First Reading of GR

[alice wellintown]

Style: open any page of GR and look at the dots on the page...here we
are...on page 549 of a limp Penguin, seven lucky sprocket boxcars
boxcars boxcars where Ginsberg Howls, then bleak house fog down the
throat of the narrow gassen and the smell of salt water. Two senses,
the imagery, Dickensian with flashes of Crane-like badges red blooming
behind maggy girl of the streets with a lilt of irish Fitzgerald when
the Vikings who must have seen, like those Dutch Sailors in that most
famous passage from Gatsby that Tom felt deep in his own capicty to
wonder comensurate with the valley of ashes he down and outed in
Mexico in search of and for which was, even then, again, like Keats in
the sonnet where he makes the mistake and has the wrong explorer
discover the pacific, wonder, the green breast of this new world,
brave, new, but for the locks without keys and the cat, but the
colors, copper green mist and red tiles, sandy forelocks, bobs and
blows behind the fog does. Bounce bounce on the lady's empty wagon.
The senses, the imagery, the cadence, the pacing, alliteration. All
easy enough here. The sentences with colon lists extended by elipsis.
The paragraphs measured but qualifiedw with romantic interruptions,
digressions and allusions. No subject predicate linked with an
absolute verb to be. Then a long block as Nationalities are on the
move. The famous lists. Here is a long one with details of the human
mobs of war, the DeePeez and all the tattered shattered sunken cheek
gaunt ghosts that crowd that painting in the barn of Bluebeard
Vonnegut, and this is Dickensian description here. The people like the
crowd in Bleakhouse fog and mud and gas under and inder the watchful
Lord's Nightmare as Tom paints what, like Crane, he never encountered,
War in all its absurdities. This is where he does his best work. He
paints what he has never known. The pen moves with majic.

A very typical passage; we could look at it dot by dot, trope by
scheme and find no less than in any other. It is a christmas tree full
to the star and stuffed at the bowl.

Trying not to get to technickal or nothin but this is the gist of it.
That is, his prose style.

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 8:47 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm never quite sure what people here mean when they talk about P's
> style or his prose or prose style. Granted, style is not easy to
> define. One way to approach this is by reading and re-reading several
> works, if available, from a single author. At this point one can even
> recognize an early, middle, late style. That sort of thing. Reading
> Pynchon this division is fairly easy to see. We can agree with the
> author's own assessment that his early works are juvenal or novice
> pieces that the young budding author had not the maturity to recognize
> were hacked out of his weak and sometimes strong readings (H. Bloom
> Anxiety of Influence) of his favorite authors (Eliot, Fitzgerald,
> Hemingway ...) and are riddled with his foolish and rigid views about
> almost everything, but especially about the kinds of people he had
> little or no real familiarty with (females, cool people, blacks,
> working class adults. The next stage is V. and the long short story,
> The Secret Integration." Here, the author does what Milton speaks of
> in his famous elegy, he "burst[s] out into suddeen blaze" and like a
> young Keats, "sings with full throated ease" but at only in fits and
> then in Mondaugan's Story. The revisions of his Slow Learner tales
> have been studied and the major revisions, plus letters and what knot
> have been shared and reveal the artist at work here. He matures
> quickly and begins to find his style and voice. Mind you, he can not
> write well yet, but has chapters that show off, and he reamins a big
> show off, a modernist in this respect, his potential and his gifts.
> CL49, his first in the California series is a poor slapdash of thin
> tropes pained over softboiled ideas. It gets high praise for its
> postmodern frustrations and drives poor readers in sane, but is not a
> work of literature. Then he writes GR. It has all the MobyDickness an
> American could squeeze out of the sperm whale of the post 60s world.
> It is full of chops and inserted stories, those famous set pieces, but
> has a style that is, as Ken Kesey says of his novel OFOCN, "the
> psychodelic sixties," one needed only hold the pen and wait for the
> majik, no clawed and cramping hands, no warlock talk, no anxiety about
> the whiteness of the whale of a rocket screaming. That's it. After
> this, it's all over but the scholars and the P-industry selling his
> soul to the highest creep with a camera.
>