The Small Rain redux, part 2

[Mark Kohut]

I think my remark that they have not yet " internalized mortality",
are not 'serious' about it (as TRP says is the attitude toward death
in good fiction, in characters in fiction) sez the same as you say.

I simply added the possible interpretation that Levine's "cool' without
caring is part of a lack of seriousness about death....when internalized
maturely, we care. As he sees the little Buttercup, she isn't yet there
either. Would like to know your judgment of Levine's characterization
of her?....reliable or unreliable judgment? ....I know my belief here.

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:13 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> Slow Learners about mortality? Are they somehow sheltered from death?
> Are they too self absorbed, solipsistic, immature to care, to
> consider, to contemplate death? I doubt it. The setting and the
> circumstances force death into their lives. If, surrounded with the
> corpses of victims of an act of God they somehow don't get, not yet,
> that they too are mortal and will die, something is not working in
> their young hearts and minds. No, they know death. But, as P goes on
> to say, they avoid it, as they avoid work, tough decisions, domestic
> maturity,  and/or more dangerously they make narratives that mix death
> with desire, a desire that is repressed and returns in awkward
> allusions and repressed descriptions that, in ball caps and cigars,
> pun them on the road to mindless pleasure.
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 4:31 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > is Levine's "problem" that, as P sez in the intro,
> > these folks don't yet get, have not internalized that they
> > are mortal---hence the sleeping late, sophomoric jokes,
> > and Levine gets the scene where we get to see death,
> > so he's getting there but in the encounter he is all cool
> > with no caring (yet)..in Pynchon's phrase....so when he
> > quips about sex and death, It IS still as bad as a
> > magazine piece.
> > When internalizing death maturely, caring develops?
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 6:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> " there was in her eyes something that might have been a dismayed
> >> and delayed acknowledgment that what was hazarding this particular
> >> plowboy was deeper than any problem of seasonal change or doubtful
> >> fertility,
> >> Precisely as he had recognized earlier that her capacity to give
> involved
> >> nothing over or above the list of enumerated wares....[they are
> enumerated
> >> in one
> >> of TRP's first but short lists]...and THEREFORE [my caps] he assumed
> >> toward her
> >> that same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex
> >> novels, or
> >> for the burned-out but impotent good guy rancher in a western. He let
> her
> >> undress
> >> apart from him, until, standing there ion nothing but T-shirt and
> baseball
> >> cap, puffing placidly
> >> on the stogie he heard her from the mattress, whimpering." p. 50 SL
> >>
> >> Discuss. if you want. One tack: reliable or unreliable narrator here?
> >>
> >>
> >> "....they lay not touching. "In the midst of great death, " Levine said,
> >> 'the little death".
> >> And later, "Ha. It sounds like a caption in LIFE.In the midst of LIFE.
> We
> >> are in death. Oh god'.
> >>
> >> Discuss in regard to narrator's problem. Maybe.
> >>
> >>
> >> Tangential. Joseph Heller once said his novel Something Happened was
> about
> >> time, a friend
> >> told me. I looked up the interview. It was about TIME, he said, working
> >> there.
> >
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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