Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He's Always Been

[Markekohut]

Once more to some groans: " in the destructive element immerse"--Conrad....

His vision of New York in the fiction, perhaps akin to his vision of science and technology in the fiction, DOES NOT carry any implication that living there is .....hypocritical, wrong. He wants to live and work like any other citizen---a willed identification with working preterites, even if he is not in the low-lands any longer.

Besides, perhaps he has chosen to live there, if certain narrow minds do find him hypocritical, because it is his wife's choice, a nice honoring of her autonomy--her life's work--for the semi-buried (but in plain sight) feminist, I think he is. 

In the ' nexus of known depravity' and the Cabinet of Illusions which is still New York,in my humble opinion, he and Melanie work against that, we have all reason to believe.Personal counterforces. 



Sent from my iPad

On Jun 18, 2013, at 5:07 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> "Recluse is a code word generated by journalists." I had forgotten that
> Pynchon remark from 1997, which IMHO says all that needs to be said. The
> only other thing I might remember from this article is author J.K. Trotter's
> own contribution: 
> 
> "[Bleeding] Edge arrives nearly seven years after Against the Day, a
> sprawling historical fiction in which Pynchon barely conceals his contempt
> for the city, described in the narration as the 'Cabinet of Ultimate
> Illusion' and by one character as 'a nexus of known depravity.'...
> Pynchon's New York is that of Fitzgerald and Salinger: suspicious,
> excessive, and permanently corrupt." 
> 
> That becomes the article's peg by piquant contrast: as we know Pynchon hates
> NYC, how odd that he lives there; recycle every "sighting" and NYC-related
> factlet, yadda yadda. 
> 
> OK: We all know -- and routinely ignore -- the warnings against imputing
> fictional narrators' or characters' views to the author. But doesn't this
> seem egregious? I can't dive back into AtD at the moment, but I recall the
> slaps at the city there as very much "of the time" -- i.e., that the Big Bad
> City Full of Funky Immigrants, Tammany Bosses, Gang Shootouts on Mott Street
> etc., where people from Colorado or the Midwest could easily go astray, was
> a standard trope of turn-of-the-20th-century America. (Ditto for the
> neo-noir LA of Inherent Vice.) They certainly didn't leave me with any sense
> that TRP himself hates NYC, any more than that he likes travel by balloon,
> or worries about the meteorites that space scientists gather from
> Antarctica.  
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
> Of Dave Monroe
> Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 4:10 AM
> To: pynchon -l
> Subject: Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He's Always Been
> 
> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/06/thomas-pynchon-back-new
> -york/66140/
>