Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels

Fri Jan 22 04:39:54 CST 2016

Agree on coda easily. The World strikes back.

V was the start of his two thematic strands: American novels and World
novels.
(I am saying nothing new or deep here just the basics)

Bleeding Edge is the end, so far, of those two strands. Mirrors.

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 3:38 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thinking some more about Tore's Part II (categorizing the Pynchon oeuvre,
> pp. 7-9)..
>
> It seems to me that in V, Stencil and virgin/dynamo, Sudwest, Malta,
> Alexandria, US Navy, Florentine revolutionaries... almost everything
> *except* Benny P. and the Whole Sick Crew fits fairly well with the
> globalizing concerns of the Big 3. Maybe V was a "false start" pulled off
> course by too much Jack Kerouac and by illusions about the inherent
> interest of the late-Beat jazz/art life in NYC (i.e., a version of
> Pynchon's own Cornell road trips and brief residence).
>
> NYC, of course, leads to Bleeding Edge. I have some doubts about my own
> high opinion of the book, because it has so many points of contact with my
> own NYC: attending Collegiate and later living on the Upper West Side,
> grappling with the city's real-estate machinery, working with internet and
> VR startups in Silicon Alley. I consider how little I like IV, and how much
> some West Coast Pynchonians like it: perhaps in both cases familiarity
> breeds contentment.
>
> That said, I think a case can be made for BE as a miniature coda to the
> "mapping the world" project. Unlike V, GR, M&D, and AtD, the book's
> geographical scope and narrative timeline are compact. DeepArcher and the
> limitless Web stand in for Vheissu, Kirghizstan and Mauritius, sailors'
> oceans and balloonists' skies. But at the center of it is 11 September: The
> Empire's Periphery Strikes Back. BE doesn't send Kit to remotest Asia; it
> brings angry visitors from ragged little camps in Afghanistan, taking
> control of our own jetliners, to the financial and political centers of the
> empire.
>
> Couple that with the "blowback"/conspiracy angles -- Ice's murky relations
> with D.C. and the Middle East, Windust in Central America, stray Mossad
> agents -- and there's substantial continuity from the real/paranoid
> world-historical maneuverings in V, GR, M&D, and AtD. The slangy, cynical
> references to Mandel's and Jameson's "late capitalism" (pp. 115, 138, 163,
> 241) might be a hint that the energies unleashed by the Renaissance,
> European empire, capitalism and industrialization and capitalism are
> fading, or at least no longer in the service of the old proprietors. Finita
> la commedia.
>
> Obviously, these considerations don't work if BE is the first/only Pynchon
> book one reads. They're sketchy if one doesn't agree with Tore (or me)
> about what Pynchon was doing with the Big 3 (and maybe V). But it seems to
> me plausible that a writer in his mid-70s might think: "I've got the energy
> for one more installment in the big story, as long as I keep it close to
> home."
>
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yeahp. As Harrison Bergeron is always saying, "You can say that again".
>>
>> And, another way of 'labeling' pynchon, or his vision...he is, has always
>> been,
>> a hedgehog not a fox in Berlin's nice critical distinction.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 12:09 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The value of the article for me is almost entirely in its discussion of
>>> GR, M&D, and AtD as one extraordinarily ambitious project. I take the
>>> discussion of Engdahl, the Nobel Prize, and the insularity of American
>>> fiction as what the abstract calls it -- a starting point. The substance
>>> really begins on pp. 4-6 with discussion of several calls for a "world
>>> literature" (whether written by Americans or not), and then makes the case
>>> that Pynchon's Big 3 are, superbly, just that.
>>>
>>> The other day, I wrote here that Beckert's Empire of Cotton helps to
>>> frame important themes of "P's grandest narrative, which is really
>>> *everything* that boiled out of Europe across five other continents -- plus
>>> the occasional Vheissu and Vormance ventures -- from 1500 to 2000." That's
>>> still Eurocentric, but I don't think many Asians, Africans, Australians,
>>> and non-US Western Hemisphereans would deny that much of their history over
>>> these centuries was importantly, often decisively *knotted into* that of
>>> Europe and, more recently, the US.
>>>
>>> See, I don't care whether or not Pynchon gets the Nobel Prize. (If he
>>> did, it would be the 1974 National Book Award or 1975 Howells Medal all
>>> over again, and we'd have another 15,000 articles about the "reclusive"
>>> author.) Yes, US fiction *is* comparatively insular, but IMO for
>>> predictable reasons of history, geography, educational practices, and
