Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Pasages of History

[Dave Monroe]

Cowart, David.  Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History.
   Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2011.

http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/thomas_pynchon

http://books.google.com/books?id=VYnorYLekEYC

"Pynchon ... cannot be faulted ... because he says nothing explicit
about sociological and historical issues.   Adhering to what Henry
James called the author's instinct for indirect presentation ..." (p.
72)

http://books.google.com/books?id=VYnorYLekEYC&pg=PA72#v=onepage&q&f=false

"Though he has been criticized for obscuring the actual horror of the
death camps, he perfers to represent Nazi genocide obliquely.  Thus is
V. he describes the extermination of the Hereros and Hottentots in
German south-west Africa in 1904 and 1922....  In Gravity's Rainbow,
Pynchon is yet more indirect...." (p. 74)

http://books.google.com/books?id=VYnorYLekEYC&pg=PA74#v=onepage&q&f=false

"... 'in art,' as Nabokov once remarked, 'the roundabout hits the
center.'  Pynchon's credo as a novelist, again, is to represent by
indirection; just as, in V. and Gravity's Rainbow, he represents the
holocaust obliquely and analogically, in the genocidal war against the
Hereros in turn-of-the-century south-west Africa and in the slaughter
of the dodoes in seventeenth-century Mauritius ..." (p. 97)

http://books.google.com/books?id=VYnorYLekEYC&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false

"... the author makes his political views clear, but such extravagance
is balanced and framed by incremental intimations of other ideas the
more powerful for their oblique presentation.  The reader who would
uncover these ideas must, like Shakespeare's Polonius, peel the onion
of appearances.... 'We of wisdom and of reach,' he say, 'With
windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions
out (Hamlet II.i.64-66).... predicated on the principle of
insight-fostering indirection, metaphor appeals to a universal delight
in cogent analogy.  But beyond simple metaphor lies the more
generalized law observed by thoughtful literati (and their critics) in
every age.  Emily Dickinson affirms this precept in a couple of famous
lines: 'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--/ Success in Circuit
lies.'" (p. 169)

   "Pynchon seems to have sprung from the artistic matrix fully aware
that effectiove literary represenation cannot dispense with this
principle.... he contrives to speak only glancingly of the camps, the
great battles, the atomic detonations." (p. 170)

http://books.google.com/books?id=VYnorYLekEYC&pg=PA170#v=onepage&q&f=false

Cf. ...

Cowart, David.  "Auguries of the Third Reich in Gravity's Rainbow."
   Literature/Film Quarterly 6, No. 4 (Fall 1978), 364-70.

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=5035412473

Cowart, David.  "Pynchon and the Sixties,"
   Critique 41, No.. 1 (1999): 3-13.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00111619909601574

http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/passage/article/view/3983/3482

Cowart, David.  "Pynchon, Genealogy, History: Against the Day."
   Modern Philology, Vol. 109, No. 3 (Feb 2012): 385-407.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/663688