_GR_ & _The Recognitions_

[Brian Stonehill Media Studies Pomona College]

Hi friends,

Charles Corlett raises questions we haven't heard in a while about the links
between Pynchon & Gaddis.  Aha, the big books.  Throw in _Ulysses_ & Nabokov's
_Ada_ and you've got a good shelf to grow a dissertation on...

In his book on _The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to
Pynchon_ (sorry, exCUSE me, pu-lease...  U Penn Press, '88, '89 paper), this
poster tried to explore the self-consciousness that links _The Recognitions_
and _Gravity's Rainbow_, & ended up concluding that while Gaddis uses
self-consciousness to direct the satiric edge of his otherwise other-directed
analysis against his own literary pretentions, Pynchon uses many of the same
self-conscious devices to heighten the power of _GR_'s many suspended
paradoxes.  Gaddis wants us to come down on the side of laughing at social,
artistic, and moral hypocrisy; Pynchon wants us to stay up.

Or so it seemed at the time.

Cheers,  Brian