Late Imperial Romance

[Dave Monroe]

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

   "But what sets V. and Gravity's Rainbow apart most
dramatically from the novels we have been studying is
Pynchon's relentless critique of the most fundamental
elements of Western romance.  Conrad, Didion, DeLillo
and Stone all represent political romances as
dangerous things.  But Pynchon rejects the opposition
they draw between these romances and the individual
spiritual romances they celebrate.  Both forms of
romance, he argues, are derived from the Christian
West's master narrative of redemption, with its
valorization of ascetic self-management, its
celebration of inner essences and transcendental
possibilities, its scorn for imperfection, for mere
surfaces, and for mere survival.  And both have served
to sponsor the West's voracious and ultimately
unsurvivable expansion.
   "Unready to celebrate tehse romances, but unready
as well to surrender to the destruction he sees them
as sponsoring, Pynchon breaks in yet another way from
the tradition of late imperial romance.  He takes on
the task of articulating counter-stories that will
sponsor political resistance without promoting
disaster.  V. explores the possibility of making
romance survivable by making it grotesque: repudiating
the conventional romance ethos of selfless sacrifice
and the conventional dreams of pure goodness. 
Garvity's Rainbow, which models a counter-ethos of
imperfection and impurity in its very form, goes on to
challenge the Christian romance more directly. 
Infused, as Tom LeCalir and Dwight Eddins have shown,
with the ideas of systems ecology and romantic
naturalism, the novel represents not only Christian
transcendentalism but 'empire' and 'enterprise' as
ultimately unsurvivable assaults on life itself.  And
it offers, in their place, not the usual late imperial
consolation of trannscendent re-enchantment and
world-rejecting resignation, but an eco-spiritual
vision that combines re-enchnatment with political
resistance." (pp. 153-4)

Citing ...

Eddins, Dwight.  The Gnostic Pynchon.
   Bllongton: Indiana UP, 1990.

LeClair, Tom.  The Art of Excess: Mastery in
   Contemporary American Fiction.  Urbana: U of
   Illinois P, 1989.

--- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> Of course, being Pynchon, GR's  romance with WW II
> is a mock romance.  That's quite OK. If something
> wasn't there in the first place, there'd be no need
> to mock it. And P is such a gentle mocker.

"Are you a mod or are you a rocker?"
"I'm a mocker."

--A Hard Day's Night (dir. Richard Lester, 1964)

"Mods and rockers, mods and rockers ..."

--The Knack ... and How to Get It (dir. RL, 1965)

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