WHERE I'VE BEEN (part two)

8.  The main reason I went into NYC was not to see a vampire movie—it was either that or Žižek—but to stay over and visit the Met with Kajsa, on Sunday, 11/3, to see the Balthus exhibit.  The exhibit struck me as something of an exercise in kitsch.  Not because Balthus’ paintings are kitsch, though some are, but because the Met was doing its level best to both trade on the so-called illicit eroticism of these paintings of underage (for the most part) girls while also striking a high-minded pose that strove to avoid an objectification we might find offensive.  The very title of the exhibit, Girls and Cats—Paintings and Provocations lets us in right away on the come-on quality of the show.  Everyone loves images of putty-cats, apparently, and if you throw in some pre-nubile flesh then we get to be prurient while also not.  It’s art, y'know.  I state this as the “advertised” aspect of the show.  It’s not, in other words, simply a retrospective of Balthus, it’s a show that tries to put his penchant for depicting felines and young females into some kind of “dialogue.”  Meanwhile the wall commentaries apprize us of the name of every young model as if trying to make us see them as real little girls, often including some statement a model made once she was all grown up, as if to say: “see, they weren’t really damaged by having to sit motionless with their underpants showing or their bottoms raised up while reading on the floor.”  Such anti-objectifying is a bit peculiar, inasmuch as there seems to be little attention to what the paintings “say.”  No one, apparently, wants to see little girls simply as images, to allow what qualities of the pre-pubescent female form make it eminently depictable, but at least the show’s curator has arranged the paintings in groups that let us read a progress: the first room is a lyrical treatment, from the girl’s perspective, of the awkward and lithe appeal of her own body, while the second room takes us to something much more corrosive, where vanity about appearance and the flush of hormonal fluctuations make something else of teen-aged girls—children become baby machines.  This in itself is perfectly natural, we know, and yet everything in our culture—and in the stultifying interiors these young girls inhabit—tells us to suppress it.  These are bodies “underage” only because they are kept within the precincts of childhood, by a law of the Father and a complicity of the Mother that must have it that way.  In the third room Balthus is trying on different aspects of sensuality but not doing nearly as well—his skill is fitful—but the final room brings us to his very mannered matching of figure to interior that create images that are almost classical—if not, they are at least monumental.  Seeing so many of his canvases at once though makes one more critical of the painter than one might be seeing one or two in a collection.  Very much my father’s grand-daughter, Kajsa pointed out the painter’s problem with feet/shoes, and it’s really a bit bothersome how such deliberately rendered figures and settings can sport terribly gauche moments of bad draftsmanship.  Looking at these paintings made in the heyday of Picasso and Surrealism and Matisse, we see how the effort to maintain a certain realist fidelity often surrenders any strong painterly interest.  There are some lessons here for the Surrealists, but only fleetingly. I don’t have much to say about the putty-cats.  In the third room, Balthus loses his ability to make them sweetly sensual and was more clearly “King of the Cats” when he was younger. 

9. Speaking of young girls: my read on the train on Sunday, 11/3, was Charles Portis’ True Grit, which I finished when I got home.  The voice of Matty, the grown woman who narrates her adolescent adventure, in the company of Marshall Rooster Cogburn and Texas Ranger LeBoeuf, to find and bring to justice the man who killed her father, keeps before us the singular presence of mind that children can have.  There were two elements of the story in the novel that differed a bit from the film version by the Coens.  One was that the written Matty made me feel her affection for LeBoeuf better than the film does, though that may be simply because I like laughing at the figure Matt Damon cuts in the role.  Matty pokes fun at him in the book as well, but the grudging care and admiration they feel for each other—present in the movie but hard to render without Matty’s choice of words available in every instance—comes out stronger in writing.  The best aspect of the book that the film doesn’t do much with is the degree to which the West Portis presents us with is a territory united with the other states primarily through mutual ridicule and distrust.  Matty is clear about political forces that are altering the world she lives in and she’s clear about the distinct differences between, say, Texas and Arkansas in amusing commentary.  Portis gives us a very American voice in its appraisals of her fellow citizens.  The best thing that both book and film do is make Matty admirable as not simply some kind of “plucky” heroine but as a force of moral reckoning. She intends to be the Avenging Law and has no interest in anything else.  And yet Portis has sport with her because her achievement costs her more than anyone—save the dead of course—and the story, in dragging on beyond its climax, hints that we are finally in a woman’s tall tale of her youthful exploits.  The film surprises us with that sadder view—in showing us a grown Matty—because it made young Matty such a vivid and charming figure. 

