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

[John Bailey]

Essay topic: The Family Plot

Do families in Pynchon's later novels function as micro-conspiracies?
>From the plausible denial of Maxine's "what?" to the combinatorics of
AtD's Scarsdale, Venture and other tribes, might Pynchon be exploring
family dynamics as variously closed- and open-circuits, Them-systems
and sites of power struggle (reference Prairie, Frenesi, Isaiah irl to
Zoyd and Brock here)? Does the denouement of Mason & Dixon thus
suffer, given its perhaps overly sentimental parent-child exchange? Or
has Pynchon's writing on family developed from the macro-familial
conspiracy of Slothrop's heritage in GR towards something more nuanced
but no less critical in its dissection of families not as an
overarching category but as a shifting field of possibility?

Terrible question, badly thought out.

Discuss.

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 8:14 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> 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>
> 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
>
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l