Welcome to Week 13, Part 4, and the start of the last big push. I’m still a little bit behind my own self, chasing after the march, coverless copy flapping in my left hand. But I read 50 pages in the last two days and now my head, it’s swirling with Deathmarch.
Early on I read someone somewhere saying that one of the special things about this book and Pynchon in general is the way he wows you on virtually every page. Over and over and over again. And I continue to find that to be true and baffling.
For example: “‘Say, there.’ It appears to be a very large white Finger, addressing him. Its Fingernail is beautifully manicured: as it rotates for him, it slowly reveals a Fingerprint that might as well be an aerial view of the City Dactylic, that city of the future where every soul is known, and there is noplace to hide. Right now, joints moving with soft, hydraulic sounds, the Finger is calling Tchitcherine’s attention to–”
It’s those big, juicy ropes of taffy that keep pulling me through. That taffy and all of youse leading the way. So here we go, just three (3!) weeks left. By my insta-math, it’s looking like 10-12 people will make it all the way through to the other side. Perhaps right before we finish, we’ll take two hours and walk around the island making totems to all the fallen, like they do on Survivor. “This circle represents a donut for Jeff. He always wanted a donut.”
Next week: It’s a hike up to the peak of “Mount Page 663 (p/v)”. Let’s meet at the cafeteria. I’m told “there are things to hold on to. . . .”
Some people seemingly fallen may just be battered and bruised. It will make the heroic charge at the end that much more impressive and rewarding. I still can’t get that bannana out of my head.
After coming through the Zone I feel like I feel at the end of some backpacking trips: a strong sense of satisfaction blurred by a stronger sense of exhaustion. Several strong cocktails and about 18 hours of sleep usually help, I may just try that today.
Whoa! As I started marching towards the next hill, it seemed as if I was just waking up in an auditorium, listening to my professors voice recounting the last? adventures of Slothrop & co. I felt a smack of history 101 and started wondering…are we going to be tested on this?
The conspiracies are laid out too plainly for my taste. And just when we think the conspirators only lie upon this side of the wall of death, we see that there is no escape, even in the other world. But there is still no God, no Devil, no Theistic beings, only poorly defined force & counterforce. And I guess these so far pointless mentions of the preterite state. But what is he saying—life isn’t fair? I love the writing, and am mightily impressed by the labor of creating this book, but I think I’m not impressed by what he has to say underneath it all. On the other hand, there are still a few more weeks to go. Maybe the climax is still to come. . . .
finished the zone this morning. been back to loving the book during the last stretch. Especially dug the Lyle Bland sequence, all the pigness, and most recently our brief trip to dogtown. Reserving judgment till the end re how it stands up as a Great Work of Art. But I’m ready to declare it a great work of pop art now. And a great whetstone for brain sharpening.
A few misc. thoughts:
* amazing to me how little we’ve learned about how Slothrop looks. I mean, we’ve gotten little details here and there when they suit. The kids in pigville think he’s big enough for the part. That sorta thing. And mebbe there was some description early on that I’m forgetting. But it’s an interesting trick, to get this far without much time spent on describing the protagonist. Makes it that much easier to have him be such a multi-purpose piece.
* I’ve also been struck for a while now by the relative scarcity of direct mentions of the holocaust. It’s got to be a conscious choice — to set a big chunk of the book in post WWII Germany, to make genocide one of the repeating themes, and then to have the holocaust be just a parenthetical whisper here and there. It feels to me like as a result, he’s found a way to come at the holocaust from numerous implied angles rather than one frontal assault. Just a really interesting artistic choice.
* all these silly names, which I continue to love — this may have already been discussed and I missed it? but it occured to me today that there’s a practical side to this too, besides the sheer fun factor. If yer gonna have 100 characters and you want the reader to have some chance of following along, you can’t really go ahead and call them all Larry now can you? Now Waxy Blodgett. There’s a name I can hold in my brain for 750 pages.
* the original pratfall, Teddy Bloat slipping just so into place back on page 5 (p/v) is sort of a heads-up for how the book runs. Like a Jackie Chan movie — orchestrated chaos where part of the fun is how convenient everything sort of explodes into position, how obvious it is that it’s all one big movie set with everything on strings. Hey, where’d these chilli peppers come from? Guess I’d better eat them and yes, spit them into the eyes of mine enemy. I’m just saying, at points this feels like the Project, Part II, of great American novels. And I mean that as high praise.
* lastly, some of these latest hints re an opposing force that’s been moving things around, couldn’t help but wonder if the opposing force’s first name might be Tom.
hey, i was so busy this week with my other homework from cecil, i didn’t have time to read. he’s a real task master. i’ll catch up, really, promise, honest
cecil’s list, plus eddie “the thought” (and his shivers and his scissors) and byron the bulb–the immortal knowing enough to know his powerlessness, and perversely enjoying the frustration of it. story in story in story…beautifully told.
Pinballs from outer space, Masonic cartels, Lyle Bland’s Asssumption—great stuff. Byron the Bulb—incandescent (the whole damn novel in miniature). So much in this book dazzles, for reasons C.V. and e. and Raptor Mage and Cap’n Marsup. inter alia describe so well. It’s like a Bach cantata played on a kazoo—intricate, funny, ambitious and (pace Cecil) “pop” all at the same time. So why have the last few installments felt like a school reading assignment? Why the diminishing point of return (at least for me) on the pleasure?
I’m hard-pressed to explain this to myself because Pychon is doing exactly what you often find in the best art—using the novel’s form to replicate its content. This is a book at one level about information: how static resolves into signs, then data, then pattern, then Enlightenment. Or fails to. Consequently, the reading experience seems designed to keep you constantly “on the edges of revelations,” as P. says of Tchitcherine, with things always just *about* to make sense. Because the real heroes in the novel aren’t the Lyle Blands, the Enlightened ones, but the preterites—folks with just a piece of the picture like Enzian, Slothrop, Katje, Mexico, Prentice, Tchitcherine. So Pynchon makes us preterite too. He keeps hinting at a point in the distance where the plot (in the sense of both ‘story’ and ‘conspiracy’) might finally reveal itself. When it doesn’t, however clever the writing, I’m left feeling betrayed by the ‘They’—the Blands, Pointsmans, and finally Pynchon himself—for holding back key information. I feel like a pawn in the author’s intricate private game. Is that meant to open my eyes to the pawn-like role I play in the world outside the book? Maybe. But like Cap’n M, I’m not sure my world looks enough like Pynchon’s to justify living inside his literary strip tease for this long. Or am I being too earnest and square about a book where lightbulbs end up in unmentionable orifices?
Am I too late for the gratuitous coffee mug posting?
Since I keep comparing Pynchon to every other artist and art form under the sun, I’ll say: not Bach on a kazoo, but rather Schoenberg played by a cornet, tympani, a string quartet, and a brace of harps (in other words, anything but a piano). I had thought of Schoenberg when we started and again when Webern’s death was name-dropped, but God, until this evening it had been years since I really reminisced about the fits that Schoenberg gave me; it’s the same thing with GR: too many themes for the ear to tolerate, but far too much brilliance in each to allow myself to stop listening.
Sitting in a drawing room with someone playing Schoenberg was to experience duality as more than an abstract or dictionary entry. I suppose now that I will have to have someone read a couple of choice pages of GR out loud to me (Krispy Kremes optional), to see whether it rings the same schizoid chords in my frontal lobe.
[…]
For the Ultimate Encapsulation of Pynchon, I bow to rodney k’s “things always just *about* to make sense.” (And yes, k, you’re being too earnest and square.)
that rib wrote:
“Am I too late for the gratuitous coffee mug posting?”
answer: no worries young goodman rib, you’re right on time.
It’s technically Tuesday while writing this. Just a coupla quick thoughts. Cece, you’re right about the holocaust. I was just realizing. We have radicals in Camp Dora, and soon we see (kinda) the gays. But where are the Jews? Are they immediately saved, and thus above our frame of reference? That seems more graceful than having them in with the other poor bastards.
Second thought, there’s always the old saw about any book being more about it’s time than the time in which it’s set. TP seems to be setting up the Counterforce that will one day become the Counterculture. Nixon sez What? We have the sad luxury of looking back at the late 60s summer of love and seeing it ground back under by Them. Did TP believe on some level that the Counterforce would change the world? I compare the Pynchon who wrote of the alt.postal system in Crying of Lot 49 and the one who wrote of the Reagan 80s in Vineland.
I’m not sure what will eventually happen to Slothy, since he’s doesn’t seem destined to make it onto a rocket. If he continues to dance naked with his harmonica he might grow up to become R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural.
http://www.crumbmuseum.com/natural.html
Did someone say donut? Remember how Mugsey used to smack Satch with his hat? Feel free…