Fausto is not Pynchon

[Otto]

Terrance:
Pynchon, in GR, explores the gap between the great Wars.
With Pudding we have a man attempting to write a history,
but it dodges, it evades, it is all mixed up in mud and shit
and blood and guilt and Death and War.  The War poets,
particularly Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Isaac
Rosenberg, represented this breakdown thematically, but
through pre-war structures of versification and diction.
Modernist poetry was more like a linguistic acting-out of
the destruction of innocence which took place in the
trenches.
Modernism is also identifiable as the point at which writing
acknowledges that it doesn't originate purely within the
soul of the author; the modernist text plagiarizes
shamelessly, building itself up out of a
patchwork of unacknowledged quotations from a variety of
international cultural sources,
fragments " shored against my ruins. This is its
cosmopolitanism.
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Totally agreed.
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Brief digression: sorry, but postmodernism's obsession or
hang-up with defining itself by not defining itself but by
casting itself in a submissive shadow  (the woman, the
homosexual, the child, the poor, the colonized, the
marginalized,) of the dominant an oppressive evil
Modernism/Enlightenment/Rationalism/Christian/all the mean
nasty horrible things that Men are heir too/ ".."...) is a
lie.
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This assertion "lie" should be elaborated.
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Modernism is getting a bad rap from postmodernism In
literature, for example,
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I don't think so. Pomo is picking up again the 20th-Century Art-thing which
had begun with Modernism but had been interrupted badly by the two wars.
There has been Modernism before the "trenches" of WW-I.
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Modernism is most of what Postmodernism claims Modernism is
not, actually the pomo often make Modernism out to be an
evil anal retentive  monster with three heads one of them
being T.S. Eliot climbing the tower of London waiting for
the Brand to come.
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You have said similar repeatedly but I haven't read any proof yet. There is
a definite stylistic difference betrween "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake."
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Its roots are EXCEPTIONALLY broad because
it is a result of cultural broadening and the
cross-fertilization between cultures, between art forms and
between disciplines. Kinda like knocking down boundaries,
but not being so destructive and self-serving about it.
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For the "common reader" the Beckett-Trilogy (which is modernist according to
your definition), Joyce etc., is well destructive. "Entartete Kunst" has
been burned by the nazis because they considered Modernism as destructing
"holy values."
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Modernism in literature: cross textually diverse
cross-fertilization between cultures,  between art forms and
between disciplines-the need to confront violence, nihilism,
and despair; the fascination with, but fear of, the
unconscious; the centrality of a dramatized narrator who is
not omniscient but rather himself searching for
understanding; a symbolic richness which invites multiple
interpretations (influence of French Symbolism), radical
redefinition of the real (W and H James, Freud, Bergson)
Colonial programs, ruthless exploitation, journey (up the
Congo) or Modern (T.S. Eliot secularized) quest or symbolic
exploration into the darkest heart (consciousness) of Man,
manipulation of the reader's experience of time and space by
means of disruption of narrative chronology and
ontological/epistemological differentiation and the
representation of consciousness (stream and multiple) by the
description of events, and the use of the  reflexivity and
self-consciousness.
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All this is true and important for the understanding of the 20th Century but
says nothing at all about Postmodernism, the beginning of this period I
would put in the interregnum between the two wars.
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The Waste Land, to the frustration of many an undergraduate
reader, straddles eastern and
western cultural history in a dazzling and maddening parade
of name dropping and references, which build up into a
polemical lament for fallen culture. Geographically,
modernism wasn't centered on one
cultural-imperial capital, but danced from London to Paris
to Vienna to Berlin to New York
to Dublin and back again. It cannot be situated, and this
cultural uncertainty is, in The Waste Land at least, a
symptom of decay: What is the city over the mountains Cracks
and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
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Indeed

Otto