Maxine meets Windust ("Make it literary")

[Fiona Shnapple]

One could argue that Pynchon is trying to expiate our if not his own
sins, Sloth primarily, as described in his essay on that Deadly Sin,
and to offer, if not a cure, at least a treatment for addiction to
Sherwood Schwartz sitcoms, Law & Order, Friends, Seinfeld, cartoons,
jingles.... and so on, but, despite the fact that we have yet another
character addicted to the Brady Bunch (Hector in VL, Shawn in BE),
this kind of argument doesn't make much sense. There must be another
reason why P continues to "make it literary" even as he floods the
narrative with pop references.   The making it literary, with
allusions and references can't be helped. Neither can pop punctuation
that flood the narrative, the dialogue, the thoughts and feelings of
characters, especially Maxine because, as protagonist, she at the
center of most of the free indirect narration, and because of where
and when she was born and how she was raised.  As McHale explains in
his essay, "Zapping, the art of switching channels: on Vineland",
Pynchon is still working with Brown and plumbing his favorite topic,
the Big D. Mediated Lives and Mediated Deaths are the effects, the
return of the repressed.

To return to the meeting of Maxine and Windust, where I contend the
talk of PROMIS and the like is beside the point, mere conspiracy talk
that will drive the quest, the detective genre into dead end, and is
satirized at every turn, and only distracts us from the mythological
and psychological themes. The mixing of Sappho and the Strangers in
the Night (the film it was first produced for), the umbrellas
touching, Heidi's comments, the madness of Maxine, of all of the
characters as they are viewed by the other characters, these are the
making it literary things we need to pay attention to and not the
conspiracy about September 11. The politics of the novel is on its
sleeve. Pynchon doesn't bury his anger or condemnation of the
politics, the media, the sad and disgusting behavior of the people
after their initial acts of magnanimity, philanthropy and brotherhood.
He names Madoff. He names the Mayor. The President. he exposes the
Neo-Liberal, Friedman economics of greed etc. There is no smoking gun
to be found in this work of fiction. Simply isn't there. Hell, Wired
Magazine, or better The Guardian that March reads will ask and answer
more questions than P poses.

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 'Making it literary' seems almost effortless here in his free & easy pop
> culture style....
> He is playing/using his lit notions almost as if quoting himself...at
> times.....
>
>
>
> On Friday, December 20, 2013 8:52 AM, Fiona Shnapple
> <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l