Maxine meets Windust ("Make it literary")

[Thomas Eckhardt]

I did not know about the Survivor Tree. Highly relevant indeed for a 
reading of BE based on Northrop Frye's notions of spring, comedy and 
"Life Returning" -- which I hope to hear more about.

Thomas



Am 21.12.2013 14:53, schrieb Fiona Shnapple:
> The Life Force is not quite exhausted or extinguished. Maxine has only
> sons, but the Pear Tree, it's magical magnetic force holds the boys
> and Maxine if only for a brief moment as the novel begins, its blossom
> petals strewn in the gutter, waste, at the end of the novel, is still
> a source of Life Returning, a confirmation of the Body and the here
> and now, a force against linear conspiracy that seeks to connect the
> dots and discover the causes, and the tree, a made literary and
> mythical symbol. is also  as an allusion to the September 11 callery
> pear tree that came to be known as the Survivor Tree after sustaining
> but living through the September 11, 2001, terror attacks at the World
> Trade Center.
>
> In any event, in the meeting in the restaurant P wants to get The Book
> of Leviticus in. It seems an awkward blurting on Maxine's part, she
> seems ignorant of the text, though she has been slipping in and out of
> a defensive posture, having something to do with her Jewish roots,
> though she has not real conscious understanding of them, they return
> here with her dietary habit of avoiding pork, though none is offered.
> She says, "don't ask", though it's obvious enough she's never asked,
> or understood the book. But P must get it in with Sappho here.
>
> On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 8:09 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> " 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
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=nchon-l
>

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