Pynchon's sentence structure

[ish mailian]

If anything, and only after very close examination, what I find a bit
awkward is the fact that the shift from the narrator who starts the
passage to the free indirect style that takes on Frenesi's language
and thoughts, and thus, her tone as well, is almost to subtle. It
happens right at the junction where the apparent grammar error is said
to occur. A James enthusiast like James Wood will complain that this
awkwardness is easily avoided through indirect style. In fact, he
argues that free indirect narrative evolved to avoid such awkward
narrative. He criticizes Updike for getting narration wrong and he
lashes out at Pynchon too. The grammar question seems less important
than this one: does Pynchon want to have his own words? Wood (29)
argues that the author must have his own words. Pynchon's VL seems to
argue that this is a stodgy convention that he will break with long
sentences and abrupt language and tone shifts. Personally, I prefer
that Pynchon majors because of the language and tone, but it's just a
preference not a critique of P's style in the lesser works.

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 6:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l