The 'Waste' Law | Pynchon's genealogical influences

[Monte Davis]

> 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.

We're talking about a quintessentially *overdetermined* situation here.

We have no way of knowing how much of the Pynchon family history he may have
absorbed growing up. Maybe every day was saturated, Yoknapatawpha county
style, with "we Sartorises used to be powers in the land." Maybe there was
only an occasional mention of his dad's second cousin, a collateral branch
of the family that was rich and went bust after the Crash." Maybe our TRP
knew nothing about it until his twenties, when he was *already* an
omnivorous reader and world-class maker of connections, *already*
preoccupied with broad themes of power in American (and world) history. 

As I wrote in the "Railroads and steel..." thread, the area of Long Island
where he grew up is home to "hundreds if not thousands of families with
ancestors [or collateral branches] who were movers and shakers in [NYC]
before the Depression... and as such, could be linked with railroads, power
companies, Edison, Brown Brothers Harriman (and every other investment bank
and brokerage you care to name)." 

Equally amazingly, as far as I know, Richard Powers (Gain), Theodore Dreiser
(the "Trilogy of Desire"), William Dean Howells (Rise of Silas Lapham, A
Hazard of New Fortunes), Frank Norris (The Octopus), John Galsworthy (The
Forsyte Saga) and a lot of other novelists who have engaged with business
dynasties did *not* have such a background. Thomas Mann did -- Buddenbrooks
owes a great deal to his grain-trading Hansa merchant family -- but I didn't
know that until years after I'd read it, and knowing it made almost no
difference to what the book means to me. 

So... I find the Pynchon family background no less (and no more) interesting
than it is to know about 17th-century William and John Hathorne when I think
about The Scarlet Letter and The House of The Seven Gables, or to know that
some of Sir Walter Scott's ancestors had played a part in some of the Scots
and Border historical events he wrote about. Did that "personal" history
play a part in making those books what they are? Yes. Can I imagine other
authors, without such histories, taking up those or similar themes? Yes; in
fact, others did. Arthur Miller managed to shape at least as much of the
Salem, MA of our mental landscape as Hawthorne did, without any genealogical
links at all.
 
One of Pynchon's most characteristic riffs from V. onward has been to set up
a lot of connections and to show us characters wondering which are
meaningful -- even determinative -- and which are Kute Korrespondences. I,
for one, don't think he's "camera-shy and interview-phobic... because he
knew he was digging into the family dirty laundry." I don't have any reason
to believe *he* thinks it's dirty in the first place. Most of the current
*A-ha!"-ing on this topic seems to be coming from people with their own
sociopoliticocultural agendas involving the secret machinations of wealth
and power... some of which overlap with [what I take to be] TRP's, and some
of which are Kute Korrepondences. 

Meanwhile, the work is what it is.