in a bind. She is holding what Deborah Tannen calls a
"two-edged sword of politeness."
3. Pynchon here is, as James Wood has noted, despite his postmodern
credntials, old fashioned American Realist in that "his language is
mimetically full of American language." Of course, Wood's read is
correct. As McHale and others have noted, Pynchon's dialogues and even
his long narratives streches are saturated with debased Ameican
language and TV-zappings, in words, in the channel surf of thought, in
the bloat and barf of Homer Simpson and his boy, Bart-roy.


On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 4:51 PM,  <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
> The comparison with Zoyd, implicitly glaring in the
> text, is apt here, for the difference. Doc is not Zoyd.
>
> I'm still not sure who I admire more, probably Zoyd.
>
> Your examples do not persuade me to your p.o.v.,
> although, I respect it as a possibility. I might say-
> "His examples do not pesuade me to his point of
> view..." but why, I'm talking to you, and the list.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sun, Jan 9, 2011 4:25 pm
> Subject: Re: "He thinks he's hallucinating" m
>
>
> Notice too, that Shasta drops the subject pronous in several statements
> here:
>
> "[He] Thinks he's hallucinating."
>
> "[I] Need your help, Doc."
>
> "[I] Just spent an hour..."
>
> Notice how Pynchon "decomposes and discomposes his own style" here.
>
> Shasta begins a non-interrroagative sentence with "Is" for example.
>
> She talks like Zoyd's friend, Van Meter.
>
>
>



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