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.
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That's kind of typical Pynchon. In fact, when Crying of Lot 49 got so many great reviews, he laughed it off and claimed that it was something he pushed out in a hurry so he could pay the bills while working on Gravity's Rainbow.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I think that's complete bullshit because he had to be doing some serious research to write Crying of Lot 49. People brushed off the particulars of the narrative, thinking they were authorial inventions, but it turns out Thurn and Taxis have a historical reality. Even 49 signifies something--and if you recognize Pynchon's pattern, you know what that is.
Even so, it's obvious that no small amount of energy had to be exerted to write the Crying of Lot 49, and yet when it recieved its honors, Pynchon kind of looked down his nose at us philistines for not immediately deferring to Gravity's Rainbow. After all, that was his supposed masterpiece. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for arrogance if it's merited, but when it hovers somewhere between feigning humility and rejecting the establishment (just BECAUSE it's the establishment), I get a little irritated.
I digress. It's still a bit Derridean, right? I know my chronology is a little wonky here, since Pynchon was writing before Derrida, but Pynchon tried to make himself ambiguous in a way that Derrida didn't. Even so, I think it can be argued, perhaps even successfully, that Pynchon retained some tiny semblance of modernity in his work. More on that later.
BUT! Crying of Lot 49 is just the precursor to Gravity's Rainbow. Everything that you've described here either works magnificently in the latter, or makes Pynchon seem like a self indulgent, arrogant asshole. I've had philosophy professors tell me it's great, and literature professors tell me it's the biggest piece of shit they've ever read.
You've hit the entropy part? That encapsulates a large portion of what he's trying to say (or what I think he's trying to say--I'm not completely sure since he's intentionally ambiguous, especially at the end).
Wow, sorry this is convoluted and long. If you want me to clear some stuff up, I'd be more than happy to.