Why haven't I read this guy before?

You know, I don't consider myself a conservative stick-in-the-mud, but I just read my first Thomas Pynchon novel, and that's sure how I felt. See what happens when I get shoved outside my comfort zone? I've always loved to read, but this was certainly something new. I'm used to your standard novel - standard conflict, standard exposition, standard climax - you get the picture. A nice normal story arc, easy to follow, easy to analyze. Pynchon knocked me on my ass! What the hell is going on here? I asked myself. No standard stuff here. The novel was all over the place, with observations from Oedipa, the main character, about life, love, the postal service, sex, drugs, men, business - the list goes on and on. And is she having a paranoid fantasy, is her dead ex-lover playing a posthumous practical joke on her, or is she really involved in some underground scheme to foil the U.S. Postal Service, traditional love, and the gods know what else.

And even though Pynchon - through his mouthpiece Diblette - tried to discourage me from analyzing the novel, by the gods I did my best. Well, I had to write my essay on something. But it was a puzzle to be sorted out anyway. I had to try to extract some kind of meaning from it. Ha! I really don't want to give it - or what I think it is - away. My own convoluted little brain added its own ideas to the mix and came away with the meaning best suited to me. That might be just what Pynchon had in mind.

I'm On the Road!!!

Well, what a coincidence! This week of On the Road in class, I am on the road (well, actually, I was in the air). I'm back home in Peoria for my 21st class reunion. Yes, 21st. Nobody ever got our 20th planned, so here we are with the class of '88. Really, the adventures of Sal & Dean remind me of some of the craziness of my late high school/first aborted attempt at college. Doing what I wanted just because I could. Experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Going, going, going nowhere. Someone once told me that all those people I called "friends" (nobody take this personally if you know me!) weren't really "friends." More like partners in crime, I guess. Did I lack a moral compass? You betcha! Do I regret the whole period? Not necessarily. I learned what I was capable of. I finally learned self-control. I eventually learned to love myself. Like Sal, I learned that even if you love someone, you don't have to follow them down the destructive path they're on.

Walk On By

So, this week in my (by "my," I mean the class I am taking) Post-WWII American Fiction class, we (by "we," I mean each student individually) read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This is a novel I had begun reading before, but never finished, not because I didn't enjoy it, but because I didn't have time. In my previous reading, I focused on the issues of identity in the novel. I mean, that narrator tries on personality after personality after being convinced by those who want to "help" him that they have the perfect role for him.

However, when I was reading this time, I caught on to another theme - the impersonality of modern society. And, with the idea of the individual as invisible, this certainly reflects the anonymity one feels when walking down a crowded city street. Okay, my thought process was definitely influenced by something else I read recently - Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, by Morris Berman. He proposes, among other things, that American (and, increasingly, global) society is so focused on individualism as to preclude most authentic relationships between people. Neighbors don't do a lot of hanging out in their yards anymore; we're too busy watching TV - or blogging!

Invisible Man explores the same phenomenon in an earlier form. One reason the narrator is able to remain "invisible" is the limited scope of the connections he does make. Work - a means of getting the cash to buy more things - while scarce in the 1930s, was fast becoming the primary focus of American society, perhaps more so during the Depression because of its scarcety. But, as Berman claims, we've lost the human connections that really make life worthwhile. Personally, I often find myself lonely, though I have classmates, church friends, and family. Maybe if I commit myself more fully to the full-fledged consumerism that defines American, I won't notice the loneliness anymore.