Do "big books"

[Eric Alan Weinstein, Centre For English Studies, University Of London]

>I'm toying with the idea of teaching a course called 
>"Big Books" not exactly a standard genre. It might 
>include Clarissa, Ulysses, and GR. Has anyone taught 
>GR in such a context? Incidentally, from this list >there 
doesn't seem much evidence that GR is taught at >all in 
universities these days. Is COL49 the only >canonical 
Pynchon, then?


The Crying of Lot 49 has been a very formative book
for many readers in English who have come of age in
or since the 1960's. It gauges the modern American 
situation in its barely imaginable complexity, variety, 
stupidity, paranoia and power---and does so with 
considerable sensitivity, brevity, and intelligence. It is 
one of the great novels of this century. Yet clearly it is a 
less great novel, or at least a less grand project, than its 
big brother, Gravity's Rainbow. Most people teaching 
late 20th century literature feel their course is 
incomplete without teaching Thomas Pynchon, yet  feel 
themselves and their students unable to devote the time 
and energy a serious engagement with GR would 
require. Hence the omnipresence of CL49.

     An irony of this situation is that while CL49 is a 
short novel when perceived in its linear narrative mode,
it is indeed the least linear and most excessively 
embedded of narratives, one of the most multiplicious 
and indeterminable literary events in the history of 
English. So while CL49 is often taught, it is too often
poorly taught.

    In these days of  too many less-than-inspired 
challenges to the syllabus, Gravity's Rainbow presents 
a brilliant and important challenge to our modern, Mc-
Text-Nugget academia: spend several weeks teaching a 
single book, or knowingly avoid teaching one of the 
central texts of our time. It is a situation which the artist 
Christo must appreciate very well. Pynchon's novel, as 
artefact, illuminates the sinister economic and political 
mechanisms underlying institutional literary educations 
designed, in the name of an illusory 
comprehensiveness, to prevent repeated close readings 
of any single book (the sacred act of so doing ironically 
being the deep justification for any programme of 
literary education) to the exclusion of a dozen others. 
The situation reminds me of an "I Love Lucy" episode 
featuring Ms. Ball and a fast-moving conveyor belt, and 
it continues until one abandons all hope and engages 
with the University in the perverse and closed rite of 
PhD.

There is a deep prejudice of mine underlying this 
account. You see, it seems to me that most students 
who do well within the academy are students who can 
read 4 to 6 texts a week and keep a basic working 
knowledge of their contents available to them at all 
times. But how penetrating is such a reading? How 
worthwhile? Truly important reading, creative 
reading if you will, is almost always slow reading, 
repeated reading.  I often find the best readers have 
taught themselves to read away from the academy. I am 
a great believe in taking a  year's absence. For myself, I 
am trying to use the summer recess to teach myself to 
read again, a useful occupation which I  think must 
often be repeated in the course of a long life.  

(Is this an overlong and overblown way of saying if 
a course on big books were possible, I think it might be
very important to teach?) 


E.A. Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk