Circularity of GR, Mendelson, Ulysses

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

At 18:22 08/03/97 -0800, you wrote:
>...being a true circle like FW, in which the ending leads back to the
>beginning, this just lends thematic continuity, with the ending completing
>the beginning.  Instead of an actual circle, I see this type of plot
>shaped like an omega, with much contained between two close points. If
>there's any real circularity, I think it would be found in the Hymn, and
>the prospect of renewal...
>     Gershom Bazerman (from the wrong address)

Edward Mendelson is (or rahter was) an interesting critic 
whom I respectgreatly  but with whom I do not always agree. 
In his introduction to Pynchon: Critical Essays (1978),
has a discussion which, although I don't think it mentions
the term post-modern, describes why he doesn't think Pynchon
is a Modernist novelist. He compares GR favourably with 
Ulysses, the book he sees as perhaps the most quintessentialy 
modernist of all novels. I love Ulysses, but  Ed, it seems, was less
fond of it than me, downright ambivalent--- 
Mendelson says: 

"The inward turn of Ulysses, the circularity of its narritive
is among the late consequences of the romantic and modernist
sensibility whose triumphant achievement is a literature which
exists finally only for itself. Such literature may claim a public
function or an 'unacknowledged legislative role,' but such
claims are best left untested...Serene in its vision of unalterable
cycles,  Ulyssses ends just before its beginnings, and closes with
its tail in its mouth.Gravity's Rainbow devotes its final hundered
pages not to a return on itself, but to an effort to find ultimate 
beginnings and endings. Ulysses ends in an eternal return, 
Gravity's Rainbow in the dangerous facts of a moment of crisis---
which is, always our present moment."

Mendelson was one of the first well-known critics to 
openly champion Pynchon as one of the greatest writers
in the English language. He saw in Pynchon a way of moving
away from both the psycological novel and High Modernism,
towards a fiction which, perhaps like Dickens before
him, rendered the socio-economic and political relations of
persons as a pre-condition to the inward life of charecters.

But how much of his comparitive structure between GR and
Ulysses do we really agree with?  And does it ignore some of 
Pynchon's own circularity? Surely CL49,  and also GR, have 
aspects of circularity built into their structure. 

Comments?
Eric Alan Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk