"1984" and "Gravity's Rainbow"

[Campbel Morgan]

> To produce Hamlet as an example of a "bad play" [a straw man propped up to
> demonstrate that Against the Day is "cobbled together"] is very silly and
> very pretentious. There's hardly any writing as musical as:
>Hamlet: Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it to you,

Silly pretentious me. Shakespeare's Hamlet is the longest play he
wrote. AGTD is the longest work of YBA. Shakespeare's Hamlet, as any
pretentious and silly reader of literature knows, is a materwork,
loose, tossed together, pieces of other plays never produced,
arguments with several of his contemporaries, the theatre wars as they
are sometimes called, and a bunch of stuff he wrote at times when the
theatre was shut down for plague and other reaosns. A reader who has
read of the play and AGTD can not fail to see the parallels. I started
with the premise, you ignored, that both works are masterworks of
their respective authors. You ignored my premise. As usual, my
conclusion is lost on you.






> I won't argue that Against the Day is some neatly plotted unified field
> theory of a book—Pynchon unspooling a thread concerning quaternions seems to
> point to some virtue in rambling—but to then point to Hamlet as an example
> of how not to write a play, when Hamlet's soliloquies and speeches are among
> Shakespeare's best music . . .
>
> The play's the thing, Campbel, not the plot.
>
>
>