Forgive the intrusion, please. I need a word.

[Paul Mackin]

What's the name for a novel that answers all your past confusions,
uncertainties misconceptions, guilts about yourself and everybody else,
thereby literally changing your  life and supplying debating points for
every occasion imaginable?

Answer: Gravity's Rainbow.

        P.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: Forgive the intrusion, please. I need a word.


> Is this a trick question?
>
> A good question to ask your professor and respected  scholar Andrew
> Delbanco.
> I believe he's written a book on the subject.
> Or James Wood.
> Or maybe our very own MalignD (Nabokov's lectures).
> A word? Novels that instruct?
> Propaganda ;-)
> Try searching "Novel" AND  "Delight and Instruct", "Cause and Effect",
> "Aristotle and  Plot".
> If you're only looking for a word--didactic.
> However, I'm not sure that a book that teaches people to behave morally
> can also be a novel.
> This is probably just my own opinion or just my own confusion about what
> a novel is.
> See also Didactic Literature, Allegory, Courtesy Book, Exemplum, Satire.
>
> On the the other hand, there are explicitly didactic authors, ranging
> from allegorists like Bunyan to philosophical propagandists like Sartre.
> Satirists like Swift and Voltaire, though they may indulge in some
> realistic effects for their own sake, will clearly sacrifice realism
> whenever their satirical ends require the sacrifice. On the other hand,
> many purely "mimetic" or objective writers, writers for whom the
> allegation of didacticism would be distressing, also treat realism as
> subordinate and functional to their special purposes. Much as Fielding
> and Dickens, Trollope and Thackery may talk about their passion for
> truth to nature or the real, they are often willing, as some modern
> critics have complained, to sacrifice reality to tears or laughter.
>
> Booth, Wayne *The Rhetoric of Fiction*
>
> Pynchon's Progress?  ...quest novels... postmodern parodies of quest and
> detective
> novels... encyclopedic... carnival...picaresque....
>
> "And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the
> shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the
> dial of Ahaz."
> - II Kings 20:11.