M&D: Vaucanson? Is That You, Again?

[Mark Kohut]

Coetzee has supervised at least one Ph. D on Pynchon, I once learned.
 

From: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
To: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> 
Cc: Pynchon List <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2013 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: M&D: Vaucanson? Is That You, Again?


The duck and other real automata were the subjects of a bit of a
mini-boom in popular historical science writing in the late 90s/00s -
not hard academic writing but the kind of books that people might take
on a holiday or give as a gift. Here in Australia those kinds of books
would get big reviews in the Saturday supplements, on the same pages
you'd expect to find a review of Coetzee or Carey (but not Pynchon,
who is pretty much unread and mostly unheard of here, hence the
hand-holding I've always had to do in my own local reviews). Automata
also made their way into a fair bit of fiction, and I'd suspect it's
because of that fairly disappointing process whereby a writer gets a
whiff of a vaguely interesting and accessible historical curio and
decides to work it into their writing.

This, btw, was one of my only reservations about Ruth Ozeki's
otherwise gorgeous A Tale for the Time Being, shortlisted for the Man
Booker. A couple of sequences in it felt as if the author had read an
article in the New Yorker and thought 'I'll chuck that in, too'.
Pynchon has always done this but at least his sources tend to be much
more obscure and better researched.


On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> I’m in the middle of J.M. Coetzee’s _Slow Man_ (2005), about an amputee
> living in Australia and the Croatian woman who takes care of him. With vague
> memories of reviews when it came out, I was ready when “Elizabeth Costello”
> – protagonist and eponym of Coetzee’s previous novel – invites herself in
> for a visit. But I wasn’t prepared for her to say of the caretaker:
>
>
>
> “ Marijana… is an educated woman. Hasn’t she told you? She spent two years
> at the Art Institute in Dubrovnik and came away with a diploma in
> restoration. Her husband worked at the Institute too. That was where they
> met. He was a technician, specializing in antique technology. He
> reassembled, for instance, a mechanical duck that had lain in parts in the
> basement of the Institute for two hundred years, rusting. Now it quacks like
> a regular duck, it waddles, it lays eggs. It is one of the _pieces de
> resistance_ of their collection…’ “
>
>
>
> OK, now I’m thinking that Coetzee himself moved to Australia just before
> those novels, and formerly Australian Peter Carey namechecked the duck last
> year in _The Chemistry of Tears_… The plot thickens like a good terrine de
> foie gras de canard.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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