Before I get into this post, I just want to preface it by saying that I know this one took quite a while. I have been quite busy at work, as I will be for the rest of this month actually, so I have had less free time than usual. I also spent a couple evenings writing the most recent update to the post I’m working on which covers various pre-Socratic philosophers, which of course also meant I couldn’t be writing on the next full upload those nights. I do want to spend more time adding to that post, because it is really where my interest is primarily right now, so I might upload slightly less frequently for a little while because I will be adding to that. Now that’s out of the way, I hope this post is a worthwhile read. It’s a little on the shorter side compared to some of the stuff I’ve been uploading lately, but I didn’t have too much to say.
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The reason I started this series was in order to decide what books of mine I was holding on to for no good reason, and therefore should be thrown away or donated. I thought it would take an afternoon, but soon it will have been a whole year and I doubt I’ll be finished even then. Because of this, there has been a pile of books waiting to be taken away in the corner of my bedroom that has slowly grown to be quite a nuisance. So just over a month ago, I decided to start getting rid of these books and clear some space again. Come to think of it, there was no good reason for me to have held on to them all this time, if the plan was just to get rid of them either way. I don’t know why I felt like it had to be all at once. Regardless, when I was taking them away I found that there was one book amongst the pile that I couldn’t bring myself to discard.
In the third part of this series, which I uploaded some time early last year, I briefly mentioned a book called The Crying of Lot 49. This was back when I wasn’t really dedicating a whole post to one book but just sort of going through the pile I have a few at a time. I hadn’t really developed a structure for this series yet. It’s very likely you’ve heard of it before, it’s a very famous book, but I was quite dismissive of it. It was a gift though, and more than that I never did actually read beyond the first chapter. So seeing it and being annoyed at myself for getting pleb filtered, I decided that instead of throwing it away I would give it a second chance and read it through entirely. Well I’ve finished it now, it’s a fairly short novel, and I have to say I really regret being so dismissive because it was quite good.
I’m not going to attempt any kind of serious literary analysis, because I am incapable, I am just going to give my thoughts on it. My thoughts being, essentially, that this book is beautifully written. Pynchon is able to do something with the English language that I couldn’t have even envisaged until seeing it done. There is a plot unlike what I said before, and also unlike what I said about it before once you get accustomed to Pynchon’s unusual style it’s very easy to follow, but where the book really comes into it’s own is when it goes down these very brief asides. It’s hard for me to really illustrate it in my own writing, because I am no Pynchon, but I actually believe that the cover art on the copy I have (pictured below) actually represents the style rather well in visual form.
The meandering nature of the telling of this story is very much like a dream, which is really what makes this book so enjoyable. I have always been drawn to art that is able to somehow capture the experience of dreaming, or some part of that experience at least, in it’s own way. I was fascinated for a time by Surrealist artists like Dali and Magritte even as a young boy, shortly after I remember my mum taking me to a surrealist art exhibition. My favourite film of all time is Brazil, as I’ve probably stated on this blog before a couple times, and that film is literally the closest thing I’ve found to a dream being captured on film. I really should write a whole post about it some day. I’ve talked about Ariel Pink a few times, who is able to capture something from the dream experience in his music in a way that really intrigues me.
In literature though, I’ve never really found anything that was able to do it. I read a book by Haruki Murakami after a recommendation to from a friend back in 2015, Kafka on the Shore, and in some respects there is a dreamlike quality to it. It’s not really within the writing itself though, but rather the plot. Well more like plots plural, because from what I remember it’s like two different novels that the author switches back and forth between. Anyway the characters in these stories, and from what I understand most of his books are similar, have a tendency to ignore or be unfazed at least by things which are in fact kind of fantastical or even magical. Which is rather like a dream, if you think about it.
When you sleep, you enter a world that makes no sense at all. Yet we never seem to really notice, until after we wake. The locations are unfamiliar, yet feel like places we know intimately. People move and behave in ways that are impossible, or out of character, and we don’t even seem to care. I think KotS did a good job of recreating that, and maybe I should read some of his other books. Pychon however, not only does this as well though much more overtly as I’ll try to explain later, but also captures this within his very writing. The way he drifts from subject to subject, only for a second before moving on again, it creates this very dreamlike flow.
His writing is a bit overwhelming at first, there are sentences that run on to be the length of a short paragraph. Where you’ll reach the end and have forgotten what the context was at it’s start. The language itself is rich, I even had to look up what a word meant a few times and I think I have a reasonably sizeable vocabulary though I could definitely benefit from learning more. It’s not like there isn’t a lot I still could learn, English has more words than any other language in the world. In fact I may have even said this before, but one of the reasons I’m hesitant to attempt to learn another language is because in a way I still feel like I’m learning English. I do love the English language and I think it is more complex and beautiful than it tends to get credit for. Indeed this very book I’m talking about is a monument to what it is capable of with the right mind. Although maybe that’s partly a cope, I’m also just too lazy and dumb to learn another language.
