Another way to categorize TRPs oeuvre

[Mark Kohut]

Better stated than my thin gruel.....Okay, M & D is also World Historical
the majority cry out (I project)......

And, yes "V." is a teeth-cutter, BUT I say it has, like teeth embedded behind one's baby teeth, many key lifetime themes, tropes, ideas, etc.
Hereros. Historical quest. Animate/Inanimate. Sacred/Profane. Loose but wide overarching metaphors--V.; structure--parts are akin if not named so--
and more...

Mr. Taxonomist


--- On Fri, 10/3/08, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: Another way to categorize TRPs oeuvre
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Friday, October 3, 2008, 3:45 AM
> 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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