Beer: All In The Family

[Fiona Shnapple]

Thanks  RL


I'm sure you are familiar with Foucault's famous essay, "What Is An
Author?" and the kind of St Jerome criticism business he describes in
it. A risky venture not even a saint with a monk's devotion to the
steep climb to the stacks and dusty tomes would invest in even after
reading the Red Herring and the Prospectus.


We simply don't know Tom Pynchon or his family. In the future scholars
will construct an author from his letters and papers, his books and
maps and scraps. Some Ellman will do a job on him, dig up his fetishes
and fantasies...but right now we have his writings and these are not
one  book of cryptic heresy.

Your biographical reading is built on sand.

Come and lift with us. We are strong mis readers too.


>
> There's a way Pynchon's collected works are considered one big message in
> code, seeing as code is central to his work. But beyond the Genius/Idiot
> Savant of Punnery, creator of indigestible foodstuffs and naughty Rocket
> Limericks, there is a person, that guy of no particular outstanding visible
> appearance, throwing those switches and levers. There is the narratorial
> voice, never once relinquished up to the First Person of Chandler's
> tarnished Knight, but stuck like glue by the Lord Overlunch of these
> stories, semi-omniscient and more observant than most. And that person, that
> voice, is growing up in public, first rejecting family, or at least acting
> as if "Family" was some sort of poison in his first three books. Family
> becomes more far more poignant and central in the tale of Vineland, hopeful
> too, as is the introduction to Slow Learner. Family and Family ties are
> wonderfully interwoven into the Glorious Fugue that is Mason & Dixon. Family
> is absolutely central to The Traversi vs. Vibes central plots that animate
> Against the Day.
>
> I would go further, and have gone further, noting how the Family History of
> the Pynchons, going back to William, founder of Springfield the first,
> [Jedidiah be damned] is such a big part of all of the author's writings. The
> Vibes of AtD are a mirror reflection of the Pynchons of Yacht racing and the
> New York Stock Exchange, America's Nobility until undercut by a manipulation
> of Pynchon & Co. stock, something to do with the propaganda potential of
> sound on film and big players squeezing out the mavericks. Those funny
> stamps in CoL49? Tax Stamps? {Lord Overlunch almighty, do we need tax stamps
> for stock transfers these days or what?}. The History of the Great,
> Heretical Pynchons is worthy of a Pynchon-sized tome, all by its lonesome. A
> very high percentage of outliers to be found there in Tom's ancestors..
>
> Could we say that on some level, our beloved author has been coasting on the
> last two? It certainly feels that way. But I think the biggest shift,
> crossing over the two most recent books in a way not really witnessed in the
> previous books, is a real sense of comfort and stability in the family. Of
> course, we have all noted how Pynchon clearly has been influenced by Ross
> Macdonald. The Lew Archer series of novels place internal family conflict at
> the center of his crime novels, something I would say that Pynchon has
> picked up and ran with in the last two books, but notable from the opening
> Blue Jays through the closing Blue Jay feathers of Vineland as well.
>
> If you've read this far, note that I'm going to get very spoilerish here, so
> if that sort of thing bothers you, avert your eyes.
>
> We get a sense that things between Doc and his parents are semi-copacetic,
> the sense that "family", as screwed up as they are, are pretty much alright
> in Inherent Vice. In Bleeding Edge, domesticity, in the context of the Upper
> West Side, 2001, is at the center of the story. I don't know if one would
> consider Doc Sportello 'privileged'—I'd consider myself lucky to be living
> in those times at/near Manhattan Beach, I could easily picture a more boring
> existence. But it's credible to say that Doc is on the preterite side of the
> fence. Maxi, like Oed, is not. And, while Oedipa leaves us with the perhaps
> the most self-consciously cliff-hanging ending in fiction, Bleeding Edge
> ends, domesticity wise, with a happy ending.
>
> If there is a Great curve here, it's not towards greater and more paranoid
> levels of complication, which are inevitable anyway, Moore's Law never
> sleeps and neither do NSA's servers. That's where "They" are headed, though
> Maxi is on some level, part of they, just like the rest of us whether we
> know it or not. But, past that, there's the karmic responsibility of raising
> your young. Somewhere along the line, if one is to grow up, one realizes
> that one is not immortal but that one leaves one's karma behind in the form
> of family and the responsibilities and rewards that family incurs. I would
> say that Pynchon as a young man was the sort of person that Pynchon, the now
> rather old man, would have problems hanging out with. In fact, the author
> said as much in the introduction to Slow Learner. Mind you, what I am
> writing is in reference to that simulacra of this person, the writings of
> this author and what the voice of this author is telling us. But it's not as
> if his books are entirely in code or that the codes used are all that hard
> to decipher. Looks like he uses Google, just like the rest of us mere
> mortals, has a thing for the Brady Bunch too, or so I  have heard.
>
> One of the things that Bleeding Edge tells us is that Horst is not so bad
> after all, even if it means that the Jewish Mother marries into the Elect
> power structure that brought on the Holocaust. It's a living, like Daffy
> Duck will tell you, this is the sort of dealing with the devil we all deal
> in. Oedipa was shocked—shocked to see all the preterite suffering that was
> previously buried to her, as she quested for her novel's McGuffin. Maxi was,
> is and shall evermore be the knowing one—been there, done that, lost the
> tee-shirt, always sufficiently self-aware to know when she's going in too
> deep, always drawing on her various "Spidy Senses" to cover her ass. So, for
> once, we have a "winner" in the center of the novel, a chosen one, though
> what really makes Maxi a "winner" is all stuff that the author witnessed
> watching his son grow up in the Upper West Side, with a Professional,
> High-Ticket, knows her stuff inside and out Mother for a wife. I would say
> that a lot of the 'family' element popping out in Bleeding Edge is
> autobiographically based, much as the lurid scene of Doc Sportello has all
> sorts of signposts to times and places within the author's personal
> experience.
>
> We have traversed from the Human Yo-Yo of Benny Profane, like a cur without
> a home, lost on the subway, to semi-cozy domestic scene on the Upper West
> Side, from feeling orphaned, to living in the neighborhood with the
> [Jeepers!] Tree of Life visible on the morning walk to school, all lit up
> like Stonehenge rotated specially for the morning of the Spring Equinox.
>
> If everything connects, it connects the deepest in family.
>
> Meanwhile, here's the announcement for my upcoming show.
>
> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=629225230463071&set=a.262126650506266.79156.100001267982193&type=1&theater-
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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