belated answer to Mark Twain Q

[Campbel Morgan]

Disagree. The Secret Integration is a parody of Twain's boys-Tom
Sawyer and the Feuds in HF in M&D; this is in the critical literature.
Also, The Innocents Abroad ...other Travel Literature...other than the
Baedecker influnce these big books And, let's not forget, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court...and Pynchon's bad ear must
have gotten a good laugh reading Twain on Cooper. Irving is also noted
as an early influence. Also, is it AGTD ...? Wigglesworth is mantioned
in V. and AGTD or M&D can't recall. Pynchon, it's clear, ran through
the Americans. James, as I just posted, In The Cage, is an influence
in CL49. I maintain that Wood is close to finding the Genre, but he's
forgotten that America won literary independence.

Also, on the characters, see Repetition and the construction of
character in Gravity's Rainbow.
Hume, Kathryn This article, the Staiger one I noted the other day, the
Wood Review of AGTD ...the Grant Introduction to V. Companion settles
it for me.

Hume's reading treats the heartless masses under extreme pressures and
navigates a reading between the postmodern and the
satire/picaresque/anatomy/encyclopedia.

It's as if, in GR, THEY have done what Julia and Winston believe They
can not, They have gotten Inside YOU (1984). Even into Your Dreams.
YOU haven't beaten THEM. Even the Proles are not Human.




On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 9:40 PM, Mark Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
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> Page,
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> Very little close Twain influence traced in most of the best books on TRP's work that I've read. Just the general great comic talents.....hey, he does the Jumping Frog on stereoids; on surreal over-the-topness.....
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> Curious to me: Tony Tanner at the end of his seminal monograph [his ideas were seminal before this summary monograph] of 1981, mentions a long list of writers who Pynchon has absorbed in his opinion.  Twain and James are
> mentioned.
> However, early in the monograph, when he has mentioned writers who have influenced TRP and quoted Barthes on "mixing words", meaning other writers' words, neither Twain nor James are on that list.
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> I don't know Twain well but as with James, I do not myself see much direct influence as we can point to with so many others.
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