Another way to categorize TRPs oeuvre

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Joining this discussion late, but, weighing in, I don't find it useful to divvy TRP's novels up into "American" vs. "world" categories.  Aside from the fact that all but COL49 have both American and non-American interludes, I think they fit together as a whole in exploring some of TRP's obsessions:  The vanquishing of the indigenous and the magical by the creeping global hegemony of the powers-that-be; the attempts of the good-guys (Profane, Stencil, Oedipa, W.A.S.T.E., Slothrop, The Counterforce, Zoyd, [not so much M and D], the Traverse family, Cyprian, Yashmeen, among others) to fight back, haplessly and unsuccessfully, against the encroachment.  The time-chronology works better for me:  M&D, ATD, GR, V, COL49, VL.  Given TRP's preoccupations, it's hard to imagine him writing a novel that predates the 15th Century (beginning of the modern world, Age of Exploration, birth of colonialism and imperialism, etc.).

Laura

PS- Heikki, I agree with you that VL and ATD lack something -- I don't know, gravitas? -- possessed by the other four novels.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
>Sent: Oct 3, 2008 1:49 PM
>To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Another way to categorize TRPs oeuvre
>
>
>
>Terrance's old insistence on "work" is IMHO most fruitful
>when applied to the medium itself: how OBA's novels *work*.
>
>To an old Bakhtinian like me, this is a crucial question
>indeed.
>
>AtD may be more mature and beautifully written and overtly
>moral, what have you, than V. We can more "safely assume"
>good things about it. ("Safely assuming" was the pet phrase
>of a former list contributor.)
>
>Still, for me V. works infinitely better than AtD. To think
>that Profane's stance toward women makes the novel worse
>requires that BP were somehow glorified in the novel. I don't
>think he is. If there were a character type that is glorified
>in V., it would rather be those like McClintic or Rachel who
>do not wholly surrender to entropy.
>
>But V., luckily, is not a PC novel. Not a politically incorrect
>one, either. It is a novel. As Bakhtin writes in "Discourse in
>the Novel", "the traditional scholar bypasses the basic
>distinctive feature of novel as a genre [...]. He transposes a
>symphonic (orchestrated) theme on to the piano keyboard."
>(The Dialogic Imagination, p. 263)
>
>What is the distinctive feature of the novel for Bakhtin? That
>it is a heteroglottic arena of various discourses and genres
>that are often in conflict but always condition each other.
>However immature OBA was when he wrote V., he knew how to make
>a novel work. GR is quite a bit better in this respect too, but
>V. is a great novel nevertheless. The conditioning alternation
>of present and historical chapters (or better still, genres)
>creates tense, caleidoscopic constellations for the reader. The
>responsibility is left to him/her too.
>
>The cuter, safer positioning of discourses and genres in VL
>and AtD is nowhere to be found in OBA's other novels. For me,
>this makes the first three novels and M&D much more severe
>works of art.
>
>Of course, V. might fare even better if it had, say, one less
>"present" chapter than it does. But AtD... do the chapters,
>discourses, characters etc vary, do they make a working whole
>at all? It feels lame and middling to me. If I wanted to be
>rude, I'd say OBA's latest is half-baked even in its
>hald-bakedness.
>
>This is how I see it at the moment. But I'll read AtD again
>when I have to stay at home for five weeks (my left wrist
>will be reoperated in two weeks - the titanium thing that was
>implanted there after a bicycle accident turned out
>insufficient, finally.)
>
>
>Heikki
>