Review: Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge" (David Auerbach @ The American Reader)

[Mark Kohut]

I, too, have long felt his reputation will grow and grow and who knows when is a prophet. My circumstantial-only reasons are,
yes, cultish ghetto bracketing now. [Even back in the Day, some peers would relegate to 'too difficult', 'science' stuff ala two cultures
divide.] 
Learning how to read him. In the sense some have written of learning how to read Hamlet, or Poe or Lawrence. Faulkner. Sterne? Cervantes, yes. Chekhov for his stories, rising and rising. 
Seeing how the writer and his world spoke to-- and against--each other; the writer ahead of, yet deeply of, his time. 
All the writers who read him admiringly almost as if he were unquestionably necessary. So many-- with none of the mental reservations the
generation of taste-setting critics, like Wood, after the taste-makers of P's own time--Tanner, Poirier, Kermode--who saw his genius. Critics can have an anxiety of influence too. 
Read about how Shakespeare was in his time seen as one of many fine theater-filling writers. Like most of any time. Very popular with the 
History plays in England's self-appreciation but not so---Hamlet---with many of his best. Maybe always seen then as 'an upstart crow', a gifted
amateur who could not compete with the University-schooled writers like Ben Jonson, others. Steadily, over 400 years, he was seen
as "first among equals" of his time.....then as Shakespearean. (this history was excerpted years ago in Harper's or The Atlantic, this latter, I think.)
 
P.S For some, BLEEDING EDGE will rise in their esteem, I suggest. I know two good readers, one a Pynchon scholar, who have already raised 
their opinion of the book. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

From: Carvill John <johncarvill at hotmail.com>
To: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> 
Cc: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 9, 2013 10:21 AM
Subject: RE: Review: Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge" (David Auerbach @ The American Reader)



>Very much agreed on the second quotation, although I suppose Auerbach could retreat behind “not IMMEDIATELY apparent.” If one thing above all else unites GR, M&D, AtD, and the flashback elements of V. and CoL49 and Vineland, it’s the continuity and contemporaneity of what was “urgent” in their epochs.

Yes. My own feeling has long been that the passage of time will surely see Pynchon's reputation improve. Right now, he's regarded as a cult author, notable only for post-modernist gimmicks and whacky conspiracy theories. Later - and I'm not willing or able to say when exactly, but of course it will be after he has passed away - he will (like Dickens, Hitchcock, etc. before him) be 'discovered' by the mainstream and will thus become more culturally 'important'. 
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