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

[John Bailey]

A very, very few moments of family circles (circularity?) in Pynchon's
books fit this (generally accepted) thesis though, right?

Why do we treat them as more serious than the anarchist miracles, the
vegetariano songs, etc?

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:00 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Family, later Pynchon: mostly An ( ideal) Haven in a Heartless World to use Lasch's title.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> 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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