Kathryn Hume's other Pynchon stuff

[alice wellintown]

> what i wouldn't give for the time and (sigh) the wit to read more criticism
> so alice you are saying the prose in agtd is superior...
> dare i ask for an example?

For now, I will work with the passage we are looking into. Paul M, as
is so often the case, is giving excellent advice on this one, so we
need to look back to where the passage is set up on page 69 and we
need to get the facts about this piece of fiction making. So, where
are we and when, or what is the setting, what is the the pov (here we
can rely on the detailed posts of Paul N), and, of course, our
knowledge of P's style, his methods, how he mixes memories and desires
into the paint, thus abstracting the expressions of the narrative
voice, and so on.

James Wood has been mentioned, so I'll use his terms, "Free Indirect
Speech" (How Fiction Works pp. 7-9), and on page 9 of that very useful
little book, he talks about how reader may be confused by what Wayne
Booth (Rhetoric of Fiction) calls distances.


So to follow up on Paul M and Paul N, back to page 69 of AGTD, we have
characters mixing memories and desire (Eliot), and these memories are
of the white city, a disneyland dismantled and merged into the
landscape. So the apparent cliche and imagery, so forth belong not
only to P, but to the character and to the reader who, is she
conflates character with author, misses the beauty the skill, the
jokes and so on (as one reader here noted on the Chicago sharks and
another noted on the use of the West from trite and overworn phrases
that actually function, as this marvelous reading noted, as Jazz or as
I've tried to suggest here, as abstract expressionistic paint.
We need to go back to page 69 to pick up the narrative technique that
sets the stage:  "After the Closing of the Columbian Fair ..." Merle
is not taking mental photos, is not experiencing the events, the
landscape, the people, the creatures because he is too busy setting up
his camera to take a photo, the subjects move on and he misses them.
Maybe he should toss the camera and form some memory here? And Dally,
who takes in all, and the reader can not miss that the words bend
around her memories and desires here, takes over she thinks she sees
dog teams & Co., but it is her Desire to roll into a White City, and
her Memory of it, that drives these descriptions not the author's
ignorance of the West. At the bottom of 69 we read that years pile on
till it all seems a memory....

P is a brilliant novelist; that, at this point some readers are
exhausted by his prolific prose, that often include manic descriptions
with lists and long sentences, that include digressives long and
splintering, thought piled upon thoughts, layered and textured
canvases that drip and bend and melt and require an active reader who
can play along...well, that he has embraced a family theme or has
become more conservative r whatever in his elder years or has used
some material too often, this anal fears abound, well, this is how it
goes for readers and writers of fiction and we can always read
elsewhere.