more on His Kipling Period and the Orgy

[ish mailian]

This essay examines genre parody in Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel
Against the Day as a means of productive transgression. Focusing on
one section of the epic novel, in which the character Kit travels
through China and Tibet in a mock pilgrimage that echoes Rudyard
Kipling’s Kim, I argue that Pynchon circumvents what Linda Hutcheon
has identified as parody’s conservative impulse by repeatedly
thwarting the attempts by Western colonizing forces to “know” the East
by way of both mapping—as in the conquest stories of imperial romance
fiction—and unmapping—as in the ambivalent stories of late imperial
romance fiction. Pynchon’s unsettling employment of parody, I
demonstrate, is paralleled in the mimicry employed by the colonized
subjects in the novel, which erodes the sovereignty of the competing
imperial forces of the Great Game. Additionally, I argue that Pynchon
links the spatial and material reality of empire to an earthly
spiritualism such that a non-singular enlightenment can only be
attained through a disavowal of the routinizing and rationalizing
forces of Western thought.

Smith, J., (2014). All Maps Were Useless - Resisting Genre and
Recovering Spirituality in Pynchon's Against the Day. Orbit: Writing
Around Pynchon.

On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 9:19 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thus the film brings into GR two competing discourses on empire t ied
> up in filmic representations of mayhem, with film itself as a
> competing -immediate, emotional, personality-driven (it is Cary Grant
> Prentice misses, not Sergeant MacChesney) - mode of discourse with the
> novel.
>
> 1999 "His Kipling Period": Bakhtinian Reflections on Annotation,
> Heteroglossia and Terrorism in the Pynchon Trade Carol Loranger
>
> http://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=english
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l