TRTR Part I, Chapter V, Pages 181-184 How Could It Be Anything But Weet?

[Mark Kohut]

Chr...ast! WG loves parties for this fiction, you are right on. You have
provided the lens thru which I also see, I think: they/we are all a cavalcade
of fools spouting off those theories while suffering and death happens.........

Suicide here, other stuff to come, happen usually with as little felt 
consequence
to most as party talk......

No?



----- Original Message ----
From: Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Mon, May 23, 2011 5:55:22 PM
Subject: TRTR Part I, Chapter V, Pages 181-184 How Could It Be Anything But 
Weet?

Okay, so others (thank the Dear!) have jumped in here and straight to
the good stuff. Yes, this is where Gaddis mentions "inherent vice" and
where he addresses a bunch of other painterly stuff. My theory (YMMV)
is that the cocktail parties are "safe" places for WG to test various
theories by sticking them into the voices of his assembled crew. We
don't take any exhortation here seriously because the scene isn't
serious, and yet serious topics are aired (i.e. suicide).

Pages 181-182 contain a serious & thematically important riff on the
artist's relation to his materials. "a painter is limited by his
materials" ... "you have to know your materials and respect them"

Wyatt, as we know, goes a long way to replicating the materials of the
artists he is forging, all that lavender & eggshell stuff.

And we find out here that certain pigments that dissolve, fade:
"Inherent vice, I think they call it."

BTW, this is just one of 4 instances of "inherent vice" (the phrase)
in _The Recognitions_; on pages 234 Basil Valentine raises it as an
insurance question ("no one will insure against inherent vice").
Wyatt repeats the line back to Valentine on page 355, and finally, on
page 949 as the Novel is crumbling to its climax, the phrase comes up
again in what may be the final appearance of Wyatt's voice (though at
that point, who knows?).

In other words, the concept of "inherent vice," that there is a flaw
in the artist's materials that speeds a work's destruction, is an
important idea in The Recognitions, not a tossed off technical term.
It is a reality that all of the book's artists must fight against, or
be concerned with. Page 242 has Valentine quoting Alexander Pope:
"That vice may merit, tis the price of toil." And also "but sometimes
virtue starves, while vice is fed." The lines are repeated out of
order (the poem is Pope's "An Essay on Man," Epistle 4) in the scene
where Valentine ad Wyatt express their inability to comprehend
Recktall Brown's inability to see anything but the business side of
anything, including this exchange:

"--True to your art, so to say" (Valentine says to Wyatt)
"--True to ... yes, that's like saying a man's true to his cancer."
(Responds Wyatt)

Inherent vice, you see...

Back to Chapter V and the already discussed statue inside the block of
marble. Of course this is a funny scene because Otto is showing off,
and is outshined by Anselm, the drunk who "gets all screwed up with
religion", but whose knowledge of Praxiteles goes beyond the Harvard
freshman's idea of Cicero's notion of sculpture, and unveils the
factoid that the figure inside the block of marble was that of a "high
class whore," Phryne.

Basically, Anselm has just chipped away at the block of Otto to reveal a Phony.