BEER Group Read, the looseness thread

[Curtis Rawling-Endicott]

Definitely one of my favorite things about Pynchon, and probably why
my head always feels a little funny after reading him.

The joys of casual indeterminacy.

On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> "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, Ace—no 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. He’s 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
> hadn’t shown up. He is a messenger from Slothrop’s 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. He’d 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 dance—all of you.”
>         “No. Honestly, I didn’t. 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? He’s twice her size. “Please—be very
> careful . . . .” That’s 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-blown—palm leaves stir, all down the esplanade.
> Ghislaine drops away, back down the beach, to pick up prim Bloat. Katje
> squeezes Slothrop’s 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/?listpynchon-l
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