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November 20, 2006

PYNCHON'S INVISIBILITY

Many thanks to Theresa Duncan for contributing this essay.  She is a former video game designer and current cultural critic and filmmaker. She hails from Detroit, Michigan, but currently lives in Los Angeles. Theresa has written for Feed Magazine, Artforum, and Slate.

"My silence was the silence of ten men." --David Berman

I don't really think about Pynchon's invisibility, because somewhere in the back of my mind I know that like the Cottingsley Fairies he hides from THEM but reveals himself to US. So he's always there, you know, the game of fort/da forever over, because you can't lose what you never had. Pynchon's invisibility is so much more vivid, isn't it? Than seeing some warmed-over wonder read at the 92nd Street Y and you have to go "that's his voice?" matching it with the better one that comes like wind out of the great library of the uncollected unconscious to invisibly light up every book you've ever read. And then--God--listen to the sycophants in the audience titter at even the unfunny ones in order to prove that they are closer to the great man's mind and humor and vision.

Pynchon's disappearance then, is nearly as great an act of generosity as the wonder-books he himself writes. Like the Hebrew moment of Tsim Tsum where God first withdrew from the universe in order to make room for his creation the universe, Pynchon's withdrawal means that we get that much more mental real estate. You know that feeling? You wait and wait for a book like this, buy it, and when you get around to opening it, you just start expanding...There's not even any photos of Pynchon except that silly sailor one. Invisibility. Perhaps it's a vain celebrity peccadillo, but to me it works as an act of psychoanalytic silence, where what I really pay for is to have the great man with his mighty mind listen, not talk.

And in that silence (still so vividly shaped by compassion and humor and intelligence) we suddenly have a limitless place to put the best of ourselves. Have you ever had a session that was timed a half-minute off, and had to witness another analysand waiting in the tiny dim foyer off Central Park West, next to your leaded glass windows and the your long green velvet curtain, which you thought were perhaps imaginary, or maybe props placed just so to frame your mental stage productions and yours alone? I mean, you're basically paying to be an only child aren't you, not for this shit. And so by sparing us the sight of other readers, we get a book that has room enough not for just ten men, not just a limitless amount of them, but room for just one. And now I'm afraid that's all the time we have. That's not me you see brushing past as you climb from the waiting room outside into your own personal thought-kingdom. Dear Reader, (as they used to say) it's probably just some fake fairy from a photo, you know, or a trick of the literary light.

Posted at 12:01 AM in Guest Bloggers, Pynchon Week |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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