Re: Review: Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge” (David Auerbach @ The American Reader)

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Admirable, illuminating review!


And yet, I find it often quite questionable. The following hypothesis will
have to do for now:

the fact that a TRP novel contains the same key structural motifs as other
TRP novels has little or no correlation with the novel's significance (or,
with the significance of a structural motif within the novel).


Heikki

On Wed, 9 Oct 2013, John Bailey wrote:

> I've only just scanned this 'review' but it looks like a must-read for
> P-listers.
>
> On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 10:23 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> >
> > Now THAT'S what I call a review!
> >
> > It offers, among many other things, food for thought in a current debate:
> >
> > "It takes sex to knock Maxine out of her cynical gumshoe pose. Where the
> > typical PI would fall for the femme fatale prior to realizing her
> > deviousness, Maxine falls prey to masculine wiles in spite of knowing
> > exactly what she?s dealing with. For two hundred pages, Maxine skillfully
> > interrogates corporate flunkies, foot fetishists, and olfactory precogs, and
> > then abruptly throws herself into the arms of the far more malevolent
> > überspook and ?federal penis? Nicholas Windust. Creepy, overbearing, and
> > charmless, with a long track record of state-sponsored torture and murder,
> > Windust has only to mumble a few words breathily, and Maxine, or more
> > precisely Maxine?s libido, falls hard for him.
> >
> > This is not a new story for Mr. Pynchon. Here is a sampling of how often he
> > has used it:
> >
> > Pynchon Graph 1
> >
> > The woman-jerk motif is just one prominent case of how Mr. Pynchon uses
> > recurrent patterns rather than linear plotting to structure his novels.
> > Regularities emerge /not/ on the micro-level, where plot developments often
> > seem random and pointless, but on the statistical macro-scale level. For any
> > individual woman, the motivation provided never seems sufficient?sometimes
> > no explanation is given?but it keeps happening, like a law of nature. In
> > /Vineland/, Frenesi and her mother Sasha Traverse speculate that their
> > attraction to uniformed men is an ?ancestral curse?as if some Cosmic Fascist
> > had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and
> > initiation into the dark joys of social control.? Mr. Pynchon later gave
> > further credence to this theory by having their great-aunt Lake Traverse
> > enact a very similar betrayal in /Against the Day/. Many of these women
> > repent; some, like Katje, even try to undo the damage. But Maxine?s
> > self-awareness puts her far beyond anyone else in the above table. Maxine is
> > puzzled at her own compulsion, and feels a mixture of self-disgust and
> > helplessness. She is not so puritanical as to loathe her own libido, but
> > neither is it within her conscious control: ?she must have been wet without
> > knowing it.? Unlike Frenesi in /Vineland/, she is not so dumb as to believe
> > she can redeem Windust, and so she does not endanger her family and betray
> > her principles as Frenesi does. We are a far ways from Frenesi?s shrug, ?You
> > know what happens when my pussy?s runnin? the show.?
> >
> > Maxine finds she can?t resist, but her exasperating compulsion spurs a will
> > to understand and forgive?not only Windust, but Horst. Her understanding
> > cuts the federal penis down to size. Attempts to control are, after all, the
> > cruel and ultimately futile efforts of scared little boys; the information
> > age gives Maxine the wisdom to understand this. It does not, however, give
> > her the power to change it. As so often in game theory, additional knowledge
> > can be a handicap to action, not an aid. Even as March drowns in conspiracy
> > theories only to gain conspiracy freak followers, Maxine keeps a keenly
> > skeptical eye on everything and sorts through the information, only to find
> > that it is impossible to master and does not cohere."
> >
> > So Maxine belongs but then again belongs not in the row?
> >
> > On 09.10.2013 00:03, Dave Monroe wrote:
> >>
> >> http://theamericanreader.com/review-thomas-pynchons-bleeding-edge/
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l /http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>
> >>
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>
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