Maxine meets Windust ("Make it literary")

[Fiona Shnapple]

In his SL Intro P critiques his "first publish story",  "Small Rain",
noting that he tied to use an ear he had yet to develop, he took his
own bad advice and tried to make the story literary by loading it up
with allusions to Hemingway and Eliot, and, that after decades of
maturity, in retrospect the story contains, a powerful, though at the
time latent, political or class theme that P would focus on through
the rest of his career: how the preterit, the working class embody, in
their work, the moral, and even the intellectual virtues that the
educated class, the managerial class, the elect have claimed as their
capital.

Reading BE one may be put off by the language and the pop references,
but the ear is quite impressive. The ear, the languages that P has
mastered here would draw the praise of Mark Twain, who had quite an
ear, and who famously criticized Cooper for not having one.

In any event, the ear is now amazing.

But he continues to make it literary. The technique that Wolfley
describes in his essay on P and the influence of Brown, later analyzed
in depth by critics like McHale, the technique he developed in GR,
reversing cause and effect, to mirror the complexity of contemporary
existence, the transition from Adams and Entropy (V.)  to Adams and
Gravity (GR), continues in BE.

So, the meeting between Windust and Maxine here, while dropping some
bread crumbs for the conspiracy theorists, Promis and so forth, is,
underneath, about Maxine & Sapho.  Of course, Eliot's use of the poem
in the Wasteland, doesn't make Maxine the Hyacinth Girl, but P makes
it literary, as usual, and to be distracted by the grand political
chess match, at the expense of the ordinary working men and women, out
in the evening, after work, in the rain, in a cafe for a talk, that
seems so broken by power, so useless, such a waste....but there is, in
the material forces, most of them on Maxine's side of the table, a
dialogue of self and soul worth spilling into the basin. But it works
on the "made literary" level; the political power game is a clogged
toilet.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l