GRGR

[Dave Monroe]

... a quick response here.  First off, if you're interested in, I don't know, history 'n' fiction, perhaps take a
look at, for starters, on that marxist tip, Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, and, at a postmodern angle, and as
alluded to here, recently, albeit parodically, Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction.  Both might bear on just how Pynchon is using history, historical fact, historical myth, mythical history,
even ...

... and not sure if Pynchon is being "criticized" for not adhering to, not including (as) comprehensively (as
possible), "the" historical record.  Actually, what one tends to find is, alongside all the wackiness, obvious or
otherwise, Pynchon tends to deploy quite a bit of that historical record--indeed, sometimes, amazingly, for
Pynchon, the truth really IS stranger than the fiction.   I think it's because of Pynchon's attention to such
details that historical minutiae necessarily become a topic of discussion.  At any rate, Pynchon does indeed have
his own take on history, on what happened, and how, and why, and what the implications there of might be.  Just
trying to work out just what that take might be, is all ...

... but I feel badly about all the questions that do go unanswered here, esp. the very good one a while back about
how to go about tecahing The Crying of Lot 49 in a high school English class, perhaps it might be an incentive to
y'all to note that I might well have been the only one here to even attempt a (humble, at best) response to that.
Wish I could say anything useful about Mason and Dixon, which I rifled through upon publication, but, hell, I'm
still working out Gravity's Rainbow, haven't even gotten 'round to rereading Vineland yet ...

Daniel Callahan wrote:

> I don't have anything against a group read, but I
> posted a Q on M&D a week back, got one short but
> helpful reply, and that was it.  That's understandable
> when a) I really don't have a handle on how this list
> operates, and b) everyone is head-first into the
> topics orbiting GR.  Maybe all that's needed is a way
> to catch us newbies up when we join the list (as in:
> the recent history so far...)  All information being
> in a context, of course--
>
> As for GR:  Reading a bit of John Kevin Newman's work
> on the classical epic tradition-- he mentions
> Aristotle's dictum that history cannot be used as a
> subject for epic literature because it doesn't allow
> the author to reach his highest peak of poetic
> achievement (Why?  History is too much fact for epic).
>  The exception to this rule, of course, being when
> history is old enough to have become myth.  Pynchon,
> in our hyper-historicized age, seems to have
> proactively made history into a mythic structure.
> Why?  Not to follow Aristotle's rule, I would say,
> because Aristotle was not a conservative critic who
> liked to make up rules.  He was an artist at
> classification and criticism who followed the latest
> trends and made bold statements, and Pynchon either
> intentionally or coincidentally acknowledged that
> Aristotle had a point.  And so we get a novel that has
> one foot in history and another in his own
> postmodernmyth.
>
> And since the P wasn't writing straight history,
> there's no need to include every single damn event
> and/or artocity that occured in WWII -- and therefore
> no basis to criticize him on that point.  (Oy!)
>
> Does Heller ever get this type of criticism?
>
> Daniel.
>
> =====
> "Any man who would prefer great wealth or power to love, the love of friends, is sick to the core of his soul."
> - Euripides
>
> Daniel's homepage:
> http://www.geocities.com/shada71/
>
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