The 'Waste' Law | Pynchon's genealogical influences

[Daniel Harper]

Sorry I'm running about a week behind here, but I'm checking up on a
backlog of messages. I've been sorta vaguely looking at the family
history side of this, and there is definitely a sense that a "key" of
sorts has been discovered that helps to "understand" some of P's
work... or at least his motivations in writing his works the way he
did.

I'm struck, however, by just how directly a lot of it lines up, and
also about P's reticence to be a "public figure" and how little
biographical detail he has provided. Does anyone else think that
perhaps the _reason_ that P is so camera-shy and interview-phobic is
because he knew he was digging into the family dirty laundry a bit,
and that the more exposure that fact had, the more literary critics
would dismiss his work as simply family biography?

In other words (and I've touched on this before in slightly different
contexts), I think that the whole reason P doesn't give interviews,
etc., is that he wants his works to stand as themselves, without the
biographical lit-crit that was so common in decades past (and still
has a certain cachet today). So while the family history stuff may be
relevant to understanding _P_, I think it's almost antithetical to
understanding _P's works_, at least as he intended them to be read.

Maybe this is obvious to the rest of you, and if so, I apologize for
beating the dead horse (especially a week and a half late!), but I
hadn't seen it explicitly stated, so I wanted to chime in with my two
cents.

On Nov 12, 2007 5:47 PM, Bryan Snyder <wilsonistrey at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

(Keeping the most relevant stuff and snipping the rest)

> I would say that while TRP does place in his fiction a lot of his family's
> history and his family's ties with thematic "winners and losers of the Great
> Depression" (a lot like how GR deals with the winners and losers of the
> carving up of Germany and the businesses that fragmented from that action) I
> don't think that his own ancestry is central to the fiction.
>
> I'm sure he enjoys the study of his own past ancestors and sees that his
> family was very much at the center of that pre-Great Depression American
> collective monetary war and these references I think are more a
> manifestation in his literature of the fate that befalls all authors: the
> insertion of themselves in their art.
>
> But when his letters do get released, I think we'll see a different force
> that drove him to his works.
>
> In one letter that was written about(in the NY Times I think... the article
> dealing with the letters TRP's old publicist sold...) back before those
> letters were promised to be kept from the public until his death, TRP says
> himself (before GR, and in one of these letters) that's he's working on
> three books and if they are anything like he envisions they will be the
> "literary event of the millennium" and I just think that if he thought this
> (and time will tell) then it must because of the snippets of ideas that we
> all discuss that he can view as a larger and far more interacting-whole
> (science, technology, philosophy, behaviorism, politics, economics,
> engineering etc.) ideas that are far more important in an
> onto-epistemological sense and FOR all of mankind than this
> self-genealogical-study FOR his own personal demon-dealing.
>

<snip>

-- 
...the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules
are words...
--Daniel Harper