7. Tweaking genres. Pynchon -- more than any other serious writer that comes to mind (i.e., one we have to take seriously) -- is able to manipulate and re-imagine any number of popular literary genres. Most of those genres I have a nodding acquaintance with, but one accepts that Pynchon reads or has read the kinds of books that rarely make their way onto any college syllabus, but which sell well and are translated all over the world. Romance novels; spy novels (he's spoken highly of Le Carré and one suspects he's spent amused hours in Ian Fleming's world, and who knows how many others of that type); gumshoe novels (late in the novel he brings back Lew Basnight seemingly for no other reason than to have a go at that type of story); boys' adventure novels (though I didn't read Tom Swift novels, which The Chums of Chance draw upon most obviously, my older brother had some around, and I'm sure I glanced through them, but I did read a series called The Three Investigators, published by Alfred Hitchcock, and I was amused to find in AtD phrases I recall from those tales of three boys sleuthing in southern California); tales of war (in which the Germans are evil incarnate) and espionage (especially the Cold War variety with those pesky Russians up to no good); sci-fi (H.G. Wells seems to be the main precursor here, but echoes of Dune can be found, and a reference to Star Trek); westerns of the Louis L'Amour variety, filtered through the kinds of westerns I'm more familiar with: the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, but also with winks toward that terrain so obsessively inhabited by Cormac McCarthy; the bildungsroman, here presented as a kind of sexual odyssey for the character Cyprian Latewood -- not exactly a "coming-out" story, but certainly playing upon the givens of such narratives; tales of showbiz impresarios and young Trilbies; any number of popular works that don't have much purpose other than to delineate the particulars of some ethnic group or other, sprinkled with plenty of italicized words to add an air of authenticity to what the characters say; this applies also to any number of subcultural tales in which the oppressed of some particular locality are in struggle against those who oppress them (Pynchon always pauses in his epic narratives to take a look at how "the preterite" are faring in any given time and place); and of course that genre made huge recently by The Da Vinci Code, in which "ancient clues" must be interpreted in order to elucidate a current crisis, as well as the genre getting its due in the novels of Richard Powers, in which new scientific developments change not only the course of life, but have explanatory power in terms of what the characters say and do.
This is to say that Pynchon's universe does not dwell in some literary absolute in which masterpieces read other masterpieces forever, but also it's to say that, in my experience, it's rare for anyone working in any of these genres to attempt or achieve what he does. Which is to say that everyone I've mentioned, and that whole host whose names I don't know, write such tales earnestly, even if only as entertainment, which is why they don't mix the signals. Pynchon mixes all the signals, thus achieving not only that genre (also popular, but usually for a smaller subset of the readership) known as satire (i.e., any work which does not necessarily take its premises or the world it depicts seriously), but also attaining a prose that is, at times, an end in itself. Often one comes upon passages in which the narrator (and the tuned-in reader) seem to say: who cares about the plot, who cares about the characters, just write!
8. The prose. Fans of Pynchon are mainly fans of how Pynchon writes. "No one does it better," as the old Bond song puts it, or to use a phrase from a song that was playing one day while I was reading, and which suddenly seemed to be commenting on whatever inexplicable event was occurring: "no one mystifies me like you do." This is not a question so much of following "the plot," but of being willing to surrender to what this kind of writing requires. (Granted, in its 1085 pages, there are some effects that become redundant, and there are a few similes that an editor should've caught -- having been used once, they shouldn't be used again; the most egregious thing the editor (assuming there is one) didn't catch: when Reef, Yashmeen and their daughter finally meet up with Frank, Stray (Reef's former wife) and Jesse, the son of Reef and Stray, the text tells us Stray (and not Yash) is the female in the first group. Whoops! More evidence that all TP's characters are interchangeable, or that Yash and Stray are the same person in different times and places? heh heh).
Reviewers who have found AtD wanting in comparison to GR (and one sympathizes with their having to read the book quickly) seem to have forgotten how hard it is to make any sense of the narrative of GR at first, how much it requires a steady forward push and gradual loosening of the expectations founded upon the works of much lesser writers. But GR trained many of us to inhabit Pynchon's universe -- but then Vineland and M&D, which don't inhabit that world in quite the same way, moved us away, again, from the kinds of assumptions GR worked with and AtD returns to. Those who read AtD without ever being enthralled by its prose, by the simple flex and flow and stretch of the characteristic Pynchon sentence, should maybe take up some other art to consider -- or, granted, perhaps they love fiction but not prose, the way some people who love movies get uneasy when one speaks of film or cinema -- i.e., an attempt to consider what the work manifests as an artifact of a certain medium, conceived in a certain time and place.
