Though it's hard to believe Pynchon has any interest in non-American readers, most of us have seen enough about America on film to know what he's getting at when he refers to "The Yupper West Side" of New York. Maybe they are no more than an expression of his backstage, cerebral fun – of the drunkenness of form being various. Within a detective-story chapter, for example, the relationship between Maxine and her friend Heidi prompts a jaunt into an ersatz teen novel: "Princess Heidrophobia is always the lead babe, while Lady Maxipad is the fastmouthed soubrette, the heavy lifter…"Īn author might engineer genre shifts like this in order to convey more precisely the texture of a relationship, personality or scene, but in Bleeding Edge they are too often associated with an instant balloon-pop of integrity for this to seem like Pynchon's intention. But a conceptually stable narrator would have prevented all the genre-hopping, which often takes place mid-scene. When March says, "I gotta warn you, though, I'm not much into shopping for recreation," Maxine gasps: "But you… you are Jewish?" Later on, when another character says, "I've been going through such guilt", she's told: "If you're not Jewish, you have to have a licence, cause we hold the patent, see."īleeding Edge has a vagabond third-person narration – its perspective is sometimes Maxine's, sometimes no one's, and sometimes it sounds a lot like a male, American author commenting on things he doesn't like the Hamptons, for example, are "a diseased fantasy". But most of these jokes are cliches offered up with the wily confidence of a standup comic who knows he'll get a whoop just by naming the town he's performing in. There is certainly contempt here – but what's beneath it doesn't seem a lot like sympathy.Ĭomparably shrewd is the humour aimed at a certain type of American Jewish reader, for whom Bleeding Edge is meant to be rich pickings throughout. Pynchon aims his gags hyper-consciously at the point where he anticipates the reader's belief in her own sense of irony meets with her intellectual self-satisfaction, just at the safe (ie the unexamined) edge of a depressive nihilism which might get sad thrills laughing at Susan Sontag's hair. But, like the intellectual flattery, the pop-culture jokes in Bleeding Edge – there's an emphasis on the sitcom Friends in particular – are soon insulting. The risk inherent in questioning the motive behind any joke, in suggesting that its value may be aggressive and its motivation cynical in nature, is that it seems to expose a fun-factor deficiency in the questioner. "I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers" is a gag designed to give the more bitter reader (who, again, needn't understand the line's real meaning) the thrill of cultural mastery – a sense of what it would be like to be so clever you can diss Tennessee Williams's sincerity at will. Talk about nessun dorma," is a typical invocation: it requires no understanding of the allusion, but invites the reader to bask in a sense of shared refinement. "All night long, not a shadow in the neighbourhood. Like a major bank, like a marriage, Bleeding Edge is an idea too big to fail – at least, not without grand-scale disillusionment.Īs if this had burdened Pynchon with the task of keeping the investors sweet, he supplies regular perks external to the story, mainly in the form of intellectual flattery. Add to this thematic weight the fact that Pynchon invokes the tones of multiple genres – detective story, chick lit, teen lit, sci-fi, Tom Wolfean social satire – and the fact that it takes almost 500 pages, most of them frantic with pop-culture references, to unfold, and a sense emerges of the scale of investment Pynchon demands from his reader. Its concerns are momentous: 9/11 – which takes place just over halfway through – the internet, and the price of capitalism. It prompts a question relevant to him and to all contemporary artists, from writers to directors to choreographers: if the present day is atomised, paranoid, infantile, obsessive, can a work of art capture this without taking on these attributes itself?īleeding Edge is a multi-character detective(-ish) story, set in 2001 in a New York thrumming with ventures linked to Silicon Alley, the home of Manhattan's tech companies. W hen March Kelleher, the leftwing, paranoid blogger in Bleeding Edge, invites the heroine, Maxine Tarnow, to recall "what Susan Sontag always sez", Maxine responds: "I like the streak, I'm keeping it?" But March – the novel's voice of misguided sincerity – persists, correcting her: "If there's a sensibility you really want to talk about, and not just exhibit it yourself, you need 'a deep sympathy modified by contempt'." Sontag's idea strikes at the heart of what Thomas Pynchon has undertaken in Bleeding Edge.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |