Maxine is not Pynchon

[John Bailey]

Are we beginning to fetishise the Preterite now? P's works were never
just about about the little guy versus The Man.

I wouldn't call Oedipa Maas a member of the Preterite. Or Mason and
Dixon (possibly Dixon, at a stretch). Slothrop is a massive pawn in
the games of the Elect but the Slothrop clan are not Preterite. Etc
and cetera.

The argument that Maxine is rich (adjusting for inflation, richer than
Oed, really?) and therefore she's a betrayal of Pynchon's vision -
nah, not for me.

I don't read his Elect/Preterite thing as a comment on wealth but one
on being inside/outside power structures. Also both of those
dichotomies are problematised within the writing itself.

But yeah, agree with RL that the later writer isn't so harsh on
family, and that's cool. If he had two kids and was in a long
relationship and was still down on the very concept of family, I'd be
more concerned. The books don't suggest that your kin will deliver you
to Grace or anything. But maybe the young P would have read them that
way and sure, older P would have heaved a sigh at him and let him walk
to school on his own.

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
> "...we must never forget that though the author can to some extent
> choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear” (20).  Booth,
> TRF
>
>
> I'm a bit surprised to read all these comments about Pynchon, the
> author we know so little about, really, and even more so by the claim
> that Maxine is, somehow Thomas Pynchon who lives on the UWS. While
> Pynchon may have somethings in common with his protagonist, to argue
> direct autobiographical readings is absurd for several reasons.
>
> First, as noted, we don't know Pynchon. He's worked hard to protect
> his privacy.
>
> Sure, he published Slow Learner,  and in it he talks a good deal about
> how his life and the times he lived in, places where he lived, so on,
> were essential to his writing, that at first he tried to reject the
> "autobiographical fictions" but that he came to understand that he
> needed to get out and live and then get his life into his books, but
> that doesn't  invite us to read his works as works of autobiography.
>
> If, as Pynchon's novels argue, again and again, language can not
> mirror reality, why would Pynchon try to do this? He doesn't. Not his
> world or ours or anybody else's
>
> Moreover, language can construct meaning. New, novel meaning, and this
> is one of the things Pynchon does so well, he explores and examines
> our use of language, deconstructs, then he constructs meaning with his
> novel use of words. Why we would want to pin him down to a meaning
> that is easy to get at by pinning his protagonist to his life tells us
> more about our inadequacies, our failures to read his books than about
> how he writes or who he is. The meaning is contextualized. To drag it
> out and staple it to a dying animal, as Roth's little book that takes
> its title from that famous Yeats poem argues, is to drain it of its
> beauty and life, the life we bring to it when we encounter it on the
> page.
>
> While I think RL has identified a fairly obvious trend that reflects
> the maturation of the man who wrote these books, to argue that he is
> more keen on family life is one argument, to claim that he is Maxine,
> that he is a rich man who therefore can't write about the preterit of
> some such nonsense is, frankly, stupid.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l