Pynchon's Quest Narratives ...

[Campbel Morgan]

I've said mucho mass ad nauseam argumentium repetitum argumentum ad
infinitum ad proofum de assertum on this but, that big fat book, yeah,
that one against the day, is a traditional American form. Yeah, of
course it got started, like all American Literature in and before
Britannia' Dreamed, before the Decline and Fall, before even Steely
Dan wrote it on the wall and there wasn't even any Hollywood, or Love
in the Western World Romance or Romance vs. Novel debate, or the
Wondering Scholars, or Jack kerouac on the Road. Yeah, there is a very
fine and easy to read Intro to American Literature, from Puritanism to
Postmodernism by Ruland and Bradbury (see pp. 3-4 the "terra incognita
...America is an invention of Europe as old as Western history
itself." Yes, that subjunctive, possible/impossible Dream. As  every
sophomore student of serious literature knows, its a form of the
Picaresque, not exactly a clew and a quest Dickensian, but a rogue,
gypsy-roofer night watchman  guest of that Menippean fest &
carnivalesque feast on the melancholy anatomy of a Beast always said
to begin with Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler, or the Life of Jack
Wilton or by The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes and of His Fortunes and
Adversities  & Cervantes and Fielding and Swift and Peacock and
Dickens's  The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit ...then jumps
over Melville to Lolita and On the Road and Even Cowgirls and
Pynchon's female-picaresque, but the jump, like writing a descriptive
paragraph of a beautiful women, staring at the top of her head and
working ever downward that skips from the neck to the knees omitting
all the fleshy fecund female power, as if a Puritan, fearful of the
Virgin's sexual V-ness erased the middle, excluded it from the
American tradition, where the politics, the people, the land, are also
excluded and Pynchon rooted, in Modern Chivalry: Containing the
Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O'Regan, a romping
rambling, satirical American novel by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a
Pittsburgh writer, lawyer, judge, and justice of the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court. The book was first published in 1792.  Henry Adams
called it "a more thoroughly American book than any written before
1833."  There is a tradition of such works in America.

Also neglected, Charles Brockden Brown; Set him against Ben Franklin
and you've got the basic ingredients for the makings of the American
novel duering the so-called American Renaissance.


see Road-Book America: Contemporary Culture and the New Picaresque by
Rowland A. Sherrill
see Revolution and the Word The Rise of the Novel in America Expanded
Edition Cathy N. Davidson