10. Wednesday, 11/6, was another trip into NYC, this time to see a matinee on Broadway.  My company on Metro North this time was Thomas Pynchon’s new novel The Bleeding Edge.  It seemed the perfect companion for such a ride, and on a bright, fresh day.  I even read a bit of it in Bryant Park, sitting outside, after I arrived.  Reading on the train, I was chuckling, smiling.  I’m a fan and he knows how to work me.  It has a keen sense of how surface-rich our world is now, without a lot of depth to it, which inspires a lot of jokes.  In fact, TP seems more or less amused these days and aims to be entertaining.  The part that impressed me most, so far, is the description of DeepArcher, the untrollable layers of the internet, that are described in the terms that visionaries used to use for the internet, which has yet to become the virtual reality some could imagine when its technology first became familiar: “the echoing dense commotion of the terminal, the profusion of hexadecimal color shades, the choreography of thousands of extras, each differently drawn and detailed, each intent on a separate mission or sometimes only hanging out, the nonrobotic voices with so much attention to regional origins.”  Yup, you’ll never find online what you can find in a book. 

11. My trip on Wednesday, 11/6, was to see Mike Nichol’s production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, starring the husband-wife team of Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, playing Robert and Emma, a husband and wife in late-seventies Britain; he’s in publishing and his best friend is an editor, Jerry, who, in 1968, began an affair with Emma that lasted till 1975.  We meet them in 1977 and then journey backwards to the party at the home of Robert and Emma—in their bedroom, actually—where Jerry first makes advances on his hostess.  What has always drawn me to this play, since first seeing it as a film with Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons as Robert and Jerry, is the march through time, backwards, and the sense of what having a woman “in common” does for a relationship between friends.

We open with Emma telling Jerry that she and Robert are finally splitting up, that she found out he has been unfaithful to her with various other women.  This comes as a shock to Jerry because he never suspected, even while carrying on an affair for seven or eight years with Robert’s wife.  The fact is, which Jerry also does not suspect, Robert has known about Jerry and Emma since 1973, which Robert tells Jerry in the play’s second scene when Jerry, quite anxiously, runs to Robert to try to salvage their friendship after what he thinks is Emma’s revelation of the affair the evening before.  What those first two scenes establish then is that the marriage of Robert and Emma withstood Emma’s infidelity with Jerry and that Robert still very much values Jerry’s friendship.  What Rachel Weisz brought to the role is a real feeling of loss at the opening, a testing of whether “she and Jerry” meant anything when measured against Robert and Jerry, or her and Robert.  Emma has now lost Robert for good, and she lost Jerry when, in 1975, they broke up the flat that was the scene of their erotic rendezvous but had fallen into sad disuse.  The sorrow in Weisz in that scene is also revealing.  We may not know what she hopes to accomplish—keeping both men in her life happy?—but we see that it costs her to lose whatever hope there was in the affair.  She’s the odd man out in the friendship. Perhaps sleeping with both brought her closer to each man but, if it was her intention to maintain a relationship with either indefinitely, she has failed.  In that first scene, it is let drop that she’s “seeing” a writer named Casey and that there has been gossip about this.  Jerry proudly proclaims that no one gossiped about he and Emma during their affair.  But the upshot is that, perhaps, Emma has found a new paramour.  And yet, as portrayed by Weisz, she doesn’t seem a woman bent upon serial affairs.  She may be in demand (she certainly should be) but we can only guess what is really driving the affairs and the continuation of the marriage—in that decade from ’68 to ’77.  Admittedly, a very particular era, one in which divorce became quite common to say nothing of other ways to work marriage to get around the old “one man and one woman forsaking all others” model.  But the play isn’t called “Affair” or “Marriage,” it’s called Betrayal.

