A Historical Novel of a New Sort

[Paul Mackin]

On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 11:34 -0800, Dave Monroe wrote:
> Again from Inger H. Dalsgaard, "Gravity's Rainbow: A
> Historical Novel of a New Sort," Pynchon Notes 50-51
> (Spring-Fall 2002), pp. 34-50 ...
> 
> "The reader may know the canonical history texts
> Pynchon writes from and against and expect some sort
> of condemnation of or siding against the atrocities of
> that delimited part of history.  Critical readers
> suggest that Pynchon neglects his duty to depict the
> Holocaust and the horror of moidern combat as
> undeniable truths of the Second World War, as if his
> fictional focus on rocketry has deselected the results
> and denied the core of Germany's totalitarian regime. 
> This is far from the case.  Yet Pynchon aims not just
> at the core of some universal human truth about modern
> history beyond immediate past events such as the
> latest World War, but also at that deeper history and
> the time-bound incidents which are its outward
> manifestation, in ways which challenge reader
> expectations of a hierarchy of importance ordering
> historical according to their relative contemporary
> moral importance.  By not appearing to place the
> Holocaust above the rocket program, or descriptions of
> the rocket's deadly impact above descriptions of teh
> rocket's design itself, Pynchon confounds those
> readers who have found his priorities inappropriate in
> light of their own hierarchical expectations
> (revealing that readers are not entirely free to
> construct even from Gravity's Rainbow's vastness, but
> read their own and common history texts into
> literature).  Some have been offended that human
> casualties, on the battlefields or at the Third
> Reich's extermination camps, are barely (or only
> briefly) mentioned, and with a lack of gravity.
>    "However, Pynchon expresses gravity with a
> loghtness of touch, either through passages of both
> tragedy and levity, or by exposing the grotesqueness
> of war in ways which make the  reader question facts
> and established hiostorical information.... Pynchon
> often employs historical events in microstrategies
> that foster a fictional alienation from what the
> reader may believe to be simple truth.... he turns ...
> gruesome brutality ... inside out both to investigate
> something deeper in the motives for the actions and to
> interrogate unrecognized beliefes concerning who was
> good and bad in the war....  In the process he thwarts
> readers' automatic, possibly legitimizing explanation
> of a historical even and rediects attentiontoward
> understanding the event through less habitual channels
> ...." (p. 40)




Sounds like what the above is saying is that some of Pynchon's readers
and/or critics are are exceedingly dense (hope there are examples given)
failing right off the bat to recognize that Pynchon is not a Herman Wouk
but a writer who actually CAN thwart readers' automatic explanations of
things, interrogate their unrecognized beliefs concerning good and evil,
etc,,etc. In other words can do things that make one a good writer. Is
there much more to it than this? If so, are the mere existences of poor
readers and critics a very sturdy even partical base upon which to build
a scholarly article? People who have read Inger Dalsgaard's article will
know the answer. I'm just giving my untutored reaction to the brief
excerpt.

I suspect it is a mistake to call GR an historical novel, even one "of a
whole new sort." Historical novel normally refers to a type of popular
fiction, not to literary work aimed at an audience capable of being
challanged. Historical novels can of course be well written. Not denying
that. Waverley and I Claudius were well written. Even Herman Wouk isn't
a terrible writer. Forever Amber was more typical of the historical
novel however. Artie Shaw didn't marry Kathleen Winsor for her writing
stlye. Wonder why he did marry her. Beautiful like Lana and Ava.


> Okay, back to, uh, work here ...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 		
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