Pynchon's Style

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

I like Andrew Dinn's post, with his interesting citiation of Gaddis.  It
seems to me that Gaddis is criticizing a particular trend in modernist
American literature that begins perhaps with Stephen Crane (a man in a boat
indeed--even if he wasn't alone), progresses through Hemingway and culminates
in the "minimalism" of Raymond Carver.  If Hemingway crafted the style to
its fullest extent (in SUN ALSO RISES and some of the short stories), then
the minimalists minimize it to a reductio ad absurdism--or as Robert Venturi
paraphrase Mies, "Less is less."

Pynchon does play around with that strain of American literature, but often--
as Andrew suggests--in a mocking or "subversive" way.  One example of 
hard-boiled minimalism was the often-parodied dialogue of DRAGNET (especially
the now-nearly-forgotten original series, not the new color series running
 on Nick at Night), which is explicitly parodied in one scene from V.

On the other hand, I think Pynchon's earlier works, through LOT49, draw a
fair amount of influence from Nathaniel West, especially DAY OF THE LOCUST,
with its apocalyptic overtones.

Then there's the *other* strain of American literature--the Run-Off-At-The-
Mouth school, that can be found originating in those long Puritan (!)
sermons, reaching a philosophical definition of sorts in Emerson's essays,
and practiced in different  ways by Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and
Faulkner.  These influences are always lurking in Pynchon, but I don't think
they emerge in all their glory until GR.

One thing that strikes me about the relative "flatness" of V., is the way
Pynchon seems to test, draw from and rework different aspects of the 
minimalist strain.  The fullness of that experimentation is best seen in
a point-by-point comparison of "Under the Rose" and Chapter 3 of V., where
we see precisely the kind of fragmenting and examination of the pieces that
Gaddis writes about.

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN