Pynchon and the postmodern

[Peter Trachtenberg]

On Sat, 14 Oct 1995, Ken Jones wrote:

> > But implicit 
> > in most pomo writing, art and architecture is the idea that grand works 
> > are no longer possible, that such feats are somehow antiquated, 
> > irrelevant, retrograde or bombastic. And GR is nothing if not a grand 
> > work: its only challengers in this country in the last three decades are 
> > William Gaddis's four existing novels and perhaps Don DeLillo's 
> > collective oeuvre.
> 
> I agree with Peter's well-argued take on Pynchon as more modernist
> than postmodernist, but would like to add to his list of "grand
> works." While perhaps not in the league of GR (what is?), I would
> include Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge and Women & Men and Robert
> Coover's The Public Burning. Though I haven't read the book, I'm sure
> William Gass' recent The Tunnel could also be considered. And if
> we're including "collective oeuvres," how about the dearly departed
> Stanley Elkin and the well-preserved William Burroughs?
> 
> Tom LeClair wrote an interesting book on the subject of giant
> modernist/postmodernist works (he refers to them as "system
> novels"). Wish I could remember the name. Among Pynchon, DeLillo,
> Coover, Gaddis, and McElroy, he also cites Ursula LeGuin's Always Coming Home
> and Joseph Heller's Something Happened (which I think is a very
> underrated book; probably the best work on American business and
> an American businessman since the days of Dreiser, Lewis, and
> Dos Passos).
> 
> Ken
> kenj at cadence.com
> 
I agree with your mentions of Coover, Elkin and Burroughs. I don't object 
to including McElroy, I just don't like him very much. And like almost 
everyone else I know, I have Gass's book sitting on my shelf but have yet 
to read it. I also agree with your assessment of Something Happened. I 
think it's been overlooked--if not actively dissed--by the collective 
opinion because it represented a diminuendo after Catch 22. It wasn't 
inventive; it was true. And because SH was true to the muted paranoia and 
wistful repression of corporate culture, truthful even in its absence of 
physical description (the literary corollary of incomprehensible job 
descriptions and grey-green industrial carpeting), it struck a lot of 
readers as an inferior achievement: if C22 is manic in its euphoric 
horror, SH is a depressive novel. And we know what happened to 
depression. They invented Prozac for it. (Could Prozac be the Imipolex of 
the 1980s and 90s?)