Atdtda22: [42.1i] Modern poetry, 607

[Monte Davis]

Paul sez:

> That "renewed interest in finding out what modernism really 
> was" is as good a description as any of Pynchon's novel.

Very true and well said for the wide swath of "high arts & culture" threads
in AtD. Less so for the threads of math and science, labor and capital, the
Great Game (both central Asian and Balkan), and the many, many mass-culture
threads: pulp adventure, Western, detective, science fiction, Buchanesque
thriller, nascent Hollywood/TV coming up in LA, and TV/internet here ("the
population who communicated by Gas").

To claim more reminds me of our earler discussion of Madsen's assertion that
"the first Western was Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902)"
  
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0705&msg=118312

which I argued could be substantiated only as "the first elegiac, post-F. J.
Turner, passing-of-the-West Western setting us up for John Ford movies" -- a
much narrower claim.
   
I'm sure Jameson could assimilate all the other threads to modernism.
Following Freud's lead on repression, what *can't* be assimilated via that
slick "the less is said about X, the more we can be sure of a preoccupation
with X"..? (And yes, I'm uncomfortably aware of its formal similarity to my
"offstage but central" arguments about the Holocaust and Cold War in GR,
Enlightenment/Romantics or determinism/magic in M&D, psychology and
relativity in AtD.)

I would be the last to dispute that Pynchon knows and plays rich games with
his modernist and postmodernist high culture. But he also knows what a small
whirlpool it is in the ocean of history, and has some fun with Jameson Raids
on the inarticulate hinterland of the Slow and the Stupefied.