M&D is Pynchon Heavy (fat and unbound characters)

[Joseph Tracy]

enjoyed that

> Now the reader and the text are still alive. They give life to each other.

What surprises me is how many books this guy sells. Part of it is that here is text that is still alive, we traverse it as we traverse the wild aliveness  and deadly bleakness of our existence - every map doomed to incompleteness and every step as real as we are.

And now he's in the movie biz as several P-listers foresaw in the 1st pages of IV. The reviews are fascinating in variety. I will have to do an hour trek to Albany to see it, but I know an excellent Felafel place there and feel that a turkish coffee will be the right scrying frame .  
 
On Jan 17, 2015, at 12:15 PM, alice malice wrote:

> M&D is taught in difficult classes to bewildered undergraduates and
> to pretentious graduate students and by professional readers of
> literature who have, so they suppose, a frame of reference, a level of
> understanding and sophistication far greater than that of Pynchon's
> audience or any of Pynchon's professional detractors (Wood, Kakutani,
> ...).
> 
> So, he writes, as Milton did, for the Elect? For a few heaven bound
> almost-angels who dance on the head of Pyn? That seems a contradiction
> given his leveling of high and low culture, his obvious sympathies for
> the non-elect, the preterit.
> 
> Why should Pynchon give up complexity, his trade, his craft, his
> innovations and experimentations, his genius...and so on, to satisfy
> Wood, Kakutani and their ilk?
> 
> Why makes things easy, convenient, or satisfy the reader's demands or
> expectations?
> 
> Who died and made the reader king?
> 
> The author died.  So says Barthes and it's a useful idea so we will
> make use of it and divide the author from the work. But the death of
> the author is not the death of the text.
> 
> Now the reader and the text are still alive. They give life to each other.
> 
> If the reader is dependent on the text and the text the reader, the
> author, though dead, haunts the reading yet, and challenges reader
> tyranny?
> 
> Connect the poetic objects (Aristotle's poetic silence to Eliot's
> objective correlative).
> 
> Some, McHale and others, call P's fiction postmodern and attribute his
> "fucking with the reader" as the next and obvious move after the
> Moderns made it super difficult, so Postmodern is a philosophical and
> physical paradigm shift. Sure.
> 
> But something else is going on here in M&D and we're on to it at the
> character level. The author, though dead, haunts these characters, not
> merely with the erasure of adjectives and adverbs (Joyce from Hero to
> Portrait); or the use of the objects and contexts and actions,  so
> passions and thoughts are not spelled out (narrators don't say, he was
> a dark and stormy cleric), and not with the fragments shored against
> ruins (though this is used to great effect in GR), but with
> anti-reason and anti-matter.
> 
> Connect wha?
> 
> So characters are fat not flat. They are stuffed pigs and they fly on
> the wings of a free and dead author, unbound from the reader's
> tyranny.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l