Inconclusive Unscientific Postscript

[Samuel Moyer]

pretty interesting... when was Recognitions first published?  How was it
received, etc..?  Obviously TRP was well read... but I am not... thanks, sam

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Westrope" <awestrop at dimensional.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2001 11:09 AM
Subject: _V._: Inconclusive Unscientific Postscript


>
> 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.