Anyway staying on topic, once you do adjust to his style then the book really opens up and you just find yourself being drawn along this winding story which takes you from one wacky scene to the next and you just accept it. As do the characters themselves, so it’s not only that the plot and the way the characters are presented is as if they are in a dream or dreamlike state, but the experience of reading the book puts the reader into one also in a sense. Or at least it recreates that one aspect of the dream experience for you, and this is achieved with the written word alone which I find to be a rather impressive achievement. It’s so well done, and this hypnagogic feel that the book has is the result of multiple different literary choices.
There is one chapter in particular which is where this book reaches it’s peak, artistically speaking, in my opinion. It’s towards the end where the protagonist, an adultress so hardly a likeable character, Oedipa Maas (all the names of all the characters in this book are equally weird, my personal favourite being Mike Fallopian) wanders around a city at night in a sleep deprived haze questioning whether the events of the story so far are trustworthy or if she is being set up in some way. I won’t go into any detail about the events of the story here, but to give some explanation the book tells a detective story of sorts and has the main character attempting to track down two mysterious private postal service companies who have been feuding with one another for centuries.
In this chapter, she wanders the city at night and begins to see the symbol of one of the two companies (Thurn and Taxis, a real postal company from history that became a princely house in the Holy Roman Empire and who are still an incredibly wealthy family of the German aristocracy to this day) everywhere. The reason she begins investigating them in the first place being that she stumbled onto the sign in a public bathroom, at first she just thinks that she’s seeing the sign more frequently as the book continues because she knows what to look for. In this chapter though, it becomes clear that in at least some cases she’s clearly hallucinating, and the places she notices the symbol in become stranger and stranger.
It’s a fantastic little book, and I’m definitely going to hold onto it because I think I very well might read it again now I’ve gotten accustomed to Pynchon’s style more and I might better be able to enjoy the early chapters which I read while still easing into the book. I should read other books of his though, partly because as brilliant as this one was it’s not where his passion was apparently. Indeed from interviews it seems that he considered this book to be a “potboiler”, a work designed to sell well and provide him with the funds to live comfortably and work on what he considered to be his real life’s work. It’s kind of demoralising to read that, that this book which is better written and more clever than anything I might write was just a means to an end for the one who wrote it. He is a very intelligent individual though, apparently starting a degree in physics at 16 but quitting to serve in the military according to Wikipedia.
I say it’s demoralising because recently, and indeed primarily as a result of reading this book, I’ve started to wonder again if perhaps I could ever write something myself. Of course I write every week for this blog, but I mean fiction/ a novel or short story or something like that. That’s what I wanted to do when I was very young, I used to love writing little stories and even later on going into secondary school I wrote some awful poems to share with my friend. I think I talked a little about this already in one of the earlier parts of this series. Generally speaking though, I’m not a particularly artsy/ creative type of person. I’m just not that way inclined, I can sometimes be profoundly affected by art and I have a reverence for what it can sometimes be, but I don’t have this urge to just “create” that some people seem to have.
I like what art, and particularly writing (perhaps because the medium is so old, and has had it’s potential explored with a great deal of thoroughness) is capable of, and the idea that I could express my ideas and thoughts through it somehow, but I don’t have this real need for it that some people talk about having. I could live my life without ever writing a novel, or painting a picture, or doing anything in whatever other creative outlet you can think of. Some people I think would rather leave something awful than leave nothing at all, whereas I would prefer to leave something rather than nothing but if I am only capable of mediocrity or worse then I would prefer not to leave anything. Of course, if I were to do anything it would have to engage this fascination with the ethereal that I have.
Reading this book, it’s just reminded me of what literature is capable of being. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a really special little book that I’m glad I read. I think I should try to read more, I used to read so much as I’ve talked about here. I have started reading more lately, last year I read the most I had since I was 16, but it’s mostly been history and philosophy (non-fiction). I’ve been reminded that writing can be beautiful and evocative and funny and charming etc etc etc. I wonder if I could ever do something like that, in my own small way because of course I’m no Pynchon. If not professionally, not someone who is published or who is able to make a living from writing, could I at least have this blog be more than what it is right now?
As well as being a place to share my thoughts, to talk about my silly first world troubles, could it actually have some greater aesthetic value one day? I don’t know, I think my writing has certainly improved since I started this blog. I’ve said this more than once already recently in fact. Although because I had forgotten so much, it’s more like I have simply returned to the level I was at when I finished secondary school. I don’t think that my prose is any better than something a teenager could produce, but I can continue to improve. Or I can try at the very least, and reading more will only aid in this endeavour. I will have to see what happens, as will those of you who are following and interested to see what happens with this blog.
I’m not really sure how to end this entry, but I think I’ve covered everything I wanted to when I started writing this morning. Except for one thing actually, which I wanted to try and fit in when I was talking about the book but I guess kind of works here as well. The ending of the book itself. See, the book slowly builds up tension throughout as Oedipa gets closer to finding out the truth of the mystery she’s following (outside of a couple of brief asides like when she has to visit her therapist/ husband’s MKUltra handler in the middle of a shootout with the police) and it concludes with her standing in a room with a man who is just about to reveal himself as one of the figures involved. The moment is about to arrive, she is shaking and preparing for how to react, and that’s where the book ends. Almost like, you’re being woken up.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 