Pynchon's back catalogue

[John Bailey]

I think Pynchon's later work makes an amazing attempt to resolve the
personal experience vs research thing - AtD is a world historical
novel in which the personal experience of research is foregrounded -
it's clearly written by someone who has only read about the places,
events, lives in question and whose experience of reading is conveyed
by stylistically referring to the way these histories were
represented... especially in the non-'historical' forms of writing
that reveal so much more than official histories. Pynchon must love
the Boys Own Adventure, the noir, the spy romance etc. These
'secondary sources' exist have as much affective weight as other kinds
of personal encounter.

This is why pop culture occupies such a place in Vineland (and... the
new one). It's part of the fabric of daily experience. It's our
reality.

That said... I like that AtD can point me towards The Princess
Cassamina. In 20 years, it may still point readers in the same
direction. But will a reader in 20 years time go and watch Scooby Doo
or Gidget or Godzilla because of Pynchon? They'll be able to do it in
a second, probably on their wrist-embedded holo-phones or something,
but will they, with billions of other texts they could follow instead?

But - not really a spoiler here - I can't believe I've never heard of
Dark Shadows. Can US P-listers please explain this televisual anomaly
and why it's never been mentioned in relation to P? I've watched a few
bits on YouTube and read about it online, and its influence on Pynchon
is undeniable.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yep, great stuff Laura.
> Tore's quote from that Donadio letter reminds me of the Slow Learner intro (which I go back to again and again and...):
> Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to me. Displacing my personal experience off into other
> environments went back at least as far as "The Small Rain." Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then
> to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with
> fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me,
> though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as
> now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always
> at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively,
> understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.
>
>
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