version's Thomas Pynchon masterclass
- Thread starter Mr. Tea
- Start date
IdleRich
IdleRich
Sure I'm not disputing that Kafka might have liked Dickens, but there is obviously a difference between liking something and even attempting to imitate something - and there actually being a visible influence in the work. I've never read Bleak House (despite my moaning earlier) but I've a fair few Dickens, and, I think, all of Kafka's fiction and I don't see any link whatsoever. Interesting to read that above though, don't get me wrong. It's late, maybe I'll read it again tomorrow and try and understand it.
As an aside, my friend is a solicitor and he (I forget the details) either went for an interview, or even worked at, a partnership that proudly advertised itself as being the one that had inspired Dickens to create Jarndyce vs Jarndyce - not really something to be proud of you'd have thought.
As an aside, my friend is a solicitor and he (I forget the details) either went for an interview, or even worked at, a partnership that proudly advertised itself as being the one that had inspired Dickens to create Jarndyce vs Jarndyce - not really something to be proud of you'd have thought.
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linebaugh
Well-known member
Just finished a reread of the crying of lot 49. If it wasn't so short Id put it right up there with GR, hard to believe I was so non plussed the first time. Some stray thoughts:
Chapter 5 (Oedipa gets drunk, wanders San Fransisco and ends with a psychotic Dr. Hilarious) was as good as anything Pynchon has ever put to paper. Also felt like a trial run for the toilet scene in GR.
Seems the book makes careful attempts to hint at Frued, Jung, and Lacan, in that order, corresponding with the begging, middle and end of the book. I don't know how Jung fits in here, but if Freud was the start of the psychoanalytic practice that looks only inward for diagnosis, the family unit with no consideration for ideological constructs, then Lacan's mirror stage (in part how Pynchon alludes to Lacan) works handily as a metaphor for the society that Pynchon is describing, one where individuals can only interpret the world through the image of the self (....echo courts, San Narciso). We also know Lacan was a big part of Bleeding Edge.
Think paranoia is handled in way not present in his other works, or at least not in a way I've picked up on. Here its that an increasingly homogenized population is as cause for the paranoia as an over load of information. Its the tendency for doubles, repetition and imitation and the corresponding coincidences that suggest the sinister master plan. Its paranoia by way of the banal. In this way C49 is styled as much like Updike as it is Burroughs. This is Pynchon's lampoon on the white picket fence.
He really shows his cards in the final pages. Practically says that its the unchecked privatization of everything that's at the heart of the problem. Inherent Vice is the only other book that summarizes itself so neatly in conclusion. And stylistically, might be P's slickest ending, thought it was fantastic. By revealing the double meaning of 'cries' right before the auctioneer climbs on stage, P throws the scene into triangular symmetry with the 'DT' and Maxwell's Demon passages from earlier. Putting that together as the auctioneer assumes the position on stage is like discovering the identity of the killer just before he plunges the knife in your back. The novel has a subtle apocalyptic tone and the ending caps that off accordingly with just the slightest peak behind the curtain.
Whats up with the rarely mentioned, but often enough and too obtuse to be accidental, pedophilia theme? Maybe its mentioned before, but its made explicit in the back half of the novel: Nefastis had been watching on his TV set a bunch of kids dancing some kind of a Watusi. "I like to watch young stuff," he explained. "There's something about a little chick that age."/ "So does my husband," she said. "I understand." This exchange comes out of nowhere and is immediately moved on from; in a book that dwells on everything this reads like a conspicuous little flag from the author. It comes up again a few times after the fact, most notabley when Metzger runs off with that 15 year old. Think its an American Beauty/Lolita thing- the book riffing on the archetypal 50's America, and the sad 1950's man becoming infatuated with a pre teen is an archetype itself. I know nothing about why this is though.
GR-C49-Inherent Vice-V-Against the Day-Bleeding Edge is my rank, but the last three you could call a tie. Still need to read Vineland and Mason and Dixon. And probably need to reread AtD, fantastic stretches in that book but it lost me at a point.
Chapter 5 (Oedipa gets drunk, wanders San Fransisco and ends with a psychotic Dr. Hilarious) was as good as anything Pynchon has ever put to paper. Also felt like a trial run for the toilet scene in GR.
Seems the book makes careful attempts to hint at Frued, Jung, and Lacan, in that order, corresponding with the begging, middle and end of the book. I don't know how Jung fits in here, but if Freud was the start of the psychoanalytic practice that looks only inward for diagnosis, the family unit with no consideration for ideological constructs, then Lacan's mirror stage (in part how Pynchon alludes to Lacan) works handily as a metaphor for the society that Pynchon is describing, one where individuals can only interpret the world through the image of the self (....echo courts, San Narciso). We also know Lacan was a big part of Bleeding Edge.
Think paranoia is handled in way not present in his other works, or at least not in a way I've picked up on. Here its that an increasingly homogenized population is as cause for the paranoia as an over load of information. Its the tendency for doubles, repetition and imitation and the corresponding coincidences that suggest the sinister master plan. Its paranoia by way of the banal. In this way C49 is styled as much like Updike as it is Burroughs. This is Pynchon's lampoon on the white picket fence.
He really shows his cards in the final pages. Practically says that its the unchecked privatization of everything that's at the heart of the problem. Inherent Vice is the only other book that summarizes itself so neatly in conclusion. And stylistically, might be P's slickest ending, thought it was fantastic. By revealing the double meaning of 'cries' right before the auctioneer climbs on stage, P throws the scene into triangular symmetry with the 'DT' and Maxwell's Demon passages from earlier. Putting that together as the auctioneer assumes the position on stage is like discovering the identity of the killer just before he plunges the knife in your back. The novel has a subtle apocalyptic tone and the ending caps that off accordingly with just the slightest peak behind the curtain.
Whats up with the rarely mentioned, but often enough and too obtuse to be accidental, pedophilia theme? Maybe its mentioned before, but its made explicit in the back half of the novel: Nefastis had been watching on his TV set a bunch of kids dancing some kind of a Watusi. "I like to watch young stuff," he explained. "There's something about a little chick that age."/ "So does my husband," she said. "I understand." This exchange comes out of nowhere and is immediately moved on from; in a book that dwells on everything this reads like a conspicuous little flag from the author. It comes up again a few times after the fact, most notabley when Metzger runs off with that 15 year old. Think its an American Beauty/Lolita thing- the book riffing on the archetypal 50's America, and the sad 1950's man becoming infatuated with a pre teen is an archetype itself. I know nothing about why this is though.
GR-C49-Inherent Vice-V-Against the Day-Bleeding Edge is my rank, but the last three you could call a tie. Still need to read Vineland and Mason and Dixon. And probably need to reread AtD, fantastic stretches in that book but it lost me at a point.
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Not just paedo but incestuous, if I remember right - the German rocket engineer who shags his own daughter (or, perhaps, a girl he's been led to believe is his own daughter).
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Klaus Kinkski, more like!!!
linebaugh
Well-known member
Please fuck me up with the good C49 articles before you go
version
Well-known member
The Four Machines of Yoyodyne
Perception of thyself, the knowledge of him who created thee, the sense of the worship thou owest unto him, are not these plain befor...
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version
Well-known member
Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>
On the surface, The Crying of Lot 49 is so much a novel about Oedipa Maas, her life, her loves, her thoughts, that it hardly qualifies as what Irving Howe would describe as a political novel. Yet while this miniature masterpiece is not a manifesto or a call to arms, some critics see reading it...
pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org