Craig plays the betrayed husband well in those scenes in 1973.  He doesn’t like the way he learned of it; he doesn’t like the doubt about who his son’s father is; he doesn’t like that Jerry doesn’t have the depth to sense what’s wrong on their lunch date.  But does he disapprove of Emma’s choice?  He likes Jerry, genuinely.  He admits at one point that he likes Jerry more than he likes her, so . . .   We might think Pinter’s playing around with the homoeroticism between two close friends, suggesting that, if it were permissible (in their view), they’d become lovers themselves.  Nichols even puts that before us (for a laugh, admittedly) when he has all three on a bed together in 1968 and Jerry seems to want to cozy up to Robert.  But let’s not be hasty. That version of things is rather unsubtle, actually.  If all it were is a case of repressed homosexual attraction, we might tell the two to get on with it.  Then “betrayal” would be the two “betraying” their real feelings.  But it’s not that.  Really, Robert just wants to play squash with Jerry. The point being that these are hetero men and hetero men have their own codes about how close they can get, and what they can get out of that.  One way they can get closer, maybe, is by having the same woman.  This is suggested when, after Jerry visits in 1974, Robert gets amorous with Emma.  He’s turned on by knowing something Jerry doesn’t, who thinks he knows something Robert doesn’t. And he’s turned on that Jerry leaves and he has Emma because, after all, he’s married to her.  If this sort of thing doesn’t interest you, then, I’m afraid, there’s little else here to beguile you.  Along the way, the trio talk books a bit—a factor that, at one time, I would’ve simply felt included by. Now, it seems almost quaint.  Remember when books were a major medium and novels, well, still important?  Possibly you don’t, but Pinter does.

Do we feel bad for anyone here? Emma, in this staging because, finally, she’s out of her depth.  She’s not a man and can’t quite understand them the way they understand each other.  She can love them or not (it’s up to her) but she can’t get closer to how they see things.  She can’t matter to them more than the other things that matter to them.  Today we like to be ultra-aware of sexism, as though it’s a factor of social relations that could be subtracted, thus making things “as they should be.”  Which translates, at some point, to: “without sexual difference.”  Betrayal knows all about the sexual differences of its time; it hails from a time when it was still a man’s world (even book-publishing!) if “with a difference.”  As an old hand of the Seventies myself (do I have to say “product of”?), I find myself amused by seeing it played before me, at this remove.

It’s an interesting lesson about staging plays, after all.  If I read a novel from 1977, I may react as I am now but I don’t have to decide how to present it.  In putting on, in 2013, a seventies artifact, one must decide whether to make it more feminist and LGBT-friendly, or to let it be what it really is, for the sake of something that many would not find sympathy with.  Much hinges on how Jerry is presented.  In Rafe Spalls’ performance, he’s very typical of his type: self-absorbed, likeable, edgy at times; Spalls has a tendency to over-emote that comes to be characteristic of Jerry, as though he’s trying to convince himself that he is feeling things, that he has reasons to be swept up in Emma, that he has reasons to remember throwing the young daughter of Robert and Emma up into the air, that he has reasons to feel “betrayed” when Emma tells Robert.  Does he feel betrayed when Robert tells him he already knew?  Yes, of course, but that means he never knew what Robert knew, which means, finally, that it was Robert’s game from ’73 on.  Robert’s “I hope she took care of you alright” is just what it is: a genuine hope that the woman in it was worth the candle.  Is either man?  Well, both seem to light Emma’s fire when in the mood; neither, it seems, is all that steady in the position, over the years.

The proceedings benefit from stage over screen if only because the scene-shifting creates a definite pace that must be adhered to.  Each vignette has its own point, its own value in the reckoning.  Triangulated desire, we might say, is what we start with, and what we end with is two mates who have come through “all that,” still able to talk books and have a pint or lunch or, yes, play squash. 

12. After the show (Craig and Spalls came out to sign playbills; Weisz didn’t), on Wednesday, 11/6, there was time for me to pop up to MoMA to take in the Magritte show.  It’s a show easy to see quickly (was I there a ½ hour, 45 minutes?) because Magritte’s paintings are almost like one-liners.  You take in the image, you reflect on its suggestion—about illusion or psychological distortion or about logical fallacies, or metaphors literalized—and move on.  Magritte is a painter who, like Balthus, is good enough for rendering a certain “reality,” making his images quite legible, with everything “realistic” enough to be like a dream, where we know it’s not real but are struck by what’s happening nonetheless.  It’s a very good show, laid-out well, and includes some early pieces of his I’ve never seen before, that are interesting in being more concerned with pictorial planes than with imagery per se, and some paintings in private collections that one might otherwise not see, that, anyway, haven’t been reproduced ad infinitum.  Magritte is not a bad painter, he’s just not a very good one.  What he does is fine for commercial art, and so he seems now a progenitor of Pop Art (when artists ceased to be concerned with the quality of painting), but that loss of what made for fine painting was lost on most of the Surrealists too.  In the urge to express ideas, the unique value of oils as a medium was lost, and that lets Magritte make paintings that would be even more effective as photo-shopped images.  Still, he possessed a fertile imagination and there’s something to be said for taking a little detour on your day through someone’s grasp of dream logic and the power of the cryptic image. So what if his sensibility harkens from the time when the female body was still an image for “mystery.” 

