The Fuss About Pynchon

Great summary of Pynchons work!

Comment by basileios from Athens — November 21, 2006 @ 5:11 am

I agree with basileios, a good overview. I also appreciate the modicum of rehabilitation of Vineland, which is indeed Pynchon’s most underrated book. Reading Carvill’s recap of it I found myself asking: “Is there anything about what Pynchon said in it that isn’t true?” It uses the ostensible artifice of fiction to relay some important brute facts about America. The fact that the lit-crit crowd had their pomposity exposed by the book’s meditations on the arcana of pop culture is a sure sign that most of them wouldn’t know genuine art if it bit them on the ass. Turn the clock back a few decades and they’d be panning On the Road for being “typing not writing.” Vineland is yang to Gravity’s Rainbow’s yin. Sunny jelly-headed California vs. the Sturm und Drang seriousness of Old Europe. And in the same way that yin and yang subdivide into further yin and yang, the “happy consciousness” of flower power morphs into it’s parody in That 70s Show and restoration of absolutism that was to come. Vineland is all the more brilliant for its brevity. Those, then, who see Mason & Dixon as a “retour a l’ordre” in the Pynchon corpus again don’t get what great art is about--that it demands you adapt yourself to it rather than submitting itself to your egocentric notions of aesthetic contemplation or pandering to your expectations. I have to admit being a little let down by Mason & Dixon in part because of the marketing of it as a “genuine Pynchon.” The type was set purposely big with a lot of leading on thick paper to make it a weighty tome that announced its importance before the spine was ever cracked. On the other hand, I’ve only read it once and it took me three trips through Gravity’s Rainbow over a period of some two decades before its brilliance really started sinking in. Carvill says relatively little about The Crying of Lot 49, which again has the status of the apocryphal within the hermeneutics of Pynchonalia. There are something interesting things about it, but its lower ranking on the totem pole seems more reasonable than that commonly assigned to Vineland.

Comment by vince carducci from Motown — November 22, 2006 @ 1:23 pm