Another way to categorize TRPs oeuvre

[Joe Allonby]

...uhhh...yeah, that's what I meant.

Well put.

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 3:45 AM, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> 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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