Edward Mendelson on Pop Culture in Pynchon

[Lemuel Underwing]

I've kept this particular paragraph in mind while sorting through the
various Pop Culture References in BE, it's from Edward Mendelson's essay
"Gravity's Encyclopedia", thought I'd share it for the benefit of the
Community:

"*Gravity's Rainbow *has on occaision been misunderstood as an endoresment
of popular culture in preference to "high" culture, but Pynchon is equally
insistent on the potential dangers that lie in absorption at either
extreme. The popular modes that Pynchon assimilates into his encyclopedia
of styles are never modes of liberation from the systems of oppression but
are instead a *means* of oppression and extinguishing. In his references to
popular forms, Pynchon incidentally commits historical errors of a kind
absent from his allusions to Rossini or Rilke: he is not, for example,
sufficiently interested in a film like*The Return of Jack Slade* to notice
that its inclusion in *Gravity's Rainbow*is a ten-year anachronism. "
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