Those who find AtD wanting as "what the world needs now" are sanctimonious poseurs who assume to speak for what that might be; AtD at times suggests what is needed is a revolution; at times, a götterdammerung; at times, more faith in what knowledge of the world can bring to light (with the narrator fostering a kind of sentimental fondness for mystical or non-rational forms of knowledge, with, perhaps better than most venturers into the occult, a working idea of how "irrational" our world of physics, chemistry and biology really is). As to the "post-9/11" world which we live in (in some influential minds), Pynchon adds a few items to the table: acts of terrorism against huge resource-controlling entities have been common since the birth of explosives; throughout the world there have ever been those -- disenfranchised, persecuted, rebellious, or simply murderous -- who work to achieve concrete goals as "a blow" against the status quo (and at times they present much to be in sympathy with); the world we take for granted in our newshows and glib commentary, or even in our thought-provoking studies, is not "all that is the case." Those who find AtD wanting in not providing a definite enough vision of the Us vs. Them game afoot in its pages (as GR was able to do more effectively -- though perhaps reductively) might have to reflect on why that might be, and what one of the first major English language literary works of the 21st century is trying to tell them about that.
You say my kisses are not like his
Yeah, but this time I'm not gonna tell you why that is
I'm just gonna let you pass
And I'll go last
Then time will tell just who fell
And who's been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine.--Dylan "(Most Likely) You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" (1966)
Showing posts with label Against the Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Against the Day. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
WHY READ PYNCHON, 3
4. Sex and humor. In Pynchon's world, sex in all its manifestations -- ribald, comic, grotesque, lyrical, perverse, sentimental, erotic, and so on -- is an ongoing narrative effect. That is to say, that not only do characters have sex, but the sex they have is tied, like the narrator's sense of humor, to the imaginative possibilities of any given situation. When, for instance, a character begins to contemplate a woman's dog as an object of desire, it's as "natural" to the fictional context as having a huge hot air balloon and gondola journey beneath the desert sands and find a city there which, like all Pynchon cities, has a bar where colorful characters cross paths.
Humor is a part of sex and vice versa in many instances. Only when a major character feels a major passion -- which generally is of the nature of an obsession that can't be gainsaid -- does the narrator adopt a tone of respect about, even of sympathy with, what primal forces can make us do. But never does he drop the tongue-in-cheek tone that naturally intrudes when discussing someone else's delusions, no matter how heartfelt. The variation on this is when he strikes up the band big time to let the prose equivalent of flowers and bon bons descend upon some happy couple he is for the moment giving a literary fête. In other words, the corollaries and nuances of sex -- often "kinky" -- and humor -- often collegiate -- are a given. Few authors are able to be so arch about their characters' sex lives -- Joyce and Nabokov spring to mind as heading the list, but neither of them is at the same time so enthusiastic about every new wrinkle or fetish. Pynchon's narrator actually seems at times enamored of the erotic obsessions his characters experience even as he exploits them for dramatic or comic effect.
Saying the humor is "collegiate" is to say that it partakes of what has been common parlance to students since the '50s: drug humor -- at first filtered through jazz (and the hipsters Mailer discusses in "The White Negro"), then through the "sex, drugs, rock'n'roll revolution" of the college-age masses of the '60s. Pynchon's humor harkens back to those times, with perhaps a bit more of the inspired goofiness that found its anarchist heroes in the Marx Brothers, and its hip counter-cultural sensibility in The Firesign Theater. Neither of which were about drugs, per se, but which were so much more "meaningful" when stoned. But another meaning for "collegiate" is "sophomoric" and Pynchon seems to pride himself on the kinds of puns and verbal jokes that old English teachers liked to use to make the class groan -- just to make sure we were all paying attention.
5. Arcana, anyone? GR was the Pynchon novel that got tagged with the term "encyclopedic," but AtD is the only Pynchon novel that at times sounds that way. The passages on rocket aerodynamics in GR, or on the statistical Poisson distrbution, or on Pavlovian experiments, were part of the activity being presented. In AtD, the mathematical discussions have some of that feeling: we're listening to math-heads talk, so, sure this is what they have to say. The parts that sound less "motivated" by the story, and also way less metaphorical, are the passages that give us a quick precis of political developments, say, in Mexico, or which want to bring us up to speed on what's happening in the Balkans when one of our heroes stumbles into it.
Such passages aren't abundant, but I mention the tendency because it does demonstrate the extent to which Pynchon, for all his audacity, relies upon certain basic assumptions of intelligibility, such as those of any historical record. At one point one character says to another, "you really only believe what you were taught," or something to that effect, and it's a moment that illuminates something that underpins much of TP's method: the stories he tells are not the stories They tell or that We were already told. He's the poet of crypto-history, the teller who wants to reimagine the world via the cast-off arcana, the forgotten bits of pseudo-historical dream and theory and surmise. It's a daunting task. Most works of fiction either imaginatively recreate things which actually happened, or entirely fantasize a world only tangentially a part of ours. Pynchon does both those things, and so much more, but he still has to rely, at times, on basic accounts of the who, what, where and why.
6. Apocalypse then. The notion of apocalypse as revelation, a showing of what is to come (or of what has always lurked latent in the way things are or were) is a major working interest of TP's narrators and many of his characters, but the more popular meaning of apocalypse, as a revelation about the ultimate end or destruction of what is, is also intrinsic to both narrators and characters, though generally it's the characters that want to see what's coming before it gets here and it's the narrators that like to intimate that, whatever it will be, it's going to wipe what is, now, off the map. No one exploits so well, or so often, this tone of meanings just out of reach, of changes poised to occur that need only a certain catalyst or participant to become manifest.
Those who have compared Pynchon's works to pre-novelistic romance or allegory tend to focus on this aspect: a sense that meaning inheres in the things themselves and that the quest is to find that meaning, to bring it out, to rescue history from darker subtexts that are just as possible, perhaps even more likely. Indeed, as we go on in AtD we get the sense that hopes for the future keep diminishing. And, since the future of the book (on at least the standard timeline), is our time, well, good reason for the pessimism. To counter that, it seems, Pynchon provides glimpses of other possibilities -- aspects of "our" past which might still be recovered in "our" future, if we can manage it. I think this, more than anything, is the reasoning behind what the novel calls "bilocations": the notion that we live always with one foot in the past we want to claim as ours and one foot in the future we want that past to be the origins of. Apocalypse, as revelation, was all about a moment -- now in the past -- when what was revealed was a future that the present wholly ignored and which only a tradition -- religious, mystical, allegorical -- could maintain as still germane in the present. For TP, all secret societies, to say nothing of every new school or system of study, owe their provenance and their relevance to some such vision, insight or relevation.
Humor is a part of sex and vice versa in many instances. Only when a major character feels a major passion -- which generally is of the nature of an obsession that can't be gainsaid -- does the narrator adopt a tone of respect about, even of sympathy with, what primal forces can make us do. But never does he drop the tongue-in-cheek tone that naturally intrudes when discussing someone else's delusions, no matter how heartfelt. The variation on this is when he strikes up the band big time to let the prose equivalent of flowers and bon bons descend upon some happy couple he is for the moment giving a literary fête. In other words, the corollaries and nuances of sex -- often "kinky" -- and humor -- often collegiate -- are a given. Few authors are able to be so arch about their characters' sex lives -- Joyce and Nabokov spring to mind as heading the list, but neither of them is at the same time so enthusiastic about every new wrinkle or fetish. Pynchon's narrator actually seems at times enamored of the erotic obsessions his characters experience even as he exploits them for dramatic or comic effect.
Saying the humor is "collegiate" is to say that it partakes of what has been common parlance to students since the '50s: drug humor -- at first filtered through jazz (and the hipsters Mailer discusses in "The White Negro"), then through the "sex, drugs, rock'n'roll revolution" of the college-age masses of the '60s. Pynchon's humor harkens back to those times, with perhaps a bit more of the inspired goofiness that found its anarchist heroes in the Marx Brothers, and its hip counter-cultural sensibility in The Firesign Theater. Neither of which were about drugs, per se, but which were so much more "meaningful" when stoned. But another meaning for "collegiate" is "sophomoric" and Pynchon seems to pride himself on the kinds of puns and verbal jokes that old English teachers liked to use to make the class groan -- just to make sure we were all paying attention.
