The Crying of Lot 49

I'm reading this nasty little Pynchon book, and can't decide whether I love it or hate it yet.

I hate being jerked around by an author. That is, I hate when the author attempts, transparently, to control my interpretation of and relationship to the text in ways which transgress against the format of a novel. At a basic level I find it presumptuous: the author, it is clear, thinks he is smarter than me and is going to pull some shrewd trick on me by reversing chronologies, changing spellings, etc.

Not to sound too much like an arrogant prick, but I'm too smart for that, and the game quickly becomes tiresome for me. I don't want to keep flipping back and forth to check whether or not a name has been mentioned before, or whether or not a character has been introduced. The disorientation that is supposed to be some kind of literary narcotic euphoria more nearly approximates being forced to take a field sobriety test while sober. It's just tireless jumping through hoops, and no kind of valuable use of anyone's time.

This is the main gripe. The other being that Pynchon creates for us probably the most vapid, irritating protagonist I have had the pleasure of slogging through a story with. His aforementioned attempts to destabilize the narrative, aside from exhausting me as a reader, have the effect of creating an unstable (in many senses of the word) protagonist. As a result, the prose style which is often engaging and dynamic seems affected and shrill.

This segues pretty well into what I actually like about the book. Pynchon has some pretty damn good poetry here, and when he's not trying to weasel some symbolist or aptronymic bullcrap his comparisons all resound clarion. If I didn't get the feeling that he was trying to bewilder/impress rather than entertain I would be entirely satisfied to let the book work entirely on its verbal harmony.

The other part is once the narrative breaks out of its sordid meditation on California (to be honest, a nasty little state which is far less worthy of obsession than Pynchon and the RHCP make it out to be) it becomes quite gripping. Its got a sophisticated bit of surrealist horror and conspiracy thriller: the black-uniformed Tristero assassins become namelessly dreadful in a delicious was. If Pynchon didn't insist on regularly breaking the mood with loud, postmodern farting noises I could even call the whole thing cool.

But we'll see where he goes. I have the suspicion that he'll knock the wind out of the intriguing (speaking literally) aspects of the novel towards the end in order to punish the viscerally driven reader for daring to take pleasure in such things. We'll see, we'll see.

The pornography of art

Every kind of love is pornographic. It's all dirty. Even beautiful people are ugly, because a beautiful body, one that engenders love, is a pornographic body. This abstracts itself to art. There is no such thing as high art. Art is love, and love is dirty, and low.

This is why "erotica" pisses me off, and why the postmodern refutation of "high art" pisses me off. Erotica is supposed to be pornography elevated. Usually this equates to subtlety of presentation, but that's just an affectation. The most demure, arty, "erotica" is exactly equivalent to the dirtiest, comespattered fuckfest Hollywood can offer.

The refutation of high art comes from the other end. Postmodernists abstract and bowlderize the pornography of art as postmodern "uncertainty." They claim that art considered "high" and "low" is characterized thus based on illusory criteria. And what they WANT to be saying is that all "low" art is "high," because the criteria for "high" art is supposedly exclusive. In fact, it's entirely the opposite.

Good art gets you to come hardest, because all art is porn. The more love a work of art can engender, the more a masterful piece of pornography it is. There is no such THING as high art. All art is low, because no matter how "high" or artistic a work of art is, the mechanism is the same. A metacultural tribute to action movies still causes adrenaline to pump. The same penis that is made erect by a black and white spread of supermodels having sex under white sheets as is made erect by some coked up college student from Kansas getting ejaculated on by Italians.

All art speak to our basest desires, because base desires all we have. Some art makes us feel more in control of those desires, but even that sensation of control is a psychological mechanism to allow us to indulge them further. All desires are base. All art is low. All art is love, and all love is pornography

Pereat Ars, Pereat Mundis