13. Friday, 11/8, was a visit to the Shubert in New Haven to see and hear a solo performance by the man who penned the words, “but when she’s lying stretched out on the floor / It’s no mystery to me any more.”  Elvis Costello appeared on stage behind a phalanx of pedals and before a phalanx of guitars, and proceeded to play for over two hours, accompanied by himself only.  There were a few songs on a keyboard as well, notably a stunning delivery of “Shipbuilding.”  He opened the show with “Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head,” a song buried back there on Blood and Chocolate, but which had great punch as an opener: “here comes Mr. Misery…”  It’s not that Costello is miserable, exactly, but that he is able to make great melodies match lyrics that have their share of misery, so that the witty engagement between sentiment and musical setting does much to sell the song.  He took requests, which led to a striking “The Other End of the Telescope,” a song which took me back with some poignancy to when it was new—1996—and lots of riding about listening to music with my daughter on tapes that always had some share of Costello.  It’s a brilliant song.  And he also agreed to perform what he called “a song I hate”: “Everyday I Write the Book.” The popularity of the song (it had a great MTV video with Princess Di and Charles lookalikes, when Di was still very much alive, mind you) took him aback as it wasn’t “what I’m like.”  It’s a very clever lyric and he played it in a slower more soulful version, with the crowd echoing the “everyday”s to produce impromptu back-up vocals.  He also pulled out a few covers, notably “Walking My Baby Back Home” (which he dedicated to his wife), that included some lovely whistling, and was able to surprise me by doing “I Want You,” also from Blood and Chocolate and quite a thing of nasty beauty.  From my favorite LPs of his he didn’t do my favorite tracks, but “Human Hands” was good to hear, as was the conviction he gave to “I’ll Wear It Proudly” (alas, Get Happy! was not represented at all—had I been in earshot and not the balcony, I would’ve called for “Riot Act”), while “Little Triggers” had a lot of bite and, late in the show, a segue into “What’s So Funny ‘bout Peace, Love and Understanding” arrived as one of those “everybody knows this one” moments.  Another pleasant surprise was “Stranger in the House,” and my favorite track on Momofuku, “Flutter and Wow.”  Then there was "Girls Talk" (!) which took me back to 1980 when he had only four LPs and each was a gem, and then came a disk of the stuff that hadn't fit. In short, pretty much all of his career was represented and I’d say there was only one Costello original that I didn’t know.  Sometime I may have to say more about this guy and the long run he had, from 1977 to 1986, with significant sightings after that, to define what matters to me in the contemporary pop song.  And he’s a very affable entertainer as well, his voice—never exactly a pretty instrument—able to register inflections and nuances that make for fascinating listening.  Oh, and he did a new song that was quite good too.

WHATCHA READIN?, 5

9. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (American, 1973)

An English teacher in my high school, who later became a friend and was known for being something of ‘a freak,’ hearing I’d read a bunch of Vonnegut and had recently made it halfway through Ulysses, told me about a crazy book, published a few years before and deemed ‘unreadable’ by the Pulitzer committee, that featured a character who goes down a toilet bowl. He offered it as perhaps the most challenging work of recent fiction.

Not much later, I accepted the challenge. The trip down the toilet didn’t put me off, but I do remember one morning in homeroom reading the infamous Brigadier Pudding shit-eating masochism scene and feeling a bit peculiar in my first few classes that day. I kinda let my reading of the book drift a bit after that, which was spring of 1977. The next time I remember reading the book at length was at the beach in June of 1978. That return was in part inspired by picking up a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in May of ‘78 (see 'Whatcha Readin? 6'). But even then I didn’t get through GR.

It wasn’t until September 1980 that I finally got through the final third of the book: the end of 'In the Zone' and 'The Counterforce,' and it was then, living in Philadelphia, that I got to know other readers of the book. And every time I crossed paths with someone who had “been there,” who could recall some improbable, baffling, hilarious, inspired, mind-expanding scene in Gravity’s Rainbow, there was a starry-eyed high, a contagious elation. Yes, it’s true, it’s really there because someone else has read it too!

