TRTR: Heresy

[Mark Kohut]

In the interview with Gaddis which was circulated here, Gaddis said he didn't 
read much contemporary fiction but did say they both--he and TRP--
got onto the ntoion of entropy as a metaphor.....

Great early appreciators, first definers of Pynchon, such as Tony Tanner were 
pretty sure The Recognitions was an influence....

I do think it is worth our plist judging whether we all think TRP has been 
influenced by The Recognitions, with 'inherent vice" offered as the prmary 
evidence. There is more--and maybe it would be worth trying to list the 
correspondences to try to convince such smart readers as Kai.

I would and have argued that TRP probably did read The Recognitions before 
penning V....one bit of pure speculation is that The Recognitions 

led him to that full, expansive frame that he had not demonstrated earlier. And 
there is The Golden Bough, the White Goddess as influences on
TRP. (Eliot could have led to The Golden Bough, but not to Graves)....also in 
early Gaddis. 


More again,

Mark




________________________________
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: Jed Kelestron <jedkelestron at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sun, June 12, 2011 8:05:02 AM
Subject: Re: TRTR: Heresy


On 06.06.2011 22:14, Jed Kelestron wrote:


No Pynchon in his library:  http://bit.ly/jFoAzU   
Taking into account the sheer number of books and the fact that an huge number 
of anglo, french, german and other writers, both fiction and non-fiction 
(Cioran! Heidegger!), are on the list, one indeed has to ask why Pynchon is 
missing. Anxiety of influence? Might be so in the case of Proust (also missing), 
but hardly with Pynchon who published later. Perhaps it's similar to Roth, who - 
as I learned from an interview last year - does not read Pynchon but recognizes 
him on NYC streets. And didn't Pynchon too  somewhere speak of himself as a 
"professional non-reader"? Beyond a certain point artists can only learn from 
themselves, imo. During the trtr group-read the question re Pynchon asked again 
and again is: Did Pynchon read TR before writing V? From what I've seen in this 
group-read here (and I still read every mail), I really cannot say. But the 
resemblances do not appear to be that striking. And when we look at what Pynchon 
wrote in the SL-intro about US authors enabling him to find his place in the 
American literary field, the name Gaddis is significantly missing: "It was also 
the era of Howl, Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, and all of the excesses of law 
enforcement that such works provoked. (...) We were encouraged from many 
directions --- Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul Bellow in The 
Adventures of Augie March, emerging voices like those of Herbert Gold and Philip 
Roth --- to see how at least two very distinct kinds of English could be allowed 
to coexist. Allowed! It was actually OK to write like this. Who knew? The effect 
was exciting, liberating, strongly positive. It was not a case of either/or, but 
an expansion of possibilities. (...) Against the undeniable power of tradition, 
we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer's essay 'The White 
Negro', the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is 
one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. / A collateral 
effect, for me anyway, was that of Helen Waddell's  The Wandering Scholars, 
reprinted in the early '50's. an account of the young poets of the Middle Ages 
who left the monasteries in large numbers and took to the roads to Europe, 
celebrating in song the wider range of life to be found outside their academic 
walls". Other artists like T.S. Eliot, Roadrunner, Frank Zappa,  Henry Adams and 
some more get also mentioned. But no William Gaddis, as far as my eyes can see 
...
  
So perhaps this is all based on a misunderstanding? Shall say: Just because some 
P-lister are also Gaddis readers, this doesn't necessarily mean that there's an 
actual connection between the two writers. And if not, --- why are you people 
doing what you're doing? 


KFL
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20110612/98b1e439/attachment.html>