5. Arcana, anyone? GR was the Pynchon novel that got tagged with the term "encyclopedic," but AtD is the only Pynchon novel that at times sounds that way. The passages on rocket aerodynamics in GR, or on the statistical Poisson distrbution, or on Pavlovian experiments, were part of the activity being presented. In AtD, the mathematical discussions have some of that feeling: we're listening to math-heads talk, so, sure this is what they have to say. The parts that sound less "motivated" by the story, and also way less metaphorical, are the passages that give us a quick precis of political developments, say, in Mexico, or which want to bring us up to speed on what's happening in the Balkans when one of our heroes stumbles into it.
Such passages aren't abundant, but I mention the tendency because it does demonstrate the extent to which Pynchon, for all his audacity, relies upon certain basic assumptions of intelligibility, such as those of any historical record. At one point one character says to another, "you really only believe what you were taught," or something to that effect, and it's a moment that illuminates something that underpins much of TP's method: the stories he tells are not the stories They tell or that We were already told. He's the poet of crypto-history, the teller who wants to reimagine the world via the cast-off arcana, the forgotten bits of pseudo-historical dream and theory and surmise. It's a daunting task. Most works of fiction either imaginatively recreate things which actually happened, or entirely fantasize a world only tangentially a part of ours. Pynchon does both those things, and so much more, but he still has to rely, at times, on basic accounts of the who, what, where and why.
6. Apocalypse then. The notion of apocalypse as revelation, a showing of what is to come (or of what has always lurked latent in the way things are or were) is a major working interest of TP's narrators and many of his characters, but the more popular meaning of apocalypse, as a revelation about the ultimate end or destruction of what is, is also intrinsic to both narrators and characters, though generally it's the characters that want to see what's coming before it gets here and it's the narrators that like to intimate that, whatever it will be, it's going to wipe what is, now, off the map. No one exploits so well, or so often, this tone of meanings just out of reach, of changes poised to occur that need only a certain catalyst or participant to become manifest.
Those who have compared Pynchon's works to pre-novelistic romance or allegory tend to focus on this aspect: a sense that meaning inheres in the things themselves and that the quest is to find that meaning, to bring it out, to rescue history from darker subtexts that are just as possible, perhaps even more likely. Indeed, as we go on in AtD we get the sense that hopes for the future keep diminishing. And, since the future of the book (on at least the standard timeline), is our time, well, good reason for the pessimism. To counter that, it seems, Pynchon provides glimpses of other possibilities -- aspects of "our" past which might still be recovered in "our" future, if we can manage it. I think this, more than anything, is the reasoning behind what the novel calls "bilocations": the notion that we live always with one foot in the past we want to claim as ours and one foot in the future we want that past to be the origins of. Apocalypse, as revelation, was all about a moment -- now in the past -- when what was revealed was a future that the present wholly ignored and which only a tradition -- religious, mystical, allegorical -- could maintain as still germane in the present. For TP, all secret societies, to say nothing of every new school or system of study, owe their provenance and their relevance to some such vision, insight or relevation.
Monday, January 8, 2007
WHY READ PYNCHON, 2
3. The world is everything that is the case.
This line from Wittgenstein is played as a joke in Pynchon's first novel, but its implications extend throughout his fiction: the world of any of his novels is everything that he deems germane. AtD is more sprawling than any previous Pynchon novel (and that's saying something) because it moves about among more stories and "follows" more characters. GR, while more imaginatively sprawling perhaps in that each wild metaphor might at any time take on a life of its own, restricted its main narrative line to Slothrop, with some notable digressions -- Pökler, Mexico, Enzian, Prentice -- that were all tangential to that narrative. In AtD, the narratives of the four Traverse siblings -- Reef, Frank, Lake and Kit -- each takes center stage for a time but also gives way to various "spin-offs" or subplots that can for a time take on as much importance as the main game -- the adventures of Cyprian Latewood, of Dally Rideout, of Lew Basnight, and of the Chums of Chance being the most vivid examples. One of the mentally fatiguing aspects of AtD is just how spread out "the story" chooses to be. V. set the bar with the wide reach of enterprises in which lady V. (or someone like her) was, at least in Stencil's reconstruction, involved. But, again, the reconstruction of V.'s past was, ostensibly, of a single character by a single character.
In AtD, as with M&D, I get the feeling sometimes that TP, having decided to chart an itinerary for his picaresque characters, pursues it sometimes doggedly rather than inspiredly, which means at times sketching in backgrounds in the broad tones of the encyclopedia (not known for really opening up time and place). In M&D the decision to follow closely the duo's actual peregrinations, I felt, reined in TP's imagination too much -- though this is what perhaps makes the novel more accessible to those that find it so. In AtD there isn't so determinate a reason for where characters go (though I think it has to do with a global map that TP laid out and chose to follow) and what they get up to (so long as it involves some type of anarchist shenanigans). Colorado, Venice, the Balkans, and Mexico become the dominant locales, though Chicago, London, New York, Trieste, Geneva, L.A., finally Paris, and hosts of other places move in and out like soundstages in the old Hollywood.
