James Wood

[Raphael Saltwood]

It was James Wood who denigrated the sentence, but not because it didn’t parse for him.


https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0707&msg=120115&keywords=unholy%20longing


And the relevant section


>j) "Here Reef, on the trail of Fresno and Kindred,
>reflects that the stooges are even worse than the plutocrats:
>
>    If Capital's own books showed a balance
>in clear favor of damnation, if these plutes
>were undeniably evil hombres, then how much more so
>were those who took care of their problems for them,
>in no matter what ignorance of why, not all of their
>faces on the wanted bills, in that darkly textured style
>that was more about the kind of remembering,
>the unholy longing going on out here,
>than of any real-life badman likeness...
>
>Again, the musical control is flawless, and the
>long sentence, slowly read, is perfectly comprehensible.
>...The ellipsis in the above quotation is Pynchon's,
>and marks a section break; and in a way, the ellipsis
>is the only place this long sentence has to go--into
>the empty terminus of broken meaning."
>
>(but I sez)
>This is Reef's thinking.  It doesn't seem perfectly
>comprehensible to me, nor a statement of Pynchon's
>- I don't think Pynchon qua Pynchon would fail to return
>to the topic or quail before extending past 7 clauses
>- except insofar as he is "thinking as Reef."
>Reef is as uncomfortable with taking up arms [against people rather than property] as Kit,
>so instead of continuing his screed against the
>hired men - though it's a valid point, a villain
>without myrmidons is impotent -
>he branches onto the topic of wanted posters,
>and "unholy longing" which I link (maybe unwarrantedly)
>with the longing Vibe feels for Kit, the longing
>Foley Walker observed in the gay club, the longing
>- however repressed - between Deuce and Sloat...
>and the longing of Reef's grief (hey, that rhymes)
>