pkd/trp

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Found a very good essay on that --

Umberto Rossi:

"The Harmless Yank Hobby:
Maps, Games, Missiles and Sundry Paranoias
in /Time Out of Joint/ and /Gravity's Rainbow/"

Pynchon Notes 52-53 (spring-fall 2003), pp. 106-123

Sample:

"Pynchon's German obsession may owe a lot to Dick's, but more important 
is the fact that Pynchon has phagocytized several Dickian works. He has 
used the diegetic framework of /TOJ/ to build the first section of /GR/. 
He has evidently inserted allusions to /The Man in the High Castle/. He 
also gestures towards another Dickian masterpiece, /The Three Stigmata 
of Palmer Eldritch/: 'the great bright hand' Slothrop is afraid to see 
'reaching out of the cloud' (29) not only is the hand of God (in the 
form of a rocket) but also recalls the shining steel hand of Dick's 
disquieting entrepreneur/drug dealer. And given that /Gravity's Rainbow/ 
centers on the towering and menacing Rocket, a notorious phallic symbol 
(an identification Pynchon insists on), can we ignore the fact that a 
common slang term for the male sexual organ in the States is /dick/? 
Would anybody suggest that this pun escaped Pynchon's notice? C'mon!

The relation between these two writers may not be one-way only. (...) 
After 1977 Dick's narrative changed remarkably. There is surely a 
Pynchonian atmosphere in his last narrative achievements, /VALIS/, /The 
Divine Invasion /and /The Transmigration of Timothy Archer/ --- three 
novels Dick saw as panels of a unitary triptych, the so-called /VALIS 
Trilogy/ (something that can be read as a trilogy only at the purely 
hypertextual/intertextual level). /VALIS/ is especially Pynchonian: 
hypernarrative. encyclopedic, quotation-ridden, proliferating; and it is 
perhaps no mere coincidence that its title's initial is the 
arch-Pynchonian V." (pp. 117f.)

Since Dick met with Robert Anton Wilson several times around 1977, I 
could imagine that it was Wilson who directed him towards Pynchon.


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