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

[Mark Kohut]

Family, later Pynchon: mostly An ( ideal) Haven in a Heartless World to use Lasch's title. 


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> On Aug 30, 2015, at 6:46 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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