Comprising confrontations in _GR_

[Terrance]

Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> A couple of notes on this: first,Edward Mendelson, in his essay,
> "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (in his Mindful Pleasures)--which was likely an
> early and strong influence on my own ruminations on Pynchon--sets forth
> not only his idea of a genre of "encyclopedic" works--The Divine Comedy,
> Gargantua and Pantagruel, Don Quixote, Faust, Moby-Dick, Ulysses,
> Gravity's Rainbow, for starters--but, further, claims such works serve
> their "encyclopedic" function for, at, a given time, place (albeit not
> necessarily in that order), generally, at the founding of a nation, or a
> particular order.  Moby-Dick is already the (North) American
> encyclopedic fiction, Mendelson claims; Gravity's Rainbow instead serves
> this function for "a new international culture, created by the
> technologies of instant communication and the economy of world markets"
> ("encyclopedic narratives appear near the beginning of a culture's or a
> nation's sense of its own separate existence," sez Mendelson).
[snip]


Here is something you may or may not find helpful: 

The "Modern Menippean Satire", and GR, may be read as such,
would combine and correct, Frye's 'Anatomy and Mendelson's.
See Eliot
Braha's  "Menippean Form in GR and Other
Contemporary American Texts." Diss. Columbia Univ. 1979. 

Here are the Bakhtin elements Braha lists, all of which can
be identified in GR. 




 
1) Carnival

2) quest-motif serves to test philosophical truths

3) the trilevelled construction of "earth," a "nether world"
and an "olympus" 

4) dissolution or merging of identities, in particular, the
motif of the double.

5) extraordinary freedom of philosophical invention within
the plot

6) combination of free fantasy, symbolism and --on
occasion--the mystical religious element with the crude
naturalism of low life 

7) the concern with ultimate philosophical positions

8) the experimental fantasticality in the handling of
perspective which can imperceptibly shift from ant's to
bird's view

9) eccentric or scandalous behaviour--spectacular
stomach-turning passages

10) utopian--or, to be more accurate, dystopian--elements of
the quest motif

11) the juxtaposition of items normally distant, often in
oxymoronic combinations

12) the parody of various genres and the mixture of prose
and verse diction

14) the variety of styles
 
15) topicality and publicistic quality--WWII novel that
illustrates ideological issues of the 1960s

see also, Kharpertian, Theodore D. A Hand to Turn the Time:
The Menippean Satires of
Thomas Pynchon. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 1990. 

http://www.otus.oakland.edu/english/showcase/satbib.htm