Maxine meets Windust ("Make it literary")

[Markekohut]

" the return of the repressed" observation and " the "its politics is on its sleeve" line are so fine....
One might argue, given some textual clues----I especially like how Maxine, unlike her activist parents, can't like opera----the form of outsize emotions dramatized and she, who has an impoverished fantasy life.....typifies NYC's final killing of the repressed ( in her generation) 

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 21, 2013, at 7:53 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>> 
>> 
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l