Pynchon's sentence structure

[Mark Kohut]

Even one long non-sentence mistake, is that enough to label P as well as a
pretty great reader, "pretenders"?
My gawd, they are still fighting over Shakespeare's punctuation (but he is
spared being called a pretender because
we don't have what he actually wrote down for sure.
---could it have been a copyediting error?
Would it work with a semi-colon? ...and, to me, the way loooong sentences
like this
"work' with a comma are that they bring us one thing after another
purely....

But, when I read Proust, I did feel that my narrow business-declarative
sentence world was so
small, so narrow and the enveloping let's-call-them-connections were so
differently and more deeply real.

When I first read James in my later high school and college years, I was
told my writing became circuitous and
ridiculous, taffy-pulled to absurdity (my pretentious metaphor just
borrowed from TRP and his taffy-stretched sky
late in GR)

With P, it is a kind of narrator's tone and, yes, his connections with long
elaborate metaphoric connections.

On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 6:15 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been reading a recent essay by one of Australia's pre-eminent
> novelists, Gerald Murnane, an extremely private man (the more common
> description is 'reclusive') only two years younger than Thomas Pynchon
> and whose work is characterised by obscenely long sentences that are
> nonetheless grammatically correct. His great obsession is Proust and
> most would say he is the Antipodean answer to Proust. The essay is on
> the long sentence's profound potential to produce meaning - which he
> associates with 'connections' - that short, descriptive, declarative
> sentences can't access. But as an obsessive grammarian, he begins the
> work decrying Kermode's review of Vineland, in which is quoted the
> following loooong sentence. Murnane says it isn't a sentence, but a 66
> word sentence followed by a bunch of unconnected clauses. He goes on
> to call Pynchon and Kermode 'pretenders' as a result (did I mention
> Murnane is a serious grammar freak?) but eventually produces quite an
> interesting essay.
>
> My question is: I can see how he can't parse the following as a
> classically correct sentence past "another motel room" but I can also
> see how it does work. I don't know how to argue for it, however. A
> puzzle fit for a P-list.
>
> The 'after a while her visits to Sasha' clause is where things get hairy.
>
> "By the time she began to see that she might, nonetheless, have gone
> through with it, Brock Vond had reentered the picture, at the head of
> a small motorcade of unmarked Buicks, forcing her over near Pico and
> Fairfax, ordering her up against her car, kicking apart her legs and
> frisking her himself, and before she knew it there they were in
> another motel room, after a while her visits to Sasha dropped off and
> when she made them she came in reeking with Vond sweat, Vond semen —
> couldn't Sasha smell what was going on? — and his erect penis had
> become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would
> keep trying to steer among the hazards and obstacles, the swooping
> monsters and alien projectiles of each game she would come, year by
> year, to stand before, once again out long after curfew, calls home
> forgotten, supply of coins dwindling, leaning over the bright display
> among the back aisles of a forbidden arcade, rows of other players
> silent, unnoticed, closing time never announced, playing for nothing
> but the score itself, the row of numbers, a chance of entering her
> initials among those of other strangers for a brief time, no longer
> the time the world observed but game time, underground time, time that
> could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless
> perimeter."
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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