Where we are and what's happening seem at times arbitrary -- also a point often delivered or perceived as a criticism -- an effect that, I would argue, is justified by the narrator's world view which I would describe as Manichaean: the two poles are the utterly random and the fated (i.e., controlled by forces unseen). Because the characters must themselves experience both sides of this pole, their adventures have to be such as to dismantle standard versions of cause and effect, probability, even self-identity. Such crutches must be thrown over by the reader as well and it seems that a deliberative wearing-down of our expectations of sequential and consistent events can only occur in a narrative of sufficient magnitude, like those paintings that only "work" on a colossal scale.
To be continued...
This line from Wittgenstein is played as a joke in Pynchon's first novel, but its implications extend throughout his fiction: the world of any of his novels is everything that he deems germane. AtD is more sprawling than any previous Pynchon novel (and that's saying something) because it moves about among more stories and "follows" more characters. GR, while more imaginatively sprawling perhaps in that each wild metaphor might at any time take on a life of its own, restricted its main narrative line to Slothrop, with some notable digressions -- Pökler, Mexico, Enzian, Prentice -- that were all tangential to that narrative. In AtD, the narratives of the four Traverse siblings -- Reef, Frank, Lake and Kit -- each takes center stage for a time but also gives way to various "spin-offs" or subplots that can for a time take on as much importance as the main game -- the adventures of Cyprian Latewood, of Dally Rideout, of Lew Basnight, and of the Chums of Chance being the most vivid examples. One of the mentally fatiguing aspects of AtD is just how spread out "the story" chooses to be. V. set the bar with the wide reach of enterprises in which lady V. (or someone like her) was, at least in Stencil's reconstruction, involved. But, again, the reconstruction of V.'s past was, ostensibly, of a single character by a single character.
In AtD, as with M&D, I get the feeling sometimes that TP, having decided to chart an itinerary for his picaresque characters, pursues it sometimes doggedly rather than inspiredly, which means at times sketching in backgrounds in the broad tones of the encyclopedia (not known for really opening up time and place). In M&D the decision to follow closely the duo's actual peregrinations, I felt, reined in TP's imagination too much -- though this is what perhaps makes the novel more accessible to those that find it so. In AtD there isn't so determinate a reason for where characters go (though I think it has to do with a global map that TP laid out and chose to follow) and what they get up to (so long as it involves some type of anarchist shenanigans). Colorado, Venice, the Balkans, and Mexico become the dominant locales, though Chicago, London, New York, Trieste, Geneva, L.A., finally Paris, and hosts of other places move in and out like soundstages in the old Hollywood.
Where we are and what's happening seem at times arbitrary -- also a point often delivered or perceived as a criticism -- an effect that, I would argue, is justified by the narrator's world view which I would describe as Manichaean: the two poles are the utterly random and the fated (i.e., controlled by forces unseen). Because the characters must themselves experience both sides of this pole, their adventures have to be such as to dismantle standard versions of cause and effect, probability, even self-identity. Such crutches must be thrown over by the reader as well and it seems that a deliberative wearing-down of our expectations of sequential and consistent events can only occur in a narrative of sufficient magnitude, like those paintings that only "work" on a colossal scale.
To be continued...
WHY READ PYNCHON
This weekend I read through the final parts of Against the Day and I found myself contemplating -- as one will when reading from page 697 to page 1085 of a book one has somewhat lost the thread of -- what it is that makes Pynchon worth reading. The question comes to mind because books of such size naturally try one's fixed concentration, but also because what happens in Pynchon novels is quite unlike what happens in any other fiction I'm familiar with.
1. Imaginative audacity. There is seemingly no end to the expansion of the tale simply because there is seemingly no end to what Pynchon is willing to imagine. The events that befall his characters are sometimes tied to actual events, sometimes not, but the version of history that Pynchon employs is, first and foremost, the one that is congruent with the world he imagines. And the world he imagines is loony, loopy, absurd, chaotic -- or organized according to a logic that, like the Quaternion mathematics that keep cropping up, is based on alternatives of space and time that, if possible in theoretical physics, are not generally observed to be functional in the biosphere. This means that "the Pynchon universe" is not really "biocentric." It's not about biographical lives which, for the most part, is all that most fiction is able to delineate. Even so-called science fiction rarely (I'm not up on the genre really) attempts to tell its story as though the tiresome creaturely "laws" of our planet are suspended in the narration itself.
