The Art of Excess

[Dave Monroe]

>From Tom LeClair, The Art of Excess: Mastery in
Contemporary American Fiction (Urbana: U of Illinois
P, 1989), Ch. 2, "Prologue: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow," pp. 36-68 ...

   "The most persistent criticism of Gravity's Rainbow
... asserts that the novel is excessive to no purpose,
that Pynchon exceeds conventions of selection,
organization, proportion, scale, and taste as a mere
parodist or crazed absolutist of verbal surface.... 
Newman claims that Gravity's Rainbow ... [is] marked
by an 'inflation of discourse' which the 'controlling
intelligence of technique alone is powerless to
reveerse' (PA, 92).  The result of this aesthetic
absolutism, argues Newman, is that Pynchon writes for
'an audience which does not exist, but cannot exist
unless it progresses with the same utopian technical
advancement of expertise, the same accelerating value,
which informs the verbal dynamic of the novels written
for them' (PA, 92).  I believe ... that Pynchon's
aesthetic deformations have a triple effect: 1) they
overload and thus deconstruct the codes and ideology
of realist fiction; 2) they reconstruct an imitative
form that implies the reciprocal plenitude posited by
systems science; and 3) they both alienate and solicit
readers who live in the age of information to which
Newman cannot adjust." (p. 38)

Citing ...

Newman, Charles.  The Post-Modern Aura:
   The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation.
   Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1985.

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