BEER Group Read, the looseness thread

Sun Oct 13 12:22:57 CDT 2013

"is THIS what is meant by 'postmodern'...?" Not by me, nonononono. I mean it
as very specific to TRP, trailing no clouds of theory, aligning him with no
epoch or school or trend.

(Parenthetically,  from Michael Hofmann's NYRB review of Jonathan Franzen's
_The Kraus Project_, on Franzen in 1980's Germany: "the overbearing
influence of the one novel our hero packed in his suitcase full of French
theory -- it was Gravity's Rainbow -- and the dual terror exerted on him by
Pynchon on the one hand and Harold Bloom on the other.")

OK, reread the end of the fully scripted, octopus-mediated "meet cute"
between Slothrop and Katje, p. 188 in the Viking-Penguin GR:
--- 
...Oh, that was no found crab, Aceno random octopus or girl, uh-uh.
Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels
instantly, in his heart.
	They all stay a bit longer on the beach, finishing breakfast. But
the simple day, birds and sunlight, girls and wine, has sneaked away from
Slothrop. Tantivy is getting drunk, more relaxed and funnier as the bottles
empty. Hes staked out not only the girl he first had his eye on, but also
the one Slothrop would be no doubt sweet-talking right now if that octopus
hadnt shown up. He is a messenger from Slothrops innocent, pre-octopus
past. Bloat, on the other hand, sits perfectly sober, mustache unruffled,
regulation uniform, watching Slothrop closely. His companion Ghislaine, tiny
and slender, pin-up girl legs, long hair brushed behind her ears falling all
the way down her back, shifts her round bottom in the sand, writing marginal
commentaries around the text of Bloat. Slothrop, who believes that women,
like Martians, have antennas men do not, keeps an eye on her. She looks over
only once, and her eyes grow wide and cryptic. Hed swear she knows
something. On the way back to the Casino, toting their empties, and the
basket full of the debris of the morning, he manages a word with her.
	Some picnic, nessay-pah?
	Dimples appear next to her mouth. Did you know all the time about
the octopus? I thought so because it was so like a danceall of you.
	No. Honestly, I didnt. You mean you thought it was just a
practical joke or something?
 	Little Tyrone, she whispers suddenly, taking his arm with a big
phony smile for the others. Little? Hes twice her size. Pleasebe very
careful . . . . Thats all. He has Katje by the other hand, two imps,
contrary, either side. The beach is empty now except for fifty gray gulls
sitting watching the water. White heaps of cumulus pose out at sea,
hard-surfaced, cherub-blownpalm leaves stir, all down the esplanade.
Ghislaine drops away, back down the beach, to pick up prim Bloat. Katje
squeezes Slothrops arm and tells him just what he wants to hear about now:
Perhaps, after all, *we were meant to meet*..."

Almost every sentence here brings a significant modulation of "who's telling
me this?" Not just in and out of a delighted/suspicious Slothrop's
consciousness,  but a fugue -- from a sympathetic, "naïve and sentimental"
narrator, a wised-up in-on-the-plot narrator, a coolly precise Nabokovian
let-the-details-do-the-work narrator ("posed" clouds, "hard-surfaced") -- oh
hell,  more narrative voices than I can count. Note the balance of 100%
literal accuracy and 100% cynical irony in "just what he wants to hear about
now." Would you, could you mistake this for any other writer? 
--------

Now read the BE description of how Maxine met Reg Despard, starting six
lines down on p. 12. It's doing "smaller" storytelling work: we haven't had
the buildup of Pointsman, Katje's Blicero past and her filming by Osbie
Feel, etc. But it's planting many of the same needles of paranoid
acupuncture:

A shoreline "by now too far away to swim to"

"The price [of the cruise] was irresistible. To anyone in their right mind,
too much so"

A face "fatefully belonging to one Joel Wiener", the nuances of whose story
"could've saved [Maxine] some trouble down the line."

Sentence by sentence, ask "who's telling me this?" Are we listening to
Maxine's memory of a casual cruise-ship flirtation -- provisionally Reg,
then probably Joel? Are we being warned that flirtation is her destined
route to places considerably darker than a NYC co-op wrangle? Hey. Who wants
to know?

"Peculiar cruise, Reg."

"You ever hear from any of those folks again?"

 You will, Maxi, you will. The modulations are finer, more constrained, but
OBA is up to all his old tricks.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Kohut [mailto:markekohut at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Sunday, October 13, 2013 11:42 AM
To: pynchon -l
Cc: Monte Davis
Subject: BEER Group Read, the looseness thread

Monte writes:
"He doesn't do it all the time, but he can do it at any time; we hardly
notice any more, except when it's flagged as you've done here. And when he
does, he (1) blows away like tissue all the good, sound advice ever given to
writers about consistency of voice/PoV, or at least the necessity of
signaling changes... and (2) opens up nifty epistemological and even
ontological questions about what constitutes the "inside" and "outside" of
consciousness in fictional narrative."

Another whole book or two in this packed paragraph, imho and can lead to
asking----is THIS what is meant by 'postmodern" and what does this say
about...............the world as we know it? 

I love "but he can do it at any time".....yes, so true, so unsaid until now
in my reading/thinking

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