Odds of another Pynchon novel

Jerome Park jeromepark3141 at gmail.com
Mon Jun 15 06:03:07 CDT 2015


Pynchon writes best when he keeps his distance. Distance is a rhetorical
strategy. In the old rhetorical triangle it is an aesthetic, intellectual,
and moral distance. Sometimes a book is weakened when it asks an audience
to accept, judge even, by norms that the audience can't accept. In VL.
While lots of readers may feel the loss, the betrayal, and then the
surrender even, to the conservative cancer that spread to the last
subjunctives of Vineland the Good, they can't accept its fictionalization
in a Pynchon novel. Brock? Windust? Not forces invisible, mysterious,
insidious, monstrous. Just here and now. So What?

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 6:42 AM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> If I didn't know better I would think M&D and VL were the works of two
> authors with very different styles and radically different visions, views
> of the world. Therefore, it makes sense to read them as works addressed to
> very different audiences. M&D, as far as I can tell, and despite its
> similarities with other works after GR, such as the family/Simpsons themes,
> is a book of Lamentations. Tony Tanner nails it when he calls M&D an
> "elegiac lament for the accelerating erosion of subjunctivity." That
> erosion, the Departures of God's Grace, is complete by VL, which slips to
>  nostalgia and blame, a politics that withdraws with a gnashing of teeth
> bitterly biting its own children.
>
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I say No, in thunder to different audiences.
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Jun 14, 2015, at 9:23 AM, Jerome Park <jeromepark3141 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Who does Pynchon write for? Were BE and IV written for the same audience?
>> I think so, How about AtD and M&D? A different audience. I sense that VL is
>> somewhere between these two. The shift after GR is most obvious in VL and
>> IV and BE. The Great American novels, M&D and AtD are what I hope Pynchon
>> will continue to produce and publish, but it's obvious that time is limited
>> and such works are longer projects so, but the California project, and BE,
>> are a lind of Return, something the other novels satirize even as they seem
>> to flirt with nostalgia parodically...so here's hoping for a massive
>> masterpiece again.
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 12:13 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Seems to me that Pynchon is much more explicit in the post-GR collection
>>> in portioning out blame, without the clutter of a mystical detective puzzle
>>> scaffold: Reagan, the FBI, Republicans, penises, the LAPD and police of all
>>> stripes, Microsoft, plutocrats of all stripes, and all intimate
>>> complications within the Beltway. i.e. the lines of good and bad are more
>>> sharply drawn (M&D retained much of that mystical which is why I don't
>>> include in this collection. We really dont know who They/M is though we
>>> know the East India Co has a few members). That's what I mean by a more
>>> direct style. the GR template is only my conceit for  the scaffolding. I
>>> also say all this acknowledging how these two threads are ever connected,
>>> despite the ostensible break and that there isnt anything wrong or
>>> necesarily lesser in the later works (Pynchon hasnt lost that voice): I
>>> would only argue such directness, aesthetically, dilutes while it instructs
>>> (sorta like comparing early REM to late REM)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> rich
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 10:41 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I, too, wish you would elaborate on these two points, Direct Style and
>>>> GR Template.  Masters Thesis sounding titles.
>>>>
>>>> David Morris
>>>>
>>>> On Friday, June 12, 2015, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Friend Rich,
>>>>> [...]
>>>>> And, I do not understand what " the new direct style" even IS per your
>>>>> reference. later works " more direct in style" than GR???....
>>>>>
>>>>> How, tell me, is AtD based on a GR template, which is Wha ????
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150615/93b9050a/attachment.html>


More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list