The implausibility of Maxine's "What" (p. 419)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

If we ask for the narrative function of Maxine's implausible "What," 
it's - I'd say - to show her in the role of the dependent child, a grown 
up daughter in need of her father to understand what's really going on, 
before, in the novel's end, Maxine - "She can watch them into the 
elevator at least" - starts to let her sons go their own ways. Ziggy and 
Otis will always be Maxine's sons like she will always be the daughter 
of Ernie. It's a family novel, too.


On 10.07.2015 11:10, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
> But isn't "Where does it come from?" the most natural (and necessary!) 
> question to ask here? And this information wasn't classified or 
> anything. Well, "(i)f they get you asking the wrong questions, they 
> don't have to worry about the answers" ...
>
>
> On 10.07.2015 10:44, John Bailey wrote:
>>
>> I had no idea about DARPA then, in any form, really.
>>
>> On 10 Jul 2015 6:35 pm, "Kai Frederik Lorentzen" 
>> <lorentzen at hotmail.de <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     I understand that Pynchon wants to make Ernie's explanations more
>>     interactive by giving Maxine a line to throw in but how could she
>>     not know about DARPAnet and its function to enable communication
>>     after a nuclear war? When the Internet went through the roof by
>>     the mid 1990s every second media report on the issue had that
>>     story in extended version. How could an intelligent and educated
>>     person like Maxine have missed it? How could we imagine her not
>>     being interested in the historical origin of such a game changer?
>>     No, this is not plausible at all. Future editions should have,
>>     instead of "What," something like "But Pop, that's so long ago,"
>>     an argument Maxine ("The Cold War ended, right?", p. 420) is
>>     trying to develop later in the conversation anyway. But the
>>     "What" damages the whole character.
>>
>>     -
>>     Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>

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