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

Mark Kohut markekohut at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 10 14:30:00 CDT 2013


I would say: this patterning can show coherence of a writer's vision. yes, like his ways of saying WTF, they must all be contextually right. 
2) if the pattern is about the real world and it is insightful about that world, then, again right.
3) yes, books must work aesthetically or patterning is irrelevant. Bad writers pattern too...
(and some critics condemn TRP for overpatterning)

From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
To: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> 
Cc: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>; Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 9, 2013 9:37 AM
Subject: Re: Re: Review: Thomas Pynchon’s “Bleeding Edge” (David Auerbach @ The American Reader)




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