GRGR(11): Webley Silvernail/a little on narration

[Michael Crowley]

> Does anyone else think of American Romance here? Hawthorne
> and company? Does anyone attribute the ironic strategies of
> this narrator to Eliot? Doesn't Pynchon's use of film owe
> more to Hawthorne ("HSG" in particular) than Hollywood?
> 
> TF  

This sounds pretty cool, but I'm not sure how you mean the use of film in
this scene is indebted to Hawthorne.  I definitely see an attitude
in TP's narrator(s) similar to the tone of preface to House of Seven
Gables, in which Hawthorne explains the difference between Romance and
Novel and how this difference allows him to take whatever
liberties in diverging from "mot merely ...the possible,
but...the probable and ordinary course of man's experience" (relevant also
to the discussion of novels in M&D).  

H writes, in part, "The point of view under which this tale comes under
the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with
the very present that is flitting away from us." He finishes the preface,
perhaps disingenuously, by suggesting that the reader should not "choose
to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of this narrative. .
. . It has been no part of his [Hawthorne's] object to describe local
manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a community
for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard."  H is
covering his ass even before the Pynchons start complaining. Even so, he's
not nearly as concerned with local manners and realism as TP is in
Gravity's Rainbow.  It's the amount of scholarship and realistic detail in
GR that creates the foundation for the more fantastic elements, not a cute
preface like Hawthorne's.

I'm trying to recall how the novel itself might fit into TP's use of film,
but help me out here.  The gothic elements in GR are sakin to some of H's
work, but probably owe more to H Walpole and M Shelley.

Mike Crowley
------------
crowley at arches.uga.edu