Another decade, another book?

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Brian McCary raises the following point:
"The fact that he communicated this approach so well in a fictional
medium is a credit to him as a writer.  But it also raises the question
of other possible thematic bases.  In Vineland, his writing is
as good as in GR, the characters are argueably better (at least
his females are much more three dimensional) and the storyline is
solid, but the thematic idea pinning it all together appears
to be a scrap off the cutting room floor for the counterforce section of
GR.  A Mason-Dixon line book will probably echo the same theme of GR and
Vineland, which would make it unnecessary."


One of the themes of COL49 and even more of GR is the Legacy of American
History--the Slothrop family history, the Berkshire sections with the 
passages on Shay's Rebellion, and other excerpts have TRP wrestling with
the possibilities of lost moments in American history.  I would expect
any Mason-Dixon work to deal with those kinds of issues, but I'm not
sure where at this juncture TRP would go.  That question of American
history was under intense scrutiny by some in the years when GR was
written and published, but--slowly--the deconstruction and reconstruction
of whose history and what history gets written is being accomplished.
(Not without a lot of rancor along the way from the Cheneys and Bennetts
about us.)

I did find it interesting that in his Sloth essay, Pynchon chose not to
dwell on the Puritan notions of Sloth (the Maypole at Merrymount and other
atrocities against the pursuit of pleasure are briefly alluded to in GR)
but to focus on Philadelphia, the Quakers and that foxy old Puritan crossover
Ben Franklin.  That's verging on the Line--what next?

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)