Pynchon list

[Gillies, Lindsay]

>Basil writes:
>I would be quite interested to find out if there are any things written
>anywhere about race issues in GR or in the influence of Malcolm X in
>Gravity's Rainbow. If any of you have read the autobiography do you agree
>that there could be some patterns that appear in GR?

I must say I thought of the autobiography quite often when I originally read 
GR.  One thing the bio shows is the virbrancy and centrality to urban black 
culture in this century of the black Boston community.  Anyone who's lived 
in Boston as I have for years knows how invisible this community  can be in 
the white man's zone.  In fact, my image at the time I first read GR of 
Slothrop's jazz and toilet adventures formed itself around the actuality of 
the Mass Ave bus line, which carried (at least in the late 70's) white 
people as far as Boyleston Street, then (difficult to describe how 
ridiculous this looks to a native NYer) switched en masse to black ridership 
for the journey down into the black zone.  The was surely Tyrone's bus to 
his first great transformation.

I don't know the literature, but the black/white issue so thoroughly 
saturates the book that it can easily escape comment.  The autobiography had 
tremendous impact at the time it was published, and the image it carries of 
the jazz outlaw is closely related to GR's ambience.  Jazz itself is 
another, related interconnection---the diction of the book is a kind of skat 
most of the time---and raises this aspect of the black/white question, what 
do rich but marginal cultures (in power terms) inject into the pallid but 
dominant white culture?

This leaves me pondering: does TP use the more literal black/white issues to 
dramatise an overarching concern with a Manichean metaphysics, or are the 
metaphysics a gloss on the literal situation he's concerned with?

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Lindsay Gillies                           FMR Corp.
lindsay.gillies at fmr.com         82 Devonshire Street, R22A
617-563-5363                              Boston, MA 02109
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