Given my feelings about literature as a field of study (as expressed via Rimbaud in 'Whatcha Readin? 4'), I must’ve needed to find a living literary hero I could believe in. And Pynchon, in his weirdly insular refusal to be a public person, to be, basically, unseen and unheard of since sending a comedian to accept the National Book award for him in 1974, was the ideal figure. In addition to Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, a book I was in love with in those closing months of high school was Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971). The deregulation of the senses, capiche? Pynchon’s novel, like nothing else I’d ever seen, felt like the wild imaginings of someone completely outside or beyond the rational norms, the parameters of conventional thought -- whether of history or of narrative or of literature or of myth. The book was paranoid and psychotic, but absurdly so, pushed to the point of clairvoyant vision, or to where that vision must break down before the unprincipled rationales by which the world is run and governed.

Pynchon wasn’t a person. I couldn’t care less about what the guy who perpetrated this did with his days and nights or how he had gotten this incredible thing produced and published. Pynchon was prose, or, even more, 'Pynchon' was the name given to what was going on in my mind while reading this prose. Then I read his previous two novels and saw something else: it’s not 'Pynchon,' because that author has written two other books that, no matter their merits, don’t do what GR does. So, it was the narrator of GR, that unique and unrepeatable performance itself, that was the mainline. And the only place to find that was in GR.

Thus began a love affair that lasted for another four years, or until Slow Learner’s Intro (1984) introduced a guy named Thomas Pynchon who was a writer and who had the proprietary rights to GR (even though he said nothing about that book in the SL intro). And this Pynchon was going to go on with his career, write blurbs and reviews and produce more novels. Fine. But that guy isn’t the narrator of GR. To be a fan of GR was like, oh pick your own example, being a fan of Blonde on Blonde and having someone put one of Dylan’s ‘80s albums on... or of 'You Never Give Me Your Money' and someone puts on 'Silly Love Songs.' Or Kind of Blue, Miles with Coltrane, and now you’re hearing Miles with Chick Corea. There’s a wide difference, not just a difference in the perpetrator of these things, but in the times themselves, in what was possible or imaginable.

It’s here, perhaps, that the point of this exercise of '15 Books That Stayed With You' becomes clearest to me. Because Pynchon is the first person on this list who still has an ongoing career, and so he becomes the best example for how definitive it is, that moment in which a book finds you -- in your own life (I’m insisting on pre-30) -- and in its life. GR found me in the first decade after its publication when it simply made every other work of fiction published in that period feel like an also-ran, written by someone who had largely missed the point of what the decade previous to its publication -- from the assassination of JFK to the impeachment of Nixon essentially -- was 'like.'

Pynchon got it, and he translated that feel into a vast cinematic retrospect on the era --World War II -- he was a child in, and which we all, post-WWII brats, grew up teething on. In other words, it was as timely and as necessary, to my conception of things, as any work of fiction could be. It has been hard for me to imagine ever since how any mere novel could beat its time.

JUST ANOTHER BAND FROM L.A.?

As I went out one morning a few weeks ago, there was a package at my door. It contained Inherent Vice, the new Thomas Pynchon novel due in stores next Tuesday. The book came my way because I sought the opportunity to review it soon after hearing, not that long ago, that a new Pynchon novel was scheduled for release this summer. As followers of Pynchon no doubt know, his previous novel appeared in November 2006, less than three years ago. Sure, there was only three years between his first novel V. (1963) and his shortest novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), but it’s been some time since any Pynchon opus was followed so quickly by a new work. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) was seven years after Lot 49, and then there was no new work until a funny, friendly intro to his old short stories, ten years after his National Book Award in 1974. Finally, in 1990, Vineland, a new novel appeared, seventeen years after GR. Then, a mere seven years later, the massive Mason & Dixon in 1997. Almost another decade would pass before Against the Day, formidable at over 1,000 pages, arrived. So, by any estimation, the new novel, at 369 pages, is a quick turn-around for the Reclusive One.

It should be noted too, going in, that TP’s short novels are set in California, predominantly. Lot 49, Vineland, and now Inherent Vice. We can think 'California trilogy' if we’re so inclined. And I must add that I’m both inclined and not inclined. I’m inclined because, yes, all three, besides taking CA as their location, also all take a certain 'California State of Mind' as their main theme. When the smoke clears -- and need I tell you what kind of smoke it is? -- what the three novels share is TP’s penchant for both basking in and gently needling the predominant culture of California in the era from the mid-sixties to the early seventies. Indeed, Lot 49 was set only a few years before the year of its publication, lending it an immediacy of setting not common in Pynchon’s works. Vineland, set in 1984, looked back both at the era of Reagan’s re-election and of Nixon’s first term and suggested that, bummer-wise, they had a lot in common, though the Reagan years were worse due to all the ‘karmic adjustments’ that had to be made because of how the Sixties went down. Now, we’re back in Nixonland again, summer of 1970, a year after the Manson murders, about to go to trial, a recurring reference point à la Joan Didion’s take on the Californian ramifications of that event in her essay 'The White Album.'

Why I’m not inclined? No particular reason, I suppose, other than a certain Imp of the Perverse which makes me want to read each of the three CA novels more in terms of what they mean in their particular moments rather than what they mean yoked together as a connect-the-dots of California culture as presented by everyone’s favorite Paranoid Author. In other words, each of the three CA novels feels to me motivated by a completely different ‘trip.’ In Lot 49, the novel is ahead of the curve, satirizing aspects of the day -- who can forget DJ Mucho Maas explaining the effects of LSD -- that hadn’t quite become common currency in 1966, to say nothing of its glance at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as something simply in the air, though major protests at non-Californian universities were yet to come.

In Vineland, the task was to remind all those who might like to bury their memories of those days, as they rode whatever conservative and generally more lucrative bandwagon through the soulless hype of the Reagan years. But it should be said that the narrative voice of Vineland was more complex than many of its initial reviewers gave it credit for. It wasn’t simply a ‘nostalgia’ trip in which TP, suffering from Tubal Addiction and jonesing for the heady days of tie-dye and patchouli, tried to reignite synapses long grown dormant. The attitude was wiser, sympathetic, but ultimately skeptical, though not snide. A bit like Frank Zappa’s attitude to hippiedom in its heyday, but more affectionate toward those ‘hungry freaks, daddy.’

Then too, both Lot 49 and Vineland treat different aspects of CA: for Lot 49 it’s the area around SF with forays to the fictional San Narciso, closer to L.A. For Vineland, it’s northern CA, Humboldt County, in 1984, with the College of the Surf shenanigans of the Sixties set between San Diego and San Clemente. And this time, in Inherent Vice, it’s L.A. all the way. The prose, enacted through the viewpoint of a Private Eye named Doc Sportello, reads like Raymond Chandler meets Hunter Thompson, and each finds the other simpatico: ‘hard-boiled’ becomes ‘head-fried.’ But one senses the book had to get into print fast, while the ‘groovy vibes’ of Obama-mania are still in the popular consciousness, and that whole Ding-Dong-The-Witch-Is-Dead thing might support cranking back into a simpler time and place where Chinatown’s Jay Gittes and Easy Rider’s Billy are, like, one.

I haven't finished reading it yet, but it’s easily TP’s lightest novel, his most simply entertaining. It might even become one of his most popular if its target audience can stop watching Nick at Nite broadcasts of the TV shows of the era and/or replays of The Big Lebowski long enough to get on board. And I wish we all could be California PIs ...

MARK, READER, MY CRY

Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,
And in midst of prosperity, know thou may'st die.
--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

That passage, which appears on a tombstone in a Massachusetts graveyard in Pynchon's novel, came to mind whilst reading Philip Roth's novella Everyman (2006). The story of an aging man's perennial illnesses, unfolding after the initial scene of his burial, could be considered a downer, but, as ever with Roth, there's always something more. The pay-off, for me, is in how "every day" Everyman is: it could be anyone's story, given the Jewish New Jersey antecedents that are, as it were, the door by which most Roth characters enter the world. But because that local reality is reasonably clear to me to begin with -- as opposed, say, to Norwegians in Minnesota or Hispanics in California or Koreans in Illinois -- his books always seem familiar territory and, what's more, given how Jewish is New York intellectual life (if you came up in the '60s), there's always an enduring weight in the encounter with Roth. That fact might be what made me skeptical, no matter how much I admire the books themselves, of American Pastoral's Swede and The Human Stain's half-black passing for white. It's not that Roth can't "do" anything but Jewish, it's just that the baggage of that ethnicity in East Coast America is what he's saddled with and we expect him to heft it.

Which is all by way of saying that Everyman is not quite "everyman" if we meet that phrase with some sense of demographic ubiquity. Which is why, I think, the Pynchon lines are apropos: the real meaning behind the title is not that Roth's nameless everyman is an "everyman," so much that what befalls him will befall, mutatis mutandis, everyman. The book is a meditation on coming to the end of things. As the narrator observes at one point, as "everyman" watches his contemporaries succumb to death: "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre."

So here's a passage that more or less sums up the main character's predicament. A point that, should we live long enough, we'll all get to:

"Even in his twenties, when he'd thought of himself as square, and on into his fifties, he'd had all the attention from women he could have wanted; from the time he entered art school it never stopped. It seemed as though he were destined for nothing else. But then something unforeseen happened, unforeseen and unpredictable: he had lived close to three quarters of a century, and the productive, active way of life was gone. He neither possessed the productive man's male allure nor was capable of germinating the masculine joys, and he tried not to long for them too much. On his own he had felt for a while that the missing component would somehow return to make him inviolable once again and reaffirm his mastery, that the entitlement mistakenly severed would be restored and he could resume where he'd left off only a few years before. But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was -- the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know."

Granted, this is definitely a prospect for everyman. And that too is as it should be, for Roth has ever been one to ruminate on those "masculine joys" and so, when those are gone, he's not likely to be one to offer the consolations of philosophy or religion -- his everyman does try to paint in old age, as he always wanted to but life got in the way, and though some are appreciative of his efforts, he himself realizes that the reason he didn't become an artist is that he isn't one. So, strike another consolation.

What then are the kind of joys that remain? Memory, mostly. But not of women, by and large, because the "serial husband" has too many regrets where those are concerned. And family, which he truly took joy in, becomes the parents already dead and the beloved older brother he allowed himself to envy, thus poisoning the relationship, on his side. His daughter is the one joy of his life, but even there the love is mainly pained by his worry for her, and by his guilt over the break with her mother. Even if it's not quite true that "hell is other people," it's certainly not true that heaven is. So, here's a glimpse of the masculine joy that stays with him:

"...it was still his beach and at the center of the circles in which his mind revolved when he remembered the best of boyhood. But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood? What about enjoying the best of old age? Or was the best of old age just that -- the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverized seashells at the edge of the shore and he hustled to his feet and hurriedly turned and went lurching through the low surf until it was knee high and deep enough for him to plunge in and begin swimming madly out to the rising breakers -- into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future -- and, if he was lucky, make it there in time to catch the next big wave and then the next and the next and the next until from the low slant of inland sunlight glittering across the water he knew it was time to go."

Here is not only a very real sense that "the best of boyhood" is when one had it best, but also the sense that having been there -- wherever "there" is for each of us -- is what matters most when we're insufferably tired of being here. The regrets of Roth's everyman aren't for a life unlived, but rather are grimmer: regardless of how one lives, the body has its own story to tell, so Roth presents us two brothers, one, the elder, is nothing but healthy, wealthy, and kind; the other, our everyman, has a body that constantly needs medical interventions to keep going. So that the existential power of the book is in that simple fact: as Hopkins phrases it, "it is the blight man was born for." The dimming of the powers, the loss of any joy in what the body is and does. Not uplifting, but to sum up the end of a life with such concision, that takes bekies.

BIG BOOKS, FEW BLOGS

It seems that undertaking to read rather lengthy books -- David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day -- serves to cut-down on my interest in day-to-day occasions for commentary. If it weren't for my idea of cataloguing albums of four different years month by month I'd have nothing to write about. This situation is exacerbated by a recently begun "book" (ok, so far it's more like a 1/4 of a chapter) on TP's output that, if I manage to stay on point, could be the project to overcome my critical-academic writing block. Too soon to tell.

I'm halfway through Infinite Jest and, since I'm also reading TP and thinking about his work and writing about V., a point of comparison with Pynchon occurs to me. Pynchon is a nerd who, thanks to the '60s and drugs and cool friends like Richard Fariña and living in Mexico, etc., became cool -- of course, the child being father to the man, much of his nerdiness remained in play, but it got channeled into this incredible prose writer. Kind of like Proust -- sure, he was a dilettante and a dandy and a neurotic but somehow he managed to put those qualities, generally drawbacks, at the service of fascinating prose and the story of how a dilettante became the great novelist of the era.

I'm less convinced that DFW has converted his nerdiness into the stuff of greatness. The guy is a nerd with a vengeance. From now on when I hear the phrase "Revenge of the Nerds" I'm going to think of David Foster Wallace. Particularly as they say that writing well is the best revenge. There's segment after segment (and the novel is really a collection of segments) that reads to me like revenge-via-verbiage.

