BEER Group Read, the looseness thread

Sun Oct 13 15:08:23 CDT 2013

I beg to differ, Monte. Everything in the passage you quote is told
from Slothrop's point of view, he is the "he" who feels in the first
sentence, and the heart is his, too. He is the one who believes in the
next paragraph, and he is the one who asks, "Little?" in the last. The
narrator has no access to anyone else's mind or heart.

That's how I read it. A-and, to quote our host, perhaps it's only me.

2013/10/13 Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>:
> "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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l