Late Imperial Romance

[Dave Monroe]

>From John McClure, Late Imperial Romance (New York:
Verso, 1994), Ch. 6, "Resisting Romances: Pynchon's V.
and Gravity's Rainbow," pp. 152-76 ...

   "Reading V. ... one becomes sharply aware of how
much has been left out of other fictional treatments
of imperial struggle.  Where Didion and Stone
dramatize these struggles almost exclusively in terms
of limited engagements between single metropolitan and
Third World nations, Pynchon sees imperial ambitions
structuring both this kind of violence and the great
power rivalries that threaten to explode again into
global war....  In V., then, colonial and metropolitan
history are viewed together, as different aspects of a
single global imperial history.  And the history of
the first half of the twentieth century is represented
as a matter not just of escalating violence and
inhumanity--the familiar story--but of escalating
imperial struggle.
   "Pynchon is writing back, in other words, against
traditions of thought that reproduce Western biases by
isolating mere colonial struggles from the great
events of the times.  And he is writing back as well
against the familiar Western representation of the
great wars of the century as isolated events of
mysterious origin.  'We're at peace,' proclaims a
character in Gravity's Rainbow, as World War II ends. 
'No, we're not,' thinks another character.  'It's
another bit of propaganda.'  He sees 'the same flows
of power, the same impoverishments' and includes that
'There's something still on' [GR, p. 628].  'The real
War is always there.  The dying tapers off now and
then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of
people' (645).  This repudiation of a 'propanganda'
that denies the ubiquity of deadly international
competitions is articulated in V. as well.  The First
World War, one character insists, 'was fundamentally
no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the
Sudanese wars, even the Crimea.'  To represent it (as
Henry James did in his famous letter) as a 'Nameles
Horror, the suden prodigy sprung on a world unaware,'
is to see it incorrectly.  'There was no innovation,
no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar
principles.  If it came as any surprise to the public
then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly
teh war itself' [V., p. 459]." (pp. 154-5)

--- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> The 60s was like Pynchon's War. A seeming Presence
> with a Life of its own, but . . .

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