GR Article--Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow. The Ideas of the Opposite

[rich]

generally a good article except for top of pg 215 where Paz says that
Pynchon assumes/naively believes Americans can and should run the
world, depicting them as energetic and enterprising unlike the
decadent Europeans

wtf?

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 3:47 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> I got a copy of this pdf if anyone would like a copy
>
> (Mr Paz has written about contemporary physics and postmodern
> fiction--(current motif of light--surely some insights into AtD, too)
>
> Author: Paz, Menahem
>
> Source: Orbis Litterarum, Volume 64, Number 3, June 2009 , pp. 189-221(33)
>
> Thomas Pynchon's highly complex novel deals with the personal and
> social difficulty of accepting a new worldview. Set at the end of
> World War II and in its aftermath, the protagonists find themselves at
> the crossroads between Newtonian mechanics, epitomized by the V2
> rockets, and the foreshadowed atom bomb, which is based on the theory
> of relativity and quantum mechanics.
>
> The style of Gravity's Rainbow resembles the scene of a subatomic
> world: it is presented as an ever-changing kaleidoscope of characters,
> places, events and interactions, which are constantly redetermined in
> relation to each other in an unpredictable manner. Pynchon manages to
> create a unifying theme by making all the twists in the plot
> comprehensible as manifestations of the underlying attempt to
> reconstruct selfhood. In addition, he refers recurrently to the motif
> of light, both as a physical entity at the center of modern physics
> and as a literary symbol of classical stability. In the end, his main
> protagonist himself turns into a mysterious source of light.
>