DFW's a cool nerd, but that doesn't help. He reminds me of guys I knew in HS who would get stoned and do calculus problems. The nerdiness is only intensified by the substances. What this means in effect is that there's no process of selection and discernment going on. His sense of detail reminds me of a scene in Wonder Boys where a student tries to caution her teacher, a respected writer, about his endless opus, mentioning how the characters' dental records and the horses' genealogies might be overdoing it. I think DFW was the model for that aspect of the character.

The point of Infinite Jest seems to be to go on ad infinitum. If a scene can last for 5 pages, why not let it last for 10? Why not footnote every drug reference with complete pharmacological details? Why not obsess about competitive tennis in every possible permutation of nerdy obsessed athlete psychology? Oh, so that might be a bit elitist? I mean, how relevant do we find competitive tennis? So let's find something more accessible. What about AA meetings? Let's render the varieties of substance abuse in all their variegated detail ... and then return to it again. Then more tennis. Then more recovering addicts. Ever wonder how many kinds of physical disfigurement there are? Betcha I can use them all in a paragraph, or six.

And then there's the anal retentive complexity of the sentences and vocabulary, usually an end in itself, but occasionally a cop-out, as when a new AA recruit delivers an appalling tale of how she delivered a stillborn partial child while smoking crack. Well, that tale might be unbearable if she were allowed to tell it herself, so our narrator chooses to render it in his usual zonked-out but oh so articulate and hyper-verbal manner, so instead of an instant of abyss-like bathos and pathos (which we're told it was for all her listeners) it becomes a kind of voyeuristic "take" on human misery and stupidity, a bit too calculated in its effects. When Pynchon does this sort of thing, it quickly moves toward camp, sometimes chilling camp, but, though I detect some camp here, what comes across more tellingly in DFW's performance is the dressing-up for literary effect.

What DFW is incredibly good at is rendering what I can only call the "processed speak" of our time. The way information access permits everyone to speak like walking 'droids with media-ized prose instantly beamed into their brains. And the relentless language of diagnosis -- whether physical, mental, political, economic, you name it -- as the means by which we understand that we don't understand what's wrong. He can also render demotic speech remarkably well, when he chooses to. And he's also got down that flinty mastery of the non sequiturs of conversation -- especially deliberate non sequiturs between people who are dodging each other as in two brothers, Orin and Hal, on the phone -- that I associate with DeLillo. DFW, though, is rarely as funny (to me) as DeLillo and forget even getting close to TP.

TP tests limits too, but they're imaginative limits. In Pynchon, the detail with which unbelievable or highly fanciful things happen is unparalleled. And the tendency to make a literal fact become a metaphor or to let a metaphor take on a life of its own can make TP frustrating for those who want to know what's "really" happening, but otherwise you can just go along for the wild ride. DFW's imagination, having set up the basic scenario of the world of his novel, seems to be bent on simply replicating endless riffs on that scenario. I've read about 520 pages and I can't say the story is going forward, nor that any of the characters will surprise me. If there is a story unfolding (occasionally we're teased with the notion of one, sorta), it's seemingly more important to impede it with more segments than it is to tell it.

Remember in Ulysses when Bloom goes to the sink and turns the tap and the question is posed, Did it flow? And the answer gives us the specifics on where the water comes from. Or when the question is posed, what did Bloom, water-lover, admire about water? And the answer takes over a page of dense prose to render all the loveable qualities of water. That's what huge sections of this novel read like. Though rarely do I find myself admiring the prose the way I love the sound of that water passage in Joyce.

Oh well. As Beckett always sez: I can't go on I'll go on.

CATALOGUES

Daily Themes this week was about catalogues. A fun week because I tend to like the use of catalgoues, like Homer's list of who shipped out for Troy, or JJ's list of who was present at the hanging in Ulysses, or like the one I've copied in here: TP's account of the desktop of one Lt. Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow. Students had to use models like Harper's index to give numerical data about themselves, to describe contents of a room or a bag, to narrate using a catalogue of actions, and to list a regimen or instructions of some kind. It's an unpredictable week but it's a good week for a) lists, b) looking at stuff, c) thinking about steps or sequences in a procedure.

"Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland" ("He does have some rather snappy arrangements," Tantivy reports, "he's a sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing," but Bloat's decided he'd rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of the Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl . . . a few Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall -- a dictionary of technical German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan -- and, usually, unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too -- Slothrop's a faithful reader."--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

In subsequent weeks there's an assignment asking students to try to write as long a sentence as possible. This is a good example for that week too. For my catalogue of my own desk top, see my blog entry for Nov. 15, 2006.

WHY READ PYNCHON, 4

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)

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.

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...

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...