>>> audience/market size rather than out of any innate, US-specific cultural
>>> autism or narcissism. But what interests, excites and moves me is how
>>> successfully Pynchon's work "contains everything" -- rather than whether
>>> that's what the Nobel committee wants (or should want), or whether other
>>> American novelists should get out more.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 9:42 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> To All Relative Newbies on the Plist.
>>>>
>>>> This shows what levels of connection and textual memory you might get to
>>>> if you read Gravity's Rainbow ten times. And the others more than once
>>>> or twice. As I
>>>> am always saying, if we all were closer to the Janeites or Proust
>>>> readers, it
>>>> would be a better world!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I urge you to read this before the GR read, if you haven't.
>>>> Tore Rye, who might still be a quiet lurker on the Plist is or was on
>>>> for a long time.
>>>> (here--or offlist?) is where I learned he may have read GR ten times
>>>> and, therefore
>>>> what a slacker I have been all my life. Or, to repurpose James Wright's
>>>> line: I
>>>> have wasted my ( reading) life.
>>>>
>>>> Tore should be hosting the read but he also has a real life AND, none
>>>> of this is to intimidate
>>>> even if you have never read GR (or finished it. Like Norman Mailer).
>>>> Asking any questions
>>>> is one of the best ways, as we can see from Mike's posting for his new
>>>> translation, to touch bottom
>>>> in the text. ---there are no stupid questions as the lie in the
>>>> classroom and the business world goes,---
>>>> but it may, like little spots of anarchy in Pynchon's worlds, be true
>>>> here.
>>>>
>>>> Tidbit. I once posted here that Against the Day 'contained everything'.
>>>> Tore
>>>> posted that GR "contained everything". we had a fun exchange akin to
>>>> mathematicians
>>>> talking about sizes of infinity when I attempted to trump him with
>>>> "Against the Day contains everything
>>>> & GR".....(I only mean this in a fun, limited way, of course.)
>>>>
>>>> As I have told Tore directly, when I read Swedish Academy guy Engdahl
>>>> say what he did about
>>>> American literature I knew why TRP would not get a Nobel. They had to
>>>> know that, even without
>>>> Tore showing all the interconnections among the works, ATD showed his
>>>> was a world imagination.
>>>> So, he had been ruled out for other reasons. (I have an unproveable
>>>> notion regarding that).
>>>>
>>>> Mark
>>>> PS. Waiting for Godot Not. (Laura you are going to regret all the time
>>>> you've given me. An improv jazz-like
>>>> mostly soloing i had figured, it won't be. Big jazz band I hope with as
>>>> many characters and plot strands
>>>> as Against the Day.) Get all your slacker friends aboard. Tore's piece
>>>> shows why no serious contemporary
>>>> reader CAN NOT read Pynchon in depth. (I loved how mini Franzen appears
>>>> herein.)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Martin Eve <martin at martineve.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels
>>>>>
>>>>> Tore Rye Andersen
>>>>>
>>>>> Taking Horace Engdahl’s critique of the insularity of American
>>>>> literature as its starting point, the essay goes on to discuss Richard
>>>>> Gray’s and Michael Rothberg’s recent articles in American Literary History,
>>>>> both of which call for a literature capable of addressing the contemporary
>>>>> global reality. While both Gray and Rothberg claim that such a literature
>>>>> has yet to be written, the essay argues that Thomas Pynchon’s three novels
>>>>> Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day can profitably be read
>>>>> together as an ambitiously conceived world-historical trilogy which tells
>>>>> the story of the gestation and emergence of our contemporary global reality.
>>>>>
>>>>> Published in Orbit. http://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.178
>>>>> --
>>>>> Dr. Martin Paul Eve
>>>>> Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing
>>>>> Birkbeck, University of London
>>>>>
>>>>> T: 0203 073 8420
>>>>> E: martin.eve at bbk.ac.uk
>>>>> W: https://www.martineve.com
>>>>> R: 416, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD
>>>>>
>>>>> Password [a cultural history]: http://meve.io/password
>>>>> Pynchon and Philosophy: http://meve.io/pynchonphilo
>>>>> Open Access and the Humanities: http://meve.io/oahums
>>>>>
>>>>> Director, Birkbeck Centre for Technology and Publishing
>>>>> Founder, Open Library of the Humanities (https://www.openlibhums.org)
>>>>> Chief Editor, Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon (https://www.pynchon.net)
>>>>> Senior Online Editor, Alluvium, (http://www.alluvium-journal.org)
>>>>> -
>>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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