To Dave, Alice, Terrance and that whole romantic american we

[Joseph Tracy]

I have been reading some of the essays you recommend and enjoying  
them, pondering them, and just wish I was a faster typist so that my  
ideas flowed closer to the speed and nature of my thoughts. I liked  
the  reading other writings you (Terrance) like; helps to understand  
your thinking. I like the connection John McMichaels elaborates  
between Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow.  I think it is quite  
plausible that Pynchon used MD as  a plot structure for GR. It is  
also possible that it is a subconscious reaction to MD. Worthy of a  
long discussion. Maybe V and the appearance of the letter V in a  
major role in the work of Pynchon is in some sense a response to  
Hawthorne's scarlet A. Pyncho incorporates everything he knows and  
especially what interests him in his writing, and he has clearly  
incorporated the the American Romantics into his fiction.
    I still don't get your involvement with the word Romance. It  
seems to me that Chase failed to make this a standard descriptive  
word with the characteristics he wanted to impart to it. Let's face  
it;  the word was bigger than him and not really headed in that  
direction. The closest we get is the phrase "romantic literature'  
usually associated with the term Romanticism.  For most people a  
Romance Novel is  a lovelorn bodice ripper involving heroic  
moneymakers with big ( things: ranches, business empires, talent,  
balls, etc.) and sexy sensitive wise and wily women who manage to  
come together against semi- tremendous odds.  There are only a very  
few people including lit people who , if you say  ' It's a romance"  
would conjure up Chase's definition.  Most would think of the  
medieval romance or the modern love story.

Even if we accept Chase's definition and accept that there is some  
sense in which the concept can be loosely or exactly applied to  
Pynchon's work   the question becomes what  does it tell us about the  
fiction of T Pynchon and how much does it explain his books, his  
collage-like writing style, and the communicative intentions  behind  
the ideas his characters supposedly represent.

I personally fail to see how any term inclusive enough to be a  
general characterization of Pynchon's work  will be more than a  
general category though Mannippean Satire seems as good as I've heard  
and more obviously satisfactory than Allegory or Romantic quest.

There are also many problems with applying Chase's definition to  
Pynchon or interpreting his work primarily through the influences of  
American Literature.  I posted this list before without response but  
I think it is a  compelling start to a counter argument to the idea  
that Pynchon has to be placed in the American literary tradition to  
be understood.

Important non-american influences on the work of T Pynchon: Dickens,  
Swift, T.S. Eliot, Rilke, European history in Africa, The great game  
preceding WW1, Jung, Freud, Dante, Kafka, Le Carre, The Bible, Church  
history including history of Heresies, Tarot, Spiritualism, mythology  
of Greece and Egypt and the Steppes, Pythagoras, history of Anarchy,  
the history of underground and hidden worlds and a hollow earth,  
history of Science and Math, Buddhist  and Taoist spiritual ideas,  
Orwell,  the history of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, the  
history of imperialism, colonialism and revolutionary resistance,...

My point is that Pynchon , while passionately interested in and  
focused on the American experiment, consciously  embraces the whole  
of human history as informative and worthy of our attention and  
refuses the myth of American uniqueness and self invention and the  
novelistic navel gazing in rapt wonder at our special American soul.

There are also many American  and contemporary cultural and literary  
influences on Pynchon that are really rather distant in any plausible  
sense from Melville, Hawthorne,  W. Irving, Poe or Henry Adams:  Pop  
songs, TV sit coms and cop shows, hard boiled noirish detective  
stories, wordplay ala Cummings/Thurber/Ogden Nash, Jazz Musicians and  
Avante garde music and the tradition of improvisation,  Dylan, R.  
Farina, Mark Twain( who he sounds like in some of his essays)  
Marijuana, LSD, the history of the American Left,  Delillo,  
Barthelme, Computers and the concept of hypertext, the killing of  
John Kennedy and post McCarthy ascent of the extreme right, Tom  
Paine, Tom Jefferson, F Douglas,  the House of Pynchon, the history  
of oil, history of railroads, history of Mexico,


.