BE/White Noise

[Robin Landseadel]

I guess what I'm looking at is a theme I've recognized from multiple  
readings of the author's  "Lesser"* novels—the way the characters in  
the novels would mimic the characters they watch on TV. In all four of  
the "Tubeland" novels, characters display memesis with Televisual  
"Doubles". In the case of BE, I'm witnessing scene after scene that  
has the a-moral quality of analogous scenes from Seinfeld, though one  
could mention any number of "New" TV comedies of the nineties with  
similar tones and attitudes. The focus seems always more on snappy  
comebacks than real action. Awful things happen, folks are impassive 
—"Didn't I see that on TV last night?" "Can't remember, wonder if  
anybody's gonna call 911" "Hey, he cut in line, wadda ya want?"  
Blackout, next scene.

I wouldn't even call mine as much of a "Left" reading anymore, thanks  
to David Auerbach. I'm realizing more and more how the "Scientific"  
Rules in Pynchon's novels, with "Incursions of other worlds" trumping  
everybody's conspiracies. In Bleeding Edge we have a demonstration of  
an overwhelming torrent of data—Oedipa's bad and unreconcilable  
choices to an exponential power. The overwhelmingness of the data flow  
is the real point, not "Left", not "Right" not right & wrong, but  
terminal overload of data, enough to cause global warming all by its  
lonesome. Diabolical, when you think about it, our creation of a  
global Maxwell's Demon to the power of Moore's Law.

BE is also a good demonstration of the Dunning-Krueger Effect, Maxi  
being more or less smart enough to figure out she's not about to  
figure this one out, with those she has to deal with thinking that  
they've got it all figured out who wind up shot down by their  
presumption of knowledge.



*[that is to say, Televisual and loaded with references to "Low" or  
"Disposable" culture that any Bozo can spot]



On Oct 10, 2013, at 3:31 PM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:

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