P andVN

[Wasted Words]

  Suggestion:  Read: 
> Milton, Coleridge, Keats, 
> Wordsworth.'"
> 
> I  don't cite this as unimpeachable (and, if true,
> it says nothing, finally, 
> about influence); just adding it to the pile.

Just piling it up here, but in the SL Intro. Pynchon
talks a lot about how he was influenced by the Tube.
He also talks about his generation and how they missed
 the parade and were getting everything second from
the media (page 9). 

 In V., he does several things with these TV/media
influences that are quite ingenius. First, he creates
Stencil and a Baedeker world (N talks about the
difficulties he faced when he left his homeland and
began to create "new world" fictional landscapes and
how he made use of Baedeker--of course we find N
playing with this Baedeker difficulty brilliantly in
Lolita). Second, the implied author of V. tells us
that all of the characters in the "Benny chapters" of
V. model themselves after TV and movie personalities.
All but one--Paola. 


On a very basic level, CL49 is a weaker novel than V.
in part because there is no Stencil-like  narrator and
 VL is a weaker than M&D because there is no
Cherrycoke. 

GR is another story. but it seems that by GR  Pynchon
got round to reading Milton,  the Romantic poets too,
I guess... and whole lot more great literature.
Although the ideas -- socio-economic, scientific,
religious--are still there, they don't crowd out the
characters and poetry. 

Nabokov's lecture on Bleakhouse can be applied to
Pynchon's novels, particualrly GR and VL.  

Rather than read BH or V. or GR or VL as satire, even
as a "non-corrective" postmodern fable of subversion
"satire" with no target or as MS, we can read  these
novels as N reads BH. As N points out, and this is a
fact that is well known the apparent target of some of
the satire in BH, if read as satire, had ceased to
exist. The same is true of GR. So we often argue about
what is really quite besdie the point, that is, did
Pynchon get it right when he satirizes Nixon or Reagan
or American capitalism. Bad question to ask about a
fiction. If he tried he failed. But the target of his
satire, to name but one, IG Farben, ceased to exist.
Oh boy! No, no, no, no. You missed it. THEY are alive
and well! Yes, they are, as long as GR is a alive, but
by insisting that THEY are Bush II, we threaten the
life of P's fiction. 


Anyway, we can go through the lecture on BH, from the
great imagery that is no greater than the imagery in
GR, to the children, to madness, to attributes, to
enfetishment, "to detective plot", to dualism and skip
over the socio economic and feel that spark in the
spine again. 




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