A Ranking of Pynchon's Novels

[Mark Kohut]

Just have to push back on Beckett's " total despair" . " cathartically humorous" as a movie ad sez this morning and which might also apply to TRP.

Another line from a movie description, " contains sci-fi action violence". a descriptive ' warning', I guess which distinguishes said movie from one with, simply, violence. 

Sent from my iPad

> On Jul 24, 2015, at 5:04 AM, Kamil Prusakowski <kukujus at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think that Gravity's Rainbow is the first post-war novel that really successfully coped with WW2 and the death of western civilization, without falling into total despair like e.g. Beckett or Tadeusz Borowski and transcending limits encountered by Herling-Grudziński, Solzhenitsyn, Kosiński, Wiesel u.s.w. 
> 
> 2015-07-24 10:35 GMT+02:00 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>:
>> 
>> On 23.07.2015 23:32, Robert Mahnke wrote:
>> 
>>> >> That sense of contingency, that sense that things could have been different, speaks to me, and I find it missing in GR ... <<
>>> 
>>> >There you speak from an American perspective. For me, as a German person, "Gravity's Rainbow" has this sense of contingency because it asks why we
>>> >did become Nazi Germany in the 1930s and what, actually and virtually, happened to Germany during the 1940s.
>>> 
>>> Can you say more about this?  I am interested.
>> 
>> For Pynchon (- especially for Pynchon I), Germany is the model of modernity and its pitfalls. The thanatoid essence of Western civilization he sees incarnated in Germany, a quasi natural way to look at things for an US author born in 1937. It's a perspective which on the one side trace back the Holocaust to former events in German history, especially the genocide in Deutsch Südwest ("This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good." V, p. 245), on the other side it - based on the facts of Operation Paperclip -  prolongs, contrary to fact, the German domination in engineering and science to the Cold War. In part 4 of Gravity's Rainbow it's still "Raketen-Stadt," not Rocket City. But, and that's crucial, the novel's collective temporary moment of freedom, in the zone where order collapses and pigs & people get along with each other well, takes also place in Germany: Only in the place where thanatoid modernity took off it can be overcome. All the doors are open again in this very moment! The Germans are the "people of the other beginning" (Heidegger). Although Pynchon would likely hesitate to sign it, this interpretation appears to me not only possible but conclusive.
>> 
>>> 
>>> I may not have articulated what I was trying to say very well.  GR is long on explanation of why things are the way they are, but isn't it mostly ex post?  (One character in GR who tries to capture what might happen is Brigadier Pudding, but he cannot keep up with events.)  I love Mason & Dixon's sense of ex ante possibility.
>>> 
>>> Anyway, just be clear, Pynchon's sense of the influence of the past and the contingency of our circumstances lies beneath all of his books, like the beach under the cobblestones.  And           I love GR too.
>>> 
>>>> On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 2:04 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> > That sense of contingency, that sense that things could have been different, speaks to me, and I find it missing in GR ... <
>>>> 
>>>> There you speak from an American perspective. For me, as a German person, "Gravity's Rainbow" has this sense of contingency because it asks why we did become Nazi Germany in the 1930s and what, actually and virtually, happened to Germany during the 1940s. In this regard the only novel that can compete with "Gravity's Rainbow" is "Doktor Faustus" by Thomas Mann, which was written in LA too. Paradoxically, the fact that Pynchon knew relatively little about Germany enabled him to evoke something crucial; and certain zeitgeist circumstances, like Acid or the war in Vietnam, helped him to create a picture of Nazi Germany that in many aspects shows more of the actual reality than the moralist tales of writers like Böll and Grass; referring to the Holocaust only indirectly is part of this writing strategy. I know, "Pynchon deserves to be honored as an American patriot" (Naumann), but I read him from my German perspective, too. The few true works of "Weltliteratur" (Goethe), and "Gravity's Rainbow" certainly belongs to this exquisite canon, deserve more than just one and the same reading. And then "Gravity's Rainbow" is 760 pages not flash prose but poetry ...
>>>> 
>>>> In the cases of both, "Mason & Dixon"  and "Against the Day," I feel the idea to be much better than the result. I guess the fact that these books were long, actually too long in the pipeline plays an important role here. Like Walter Benjamin had it: "Das Werk ist die Totenmaske der Konzeption." The (finished) work of art is the death mask of conception. The letters are there on the page, but the artistic thrill is gone ...
>>>> 
>>>> "Bleeding Edge," where Pynchon - focusing on digitalization and terrorism - returns to the GR question of technology and control, and "Vineland" show Pynchon II in full bloom, an author who, while having a family of his own relatively late in life, discovers the loyalties and disloyalties of blood ... I also think that these two are the funniest works of Pynchon.  
>>>>  
>>>>         
>>>> 
>>>> On 23.07.2015 03:39, Robert Mahnke wrote:
>>>>> David said, "the fact that not everyone agrees that GR is Pynchon's masterpiece make some of wonder what's wrong with those that don't. We could start flame wars about these differences. That might be illuminating, and fun..."
>>>>> 
>>>>> Since I was one of the (few) people who didn't rank GR first, let me try to shed some light, but not heat.  The most recent time I re-read GR, I was as impressed as ever with it intellectually, but it didn't seem as human as M&D.  Maybe a central question of M&D is, Why did we end up with this country instead of another?  That's question in many of Pynchon's novels (AtD (this world instead of another) and both Inherent Vice and Vineland (this California instead of another). That sense of contingency, that sense that things could have been different, speaks to me, and I find it missing in GR (and V and TCoL49 before it), where there is such a strong sense of predetermination, of the discovery of a hidden order and conspiracy, whether in the pattern of the V-2s falling on London or the printed-circuit-like layout of San Narciso. I'm presenting this as a dichotomy, but of course something of that sense of another country is in the earlier books, for example in a great passage just before the end of TCoL49 which I can't find online just now.  Still, from this perspective you can be impressed by the intellectual pyrotechnics of GR (it is second on my list, after all), and yet still think of it as a not-yet-matured work relative to M&D.  If Pynchon had written M&D in the 70s and GR two decades later, might their relative statures in everyone's eyes be the reverse? 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Those are just a few thoughts tonight. I reserve the right to change my mind completely tomorrow.
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 4:58 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Those that have read all of Pynchon's novels are familiar with each ones qualities and differences. Thus there is a common unspoken understanding of the overall picture. But the fact that not everyone agrees that GR is Pynchon's masterpiece make some of wonder what's wrong with those that don't. We could start flame wars about these differences. That might be illuminating, and fun...
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150724/5f0e102a/attachment.html>