2. Cinematic characters. This imaginative departure from the time-bound world we and most of our literary characters exist in means that Pynchon's characters don't function with the same degree of gravitas that most readers of "serious literature" come to expect. It's often said that Pynchon characters are cartoonish -- generally this is said with a certain degree of deprecation, or simply from a wish to be accurate, or as a means to suggest amusement. But one thing that has remained a constant of Pynchon's fiction is that his characters are not so much cartoonish as cinematic. They all live lives that occur in the vast film that is their narrator's imagination. In this film, all the female characters are played by charming starlettes, all the male characters are played by any number of character actors from the great age of cinema (up to the '50s let's say), but they are given to us by a narrator who knows that psychological nuance, in cinema, is simply a trick of the light, or, more interestingly, is a different "reading" or enactment breaking through the initial one. A world rendered in such a way entails a rather different fictional sleight of hand. One could say, somewhat facilely, that Pynchon gives us Warhols, not Rembrandts, with the implication that the nuance of a Rembrandt is only possible before light has been seized and frozen in photography. The patina in Pynchon is old movie patina, and it resonates for all who -- as the voice at the end of GR says "have always been at the movies -- haven't we?"
to be continued...
Sunday, December 17, 2006
TP 'N' ME
When in Mason & Dixon the eponymous duo were shown visiting New Castle, DE, and using the steeple on the church on the Green as a reference point for their calculations, I must admit I was touched: here were Pynchonian protagonists in my hometown! Granted, the loveable surveyors were there well before America became the United States, but so was the town I hail from (well, actually I'm from the suburbs between it and Wilmington). The church of course is still there and the Green and the churchyard played their picturesque part in a senior high school project on the old town. Despite the fact that Pynchon's novel was set so far in the past, I amused myself imagining TP himself visiting my familiar stomping-grounds so as to recreate the place for his protagonists.
In Against the Day, I'm similarly amused by the fact that some of it takes place at and around Yale, but the narrator's remarks on Yale simply echo remarks in Gravity's Rainbow about Harvard: (gee, won't those Cornellians ever stop sniping?), but I admit I was tickled by the following:
All the way out Prospect Street, past the cemetery, the feeling grew that something awful was about to happen.
Since every time I walk or drive home from campus, I go "all the way out Prospect Street" past the Divinity School, which is well past the cemetery, this allowed me for a moment to think of Pynchon taking the same path up Science Hill. The only problem I have with his statement is that the cemetery is right on the edge of the main campus, so to go "all the way out, past the cemetery" is merely to be at the start of Prospect (which is called College Street until Grove, where the cemetery sits). But I grant you that only the cemetery was likely to have been there both in the time of Kit Traverse and now, so it would be hard to pick another landmark. But I'm quibbling. The sentence steps for a moment onto my turf, and that was a pleasure.
" . . . . sometimes, to be sure, he'd caught hints of some Kabbalah or unverbalized knowledge being transferred as if mind to mind, not because of so much as in spite of Yale." I hear you, brother, I hear you . . .
In Against the Day, I'm similarly amused by the fact that some of it takes place at and around Yale, but the narrator's remarks on Yale simply echo remarks in Gravity's Rainbow about Harvard: (gee, won't those Cornellians ever stop sniping?), but I admit I was tickled by the following:
All the way out Prospect Street, past the cemetery, the feeling grew that something awful was about to happen.
Since every time I walk or drive home from campus, I go "all the way out Prospect Street" past the Divinity School, which is well past the cemetery, this allowed me for a moment to think of Pynchon taking the same path up Science Hill. The only problem I have with his statement is that the cemetery is right on the edge of the main campus, so to go "all the way out, past the cemetery" is merely to be at the start of Prospect (which is called College Street until Grove, where the cemetery sits). But I grant you that only the cemetery was likely to have been there both in the time of Kit Traverse and now, so it would be hard to pick another landmark. But I'm quibbling. The sentence steps for a moment onto my turf, and that was a pleasure.
" . . . . sometimes, to be sure, he'd caught hints of some Kabbalah or unverbalized knowledge being transferred as if mind to mind, not because of so much as in spite of Yale." I hear you, brother, I hear you . . .
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