That unpleasant memory, like the damage beneath Darby's nimble fingers, would soon be quite unmade . . . as if it were something the stripling had only read about, in some boys' book of adventures . . . as if that page of their chronicles lay turned and done, and the order "About-face" had been uttered by some potent though invisible Commandant of Earthly Days, toward whom Darby, in amiable obedience, had turned again. . . .
* * * * * * * * * *
The narrator narrating this sentence knows that Darby is a character in a boys' book of adventures, currently The Chums of Chance Nearly Meet Their End But Miles Blundell Stumbles and Barely Avoids the Gaze of H. H. Holmes. That title is the entire story so it's not their best adventure.
Anyway, this is more the kind of thing I feel Pynchon wants to be writing but he's got to write all of this "boys' book of adventures" crap to make Against the Day feel more accessible to the average reader! You can pick up this book and dive right in without any confusion at all. Compare that to Gravity's Rainbow which immediately throws you into some kind of dream realm or hallucination involving the evacuation of London after a rocket strike. Maybe if Pynchon would have begun with the guy sticking the banana out of the fly of his pajamas, more people would attempt to finish that book!
But this line gets me raring to go again! A character in a book who is also a character in fictional boys' books of adventure feeling like he's a character in a book is just the kind of dizzying self-referential nonsense that fuels me! Plus Pynchon basically gets to call himself a "Commandant of Earthly Days." That's probably pretty satisfying. I always called myself a "Grandmaster Comic Book Reader" but nobody ever used that title when introducing me. That's probably why I hate all of my friends and family.
No comments:
Post a Comment