What Pynchon knows about Entrippy and other matters.

Terrance lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Tue Feb 11 05:15:16 CST 2003


Pynchon may end up being the most written about American novelist in
history. Melville was only "re-discovered" recently and while others
(i.e., Irving, Cooper, Twain, Poe,) have launched huge industries,
Pynchon's timing (Morrison's too) has sent his stock into off the
charts.  With only a few novels it's hard to imagine that Pynchon books
themselves will keep his stock up. And, just as the Pynchon List can't
sustain a conversation around his picked over feast forever, the
industry needs to diversify to survive. Who knows, perhaps 8o years from
now someone will find an unpublished manuscript in a barn or perhaps
Pynchon will publish books of poetry and these will find favor with
critics in 100 years or so. Pynchon, disinherited as was Melville, would
surely be the inheritor of Melville's broken estate if that were to
happen. In the mean time, critical studies will continue to be more
about what critics know and the various debates among schools of
literary criticism than about what Pynchon knows. Entrippy! Yes,but
refusing to have your picture taken (in many ways Pynchon is the polar
opposite of Toni Morrison) has a price. Pynchon, it seems, his agent,
his publishers, his industry, are happy to accept it thank you very
much. 




Pynchon himself claims, in the introduction to SL, that he has nothing
more than a casual understanding of entropy, and goes some way to
demonstrating this claim by using a definition of the term from the OED
instead of a more arcane definition from a scientific text. There are no
direct references in GR or elsewhere in Pynchon's writing to quantum
mechanics or even allusions to the physicists whose work in the first
half of the century led to the creation of the atomic bombs which are
released by the US on Japan, and which Slothrop discovers at the end of
the novel. Given that Pynchon is careful throughout his work to assign
blame to a lineage of scientists, philosophers, and political leaders
for the state of the world in the twentieth century, these are
remarkable absences. (141)

Alan W. Brownlie, TP's Narratives Subjectivity and the Problem of
Knowing, 2000

Again, early Pynchon criticism assumed that Pynchon was a scientist
writing fiction. They undervalued Religion/Politics/America. 

But Moore, and Ironically, Brownlie and K. Hume, expose Pynchon limited
understanding of science. The same is true of much that Pynchon seems to
know but doesn't--communication theory, philosophy (i.e., 
Wittgenstein), conspiracy theory, communication theory, etc. and Co.
....



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