The Small Rain redux, part 2

[ish mailian]

45-46   Picnic plays analyst with Nathan after he notices the "old
Sgt. Bilko type soldier we used to know and love" has changed, "the
past beginning to close in" or perhaps Nathan is "undergoing an
intellectual crisis", that Levine shrugs off as,  all the time he's
been developing (irony) and caring (irony) for this hear beer belly
(in Hemingway's FWA the men have distended bellies too, though not
from beer but from death that swells them out, as if pregnant with it
as they march through the rain that causes cholera, and is generally a
symbol of death, end especially death of procreation and fertility),
when "something like those stiffs comes along and throws it out of
kilter" (more irony as kilter or kelter is a healthy or good
condition).

Here, as in Lowlands, and in the more developed stories (Doctors
Hilarious and Slothrop etc...) the "analyst" is a setup for irony and
puns.

They decide to "talk about something else" and then the girls fall in
their laps, and the sizing up exchange, tomorrow night we'll see...
they break into boys grab-ass fighting and stagger home.

Young Pynchon does a fine job with the dialogue here. And she is
wonderful. The bad ear thing is not that bad and not as significant,
as P suggests in the SL Introduction to the tale, It doesn't evolve
from the accents, but the story suffers in the characterization of
Buttercup in the final two pages as does the rest of the story. She is
very well drawn until the plowboy stuff and the pile of allusions and
the whimpering.





On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:28 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l