Pynchon and G. Perec

[Kevin Crosby]

On Mon, 31 Jan 94 10:58:33 MET, Pampaluna Marco wrote:

> 
> 
>> > > [...] there is lot of Perec in Pynchon's book ( or vice versa ).
>> > Looks plausible to me!
>> > I found "V" pretty unreadable in the last half... how's Perec for
>> > style/readability?
>> 
>> Perec are really three Perecs. "Les choses" (1965) is Minimalist, cool,
>> reserved, very French. The bizarre lettrist experiments of the seventies
>> are a strange mixture of Baroque, Dada and weird parlor games.
>> But the third Perec, the Perec of "La vie mode d'emploi" (1978) is a novel
>> which somehow goes off in several directions at the same time and, indeed,
>> related to Pynchon in spirit if not in form.
>
>i would like to add that Italo Calvino in his "Six American Lessons" referring
>to that literature's attribute which is 'multiplicity' ( i hope the spell is
>right ), signed Perec as one of the most meaningful example of how a book
>can contain whole universes. whole worlds. Calvino cited Borges, Perec, and
>i would include Pynchon. i agree totally with relating Pynchon to Perec in
>spirit. Calvino who was a close friend of Perec, wrote that Perec had a huge 
>number of 'tricks' to build plots, combinations, attributes distributions,
>recalls in order to hide a sort of labirynths in the book. i always wondered
>if Pynchon had some similar way to set his books. i think the attitude is
>quite similar...i think how interesting would be to read both "V." and "La
>vie mode d'emploi" with an hypertextual program. 
>just some wonderings...
>
>Marchino

Greetings to Milan (it's a shame GR hasn't been translated into Italian)-

This is the first I've heard of Perec, so I cannot say anything about him, 
but I definitely get a different feeling reading Borges & Calvino vs. 
Pynchon.  All of their books contain entire worlds, but in Borges & Calvino 
it seems that there is some sort of goal or solution implied, to figure out 
what tricks the authors used to make their text work (I think especially of 
Calvino's _If on a Winters Night a Traveller_).  When I read Pynchon I do 
not feel compelled, or even able, to discover how things fit together to 
make a whole.  
Pynchon & Borges & Calvino definitely share some characteristics, but I 
think the underlying goal is different in Pynchon.  I have no problem 
describing Borges's & Calvino's style as full of authorial tricks, but in 
Pynchon, though he may do similar things, the tone is different, not so 
cute.  Pynchon doesn't seem to hiding things as much as describing or 
creating a bizarre and complex world.  Just the feeling I get reading 
them...
Kevin Crosby
crosb003 at maroon.tc.umn.edu