Mendelson's View of P's 2ble Vision

[Fiona Shnapple]

I suspect that readers don't want the most important double that P has to
offer in BE: parody, an allusive polemical double.

On Sunday, October 6, 2013, Markekohut wrote:

> Stereoscopic...double vision.....Iceland Spar.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Oct 6, 2013, at 9:00 AM, Fiona Shnapple <fionashnapple at gmail.com<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'fionashnapple at gmail.com');>>
> wrote:
>
> That Flatiron Vision, what in art class and in math and physics class we
> were taught is the two point perspective, and then vanishing point, and
> then, of course, Infinity & Entropy, is, in literature an Encyclopedic
> Vision, not merely in the sense that it is comprehensive, exhaustive if you
> prefer, but in the sense that the narrative, while steroscopic in depth,
> winks on either side of the V, like Kilroy, the band-pass-filter, so that
> we are, as Mendelson says of the setting and context  of GR, in that
> gestation period, that 9 months around the end of the Second Great War,
> when contemporary history begins its life, and in the immediate present of
> the readers, circa 1972. This double Vision allows the author  both a
> prophetic and satirical Vision.
>
>  [the differrences bewtween Anatomy, M-Satire, Encyclopedia have been much
> discussed here, so...whatever].
>
> Recent P scholarship has focused on the use of parody, the encylopedia of
>  literary styles. This, of course, is what makes AGTD such a masterpiece,
> one that we put on the top shelf next to Melville's grand encyclopedic
> romances, M-D, C-M, and with Joyce etc.
>
> Brian McHale has turned this to good effect in his essay "Genre as
> History: Pynchon's Genre-Poaching," which offers a perceptive analysis of
> Pynchon's incorporation of popular generic forms into his work.
>
> https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/26/82
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20131007/8228b634/attachment.html>