BE/White Noise

[Robin Landseadel]

Back when I was in the midst of the slog of reading Bleeding Edge,  
posted at the Hoffman Forum that I had a hard time keeping my eyes  
open. A forum member asked, "Does this mean you were disappointed?",  
this is my response:

At First.

This is very different from the author's other "Big Books" and make no  
doubt about it this is one of the Big ones. The way I'm reading it  
now, Maxi is very much in the mold of Elaine from "Seinfeld". As I  
take this on a second time I'll ask—"What would Elaine do?" Of course,  
they're not twins. But the local environment of Bleeding Edge appears  
to be in Larry David's zip code.

At the same time, this novel is in a similar territory as DeLillo's  
"White Noise." We have a somewhat isolated, somewhat intellectual  
community, full of the language and world view of its little tribe,  
incapable of dealing with the "real" world using the paradigms they  
live by and brought to a crisis thanks to one of those abrupt  
incursions of another world into theirs.

While "White Noise" has a center "I" that turns out to be crazy, Maxi  
balances on a very thin wedge of morality, always threatening to  
capsize in one direction or another—she did marry one of those Banker/ 
Market Speculator types after all. In many ways she's what I'd call a  
"LINO", a "Leftist in name only" in that she mouths opposition to the  
system but analyzes it, works it, makes her money off it and in that  
way, keeps the Dynamo running. It's an impossible balancing act and  
Maxi falls too easily, though full of common sense as she is, she  
dusts herself off after these monstrous couplings with conscience-free  
Lotharios and gets on with her life.

Kinda like Elaine, see?

The real difference between Maxi and one of the "worst people in the  
world" being that Maxi is a mother, a classic example of what Donald  
Winnicott would call a "Good Enough Mother," this being Maxi's only  
real moral compass, but more than enough for her and her family to  
survive. But when bad stuff happens to bad people? She just shrugs it  
off.


Wonderfully paradoxical stuff and at the same time the envoirns are  
recognizable for what passes for quoditian these days. The book is  
also like those kinds of downloadable files that have lossless  
encryption—takes a while for "Bleeding Edge" to open up. But the same  
was true of Gravity's Rainbow.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l