TRTR: Heresy

[Mark Kohut]

just to say: most of the writers (and some others--Zappa. I can't speak with any 
sense of hisotry re Roadrunner) whom TRP writes
about in that intro, he writes about as new narrative strategies, new ways of 
fiction-telling as against the traditional old ways........

Gaddis is more a dark, dense--and comic---traditionalist. Dreiserian, as I've 
suggested. 


i might argue that TRP got part of his vision from WG. And learned some ways to 
use knowledge-laden allusions in his fiction. 





________________________________
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
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