Another way to categorize TRPs oeuvre

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Mark Kohut wrote:

> The World History novels. A trilogy.
> "V."
> "Gravity's Rainbow"
> "Against the Day"
>
> The contemorary (or recent past) American novels
>
> - -- "C of Lot 49"
> - ----"Vineland"
> - ----new one
>
> The historical American novel
> - ---Mason & Dixon

Squeezing huge, uncategorizable novels into neat litttle boxes? Heck, count me in!

I'll subscribe to your first two categories, but I'll rearrange the works a bit:
M&D definitely belongs to the World History novels, whereas V. doesn't belong
anywhere. V. was written before Pychon really came of age as a writer, and in
many ways he cut his teeth on that novel. Later, I think he conceived what we could
call his World Historical Project, but I think V. was written before that idea.

GR, M&D and AtD, on the other hand, have World History written all over them.
They all span several continents (one third of M&D takes place in Europe and Africa),
they all take place right on the brink of major historical cusps (The Enlightenment,
Modernity, and Postmodernity), and they all try to salvage some of the many ideas
from these historical periods that have later been tossed into the Dustbin of History. 

At a first glance, M&D may seem stylistically different from AtD and GR, but the
stylistic difference is a natural consequence of what I believe to be a conscious
project in these three novels: To write them in a style consistent with the period
they depict. Pynchon tries to reconstruct the complexity of these historical cusps;
to describe the past not as past, but as the present that it once was. An in order
to do so, he reconstructs (not altogether faithfully) the styles corresponding to each
period: The archaic language of M&D, the more modern but sometimes stilted style 
of AtD, and the ultramodern vernacular of GR.

Finally, look at the structural similarities of these three novels: As opposed to V., 
Lot 49, and VL, all three are divided into a few named parts (3, 4, and 5), and all three
have seventy-something chapters.

M&D, AtD and GR constitute Pynchon's Great Global Trilogy, describing the overall
historical development of the world (the western world in particular, it should be
pointed out) through the most important historical cusps of the past 250 years.
Incidentally, the three phases covered by these three novels (The Enlightenment,
Modernity, and Postmodernity), correspond nicely with Ernst Mandel's three stages
of capitalism: market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and
late multinational capitalism. These three stages in turn, argues Mandel, correspond to 
three stages of technology: mechanical, electrical, and electronical. And these three
different stages of technology play huge parts in M&D, AtD, and GR, respectively.
I'm not saying that Pynchon read Mandel, but I do think that his Global Trilogy covers
these three world-historical stages brilliantly.


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