There is high magic in low puns

[jochen stremmel]

"Calling a tech-centric novel 'Bleeding Edge' is like calling a
fictionalised life of Freud 'Penile Cigars'."

Not at all.

2013/9/26 Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>:
> You're right, that review is interesting. The passage you quote from....
>
> "It is probably fair at this advanced stage to note that Pynchon has an
> incurable obsession with language: its capacity for behaving like glass or
> gauze. The opening paragraph of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) – “A screaming
> comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to
> compare it to now” – makes a point of stating where eloquence can’t go,
> either because we don’t hear V-2 rockets any more, or we no longer hear
> anything that resembles them, or because the only people who might have
> heard them were dead by the time they got the chance (being supersonic, the
> V-2 announces its arrival after it has already landed). But then “screaming”
> is already a comparison, a clarifying anthropomorphic metaphor. Fastforward
> more than half a century – from 1944 to 2001 – and there are even more
> phenomena to describe or half describe, more slang to borrow from espionage
> and economics, erotica and psychiatry. One of the things that Pynchon wants
> to expose is the way we massage things into metaphor and then forget that
> we’ve done it."
>
> ...is thought-provoking. But I struggle to connect what he's saying about
> Pynchon with what Pynchon has actually written in BE (or at least in its
> first 100 pages, which is where I'm up to). Robson is spot on with the love
> of language angle, but BE makes me feel as though Pynchon's ardor has
> cooled.
>
> Then there's this:
>
> "The book’s title, though a term in its own right (meaning new technology
> with risks attached), is repurposed here as a pun on a metaphor – the word
> “pun” being, as Gottlob Frege points out in Pynchon’s novel-beforelast
> Against the Day (2006), “und” upside down and back to front and a good way
> of bringing things together. Bleeding edge isn’t just a melding of a
> favoured phrase with the vaguest of themes. A bleeding edge is also an edge
> that has lost its sharpness, and one of Pynchon’s main subjects has always
> been identity’s lack of firmness, the habit things have of ceasing to be
> themselves – in this case, things such as the internet and New York."
>
> Again, good stuff. But again - say what? Calling a tech-centric novel
> 'Bleeding Edge' is like calling a fictionalised life of Freud 'Penile
> Cigars'.
>
> Maybe all will be clear once I've finished the book. For now, theories such
> as Robson's seem like wishful thinking. And whether Pynchon's thematic
> interests - and constructs - are really 'there' or not, the actual writing
> is sub-par. It isn't enough to throw out phrases which can come to seem
> freighted with multiple meanings and heightened contextual significance: we
> need to be entertained, and wowed by the elegant and unexpected use of
> language.
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: montedavis at verizon.net
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: There is high magic in low puns
> Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 06:16:11 -0400
>
>
> “It is probably fair at this advanced stage to note that Pynchon has an
> incurable obsession with language: its capacity for behaving like glass or
> gauze…. One of the things that Pynchon wants to expose is the way we massage
> things into metaphor and then forget that we’ve done it.”
>
>
>
> You go, Leo Robson. One of the best reviews I’ve seen.
>
>
>
> http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/09/bleeding-edge-thomas-pynchon-dotcom-survivors
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