_V._: Inconclusive Unscientific Postscript

[Alan Westrope]

I decided to embed this in the list archives even though I'm not sure
if the _V._ reading is over.  Here are a couple passages I've always
found stikingly similar in tone and content:
======================================================================
               _V._, p. 270 in my beatup Bantam edition:

Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjuction with
the sun, the dog days began.  The world started to run more
and more afoul of the inanimate.  Fifteen were killed in a train
wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July.  The next day fifteen people
died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid.  July 4 a bus fell
into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers drowned.
Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm
in the central Philippines.  9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by
an earthquake and tidal waves, which killed forty-three.  14 July
a MATS plane crashed after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in
New Jersey, killing forty-five.  An earthquake at Anjar, India,
21 July, killed 117.
======================================================================
                     _The Recognitions_, p. 947:

Spring came everywhere, as though for the first time.

And for the first time, civilized use was found for the Great
Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, where a native son hurled himself
effectively down the slope of two-ton blocks.  In South America,
with seventeen dead and 4,990 in need of medical attention after
Rio de Janeiro's pre-Lenten festivities, Holy Week itself moved toward
a comparatively peaceful close.  Three hundred lepers were reported
marching on the capital city of Colombia from their colony at Rio
Agua de Dios.  Nine Pilgrims were trampeled to death, and twenty-five
injured, jamming the gates of the Shrine of Chalma in Mexico.
======================================================================

While the question of whether Pynchon read Gaddis before writing _V._
seems to me one of the most interesting in postwar U.S. fiction, I'm
not much interested in whether he read Gaddis *after* _V._ was published.
(It would hardly be surprising if TRP decided to read Gaddis after seeing
published assertions that he actually *was* Gaddis, though it's equally
conceivable he chose to avoid Gaddis so as to avoid any possibility of
contamination from the influence of a similar writer.)

I expect we'll never know...

-- 
Alan Westrope <awestrop at dimensional.com> <awestrop at nyx.net>

Whish!  A gull.  Gulls.  Far calls.  Coming, far!  End here.