I know that Pynchon fans are diehards, but I somehow feel like I missed the boat. [...]
Crying moved pretty fast and its farcical surreal story line made me not worry too much whether I was getting the references. I think I did get them, I think I think, but there are several books on this book, so I can only assume that one would have to read it with an eye to uncovering more than what's on the surface to get everything. This is not a book I'm interested in doing that on. Perversely, the book's shortness (along with the issue above) makes me not want to delve in too deep.
My own path through Pynchon has involved mostly false starts. I started with V. which I read a chunk of before I gave up on it. I forget why. I'm pretty sure I had no idea what was going on. Then sometime later I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow before I gave up halfway through. (Well, truth was I gave up after about ten pages. I really loved the first ten pages. But I had to work for them--like, in a pulling out the old English major hat kind of way. When I realized it would take four years for me to read the book that way I decided to coast, thinking I'd get what I'd get and to hell with the rest. What I got was not very much, and then a headache, and then a resounding desire to quit. Which I did. I think maybe the book was about a penis.) Then just last year I read Crying and I read it in a day and I think my reaction was similar to Bud's.
Thing is, I think I like the idea of Pynchon. I recognize and acknowledge that he's a very important writer. I mean, it's not like it's just anyone who can claim to be Thomas Pynchon, right. I can't. You can't. (Unless you are, in fact, Thomas Pynchon, the famous author, in which case, OH MY GOD I LOVE YOUR WORK WILL YOU SIGN MY CHEST?!?!? K THNKZ PLZ BYE!) But my experience with his writing has lead me to suspect that it's all much better in theory, for me. Modernist, post-modernist, Saussurian Seussian, whatever the heck he is, I feel like he's not necessarily out to tell me a good story, which, when which urge it's without, literature doesn't feel all quite right and there to me. It's not that he's going so far as to use a communications medium to explicitly not communicate anything to me, so much as it is that there's a signal-to-noise ratio which is tipped out of balance in a way that doesn't please me so much as the TiVo menu summary suggested it would. ("4 stars. Action/Adventure. A man travels through a war-torn country on a voyage of self discovery.")
Plus there's the fact that I'm not that smart anyway and I miss enough stuff under the best conditions that when missing things becomes part of the actual fabric of the experience of reading the book, well. See, I was going to include this as a humorous little self-deprecating parenthetical, but then I remembered I've really been thinking about this a lot lately, about how it is we strive to become better, more attentive, more attuned and explicative readers (because if you're a lit blogger and you think you've got it all figured out by now you're a huge lying asshole and your blog probably sucks) and just how far behind where I feel like I should be I often think I am, and how the last year and a half of reading has lead me to constantly question not only the literature but more and more my own ability to relate to that literature, and how all that mixing itself up in a boy's mind starts to make the word "discouraging" sound like a pleasant bedtime story, a state to aspire to rise up towards, and, and. It's almost enough to make a lit blogger want to hang up his hat and go start a politics blog; at least there, nobody, least alone the blogger him or herself, expects deep attention to the struggling subtle unspoken. Rock out with your red, white, and blue cock out.
Still, for all that, I'm sometimes tempted to rope some friends into doing a good slow group reading of Gravity's Rainbow, just to see what's to be gotten through teamwork, because 10,000 Pynchon Fans Can't All Be Mark E. Smith, right? And when news arises that there's a new Pynchon novel on the horizon, you can bet I'm going to let you know about it.
1 comment:
I once had a theory that there were two types of people in the world: those that absolutely adored Gravity's Rainbow, and those that never finished it and hated it.
You're proffering evidence for a third type of person, one that I never thought could have existed. Eeeenteresting.
But for me it was certainly the sheer raw polymathematical geekery of it all. Parabolas, and indoles, and Poisson distributions, oh my!!
And of course without GR there would have been no Cryptonomicon, which is in some ways a much more accessible book.
Post a Comment