BE/White Noise

[Fiona Shnapple]

Big or Small, this book, I agree that this book is loaded with extreme
complexity, ironic subtlety, and a nearly private set of values that
need to be inferred by a perceptive reader who is willing, and able,
to look into the tangled wreckage. Even professional readers of
Pynchon will have trouble agreeing to the values, though I suspect
most will agree with Robin's Left reading, I don't think the norms are
that simple, so a reading of Maxine as, not a double, but kinda like
Elaine, will be open to debate, and, as noted, we will need to deal
with the narrative, the close third, and the ironic distance. It is
possible that the book will remain obscure to us, to P's
contemporaries because it invites us to interpret it by considering
how it has sampled from Seinfeld and so forth. This is ironic in that
the usual fate of a satire is that it looses value after its immediate
audience has read it, but P seems to have written a book that resists
a contemporary reading and favors a posterity, those who will, like
Prarie when she reads her, or better watches her mother's films.







On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> 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/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l