TRP and Gore Vidal

[Barry Westburg]

At 06:11 PM 11/10/95 -0400, Peter Trachtenberg wrote:
>
>
>On Wed, 11 Oct 1995 MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu wrote:
>
>> Mes Pynchonelles--
>> 
>> Someone just mentioned Gore Vidal. Anybody read Gore Vidal novels out 
>> there?  I recently read DULUTH, which I enjoyed very much.  I came 
>> across an interesting tidbit.   As part of the novel's plot, a 
>> mysterious red spaceship has landed on the outskirts of town.  The 
>> spaceship's location is represented by a red pushpin stuck in a wall map 
>> at police headquarters.  Whenever police Captain Eddie Thurow picks up 
>> the pin and moves it to another location on the map, 
>> the--actual--spaceship moves to that location.  On p. 67, when we're 
>> first told about this, the phenomenon is attributed to:
>> 
>> "Pynchon's lesser corrollary to the law of gravity [whereby] whenever a 
>> spaceship (macro) is represented by an object (micro) on an EXACT chart 
>> of where gravity insists it rest when not under propulsion, then MACRO 
>> will move on its plane exactly as MICRO moves on its representational 
>> plane."
>> 
>> 
>> There's a later repeat reference in an aside, when one of the aliens 
>> dismisses the corollary as elementary knowledge.
>> 
>> 
>> Anyone familiar with Vidal's  (non-historical) novels knows the time- 
>> and space-warp games he plays.  My question to the group is, do we 
>> consider him a --serious--enough writer to --seriously--consider 
>> questions of influence, shared or divergent aims/methods, etc. with 
>> Pynchon?  (Obvious in the above example, for example,  is the idea of 
>> the map mapping the world, the interaction/imbrication of a 
>> representation and the thing represented.) Or is he just being catty?  
>> 
>> Know any other references to TRP in Vidal's work? 
>> 
>> john m.
>> 
Have a look at Vidal's United States: Essays 1952-1992. pp.139-145 (and
elswehere--see index). He is a fairly close reader of TRP. Also see what he
has to say about Nabokov. 
>"It can never be satisfied, the mind, never." - Wallace Stevens