T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" and The Crying of Lot 49

[jbor]

on 6/6/02 3:14 PM, m. at di645 at freenet.carleton.ca wrote:

> He is conscious that he has violated that rule with the story "Entropy"...
> so is he violating the rule with most if not all of his works?

Pynchon's criticism of 'Entropy' is that it is a short story which has been
*wholly* structured and detailed so that all elements conform to an abstract
scientific/philosophical concept. This means that the events occur, and that
the characters act and speak in ways which don't ring true, and this is in
order that the text as a whole will illustrate a particular theoretical
construct. And, indeed, the narrative structure of this story is quite
stilted imo. 'Under the Rose' is the other story which he is referring to in
the quote from the _Slow Learner_ 'Intro' you cite, and he certainly took
pains to rectify this story's artificial "grounding ... [in] the data in a
guidebook" when he rewrote it as Chapter III of _V._ A comparison of those
two versions of the same story exemplifies pretty well the criticism he is
making in the SL 'Intro', and some of the difference between these two early
stories and the later works.

best