Colson Whitehead - Zone One

[Mark Kohut]

I had a chance to talk with Colson within six months or a year of
the publication of Against the Day. I, too, had learned he was
a Pynchon reader/fan so I was eager being so into THAT book,
had I been unscrewed my ass woudda fallen off. (So many Wiki posts
I felt like a published scholar, lol)

Anyway, he engaged humanly; said he had not read it yet, been busy but
that some friends had said it was so full of miscellaneous allusive "stuff"
because Pynchon
now had google and the internet. I said No, I disagree. That makes it
easier for US--then
lay my speculation on him, mentioning some internal clues I thought, that
Pynchon
had been writing this alongside M & D and Vineland for decades....maybe
since he published
GR...which is one reason it took decades besides how hugely great he made
it..
Colson took that in as if it were worth taking in
and I felt...proud.

yes, when i saw this title I, too, thought of THE famous novel's ZONE.

I have also thought, when you read of the way the fantasy Underground
Railroad is written about  in
the beginning of that book, one can see it coming out of the opening of GR,
a loose sea-changed influence perhaps-- those rail cars......
but this is probably a stretch, although.....

But, with Bailey's post and all we know, some real widely-read scholar
could do a longish article on the possible ways
GR has influenced even just some scenes, tropes, etc. in later novels. I
think I've seen a few--and some in the
unlikeliest of places---an Ian Rankin novel say (we know he did his thesis
on Pynchon) and Tinkers, I think
it is.

"Pynchon in the veins"--nice.

Like that.



On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 6:59 PM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Halfway through my first book by Colson Whitehead and I'm thinking:
> damn, this has Pynchon in its veins. Some quick googling confirms that
> Whitehead is avowedly a fan.
> The novel is NYC post-zombie-apocalypse, following a Benny
> Profane-like schlub tasked with mopping up the undead stragglers. For
> all its genre roots it's very literary, to a point that irked me early
> on - why say it's cloudy when you can call the sky a "solemn
> nigrescence"? - but the thesaurus bashing turns out to be less
> frequent and less annoying than I first thought.
> And the stylistic methods Whitehead has purloined from Pynchon are
> giving me greater insight into just what P was doing in GR,
> especially. What actually *happens* in Zone One is very slight - the
> protagonist's actions could probably be condensed to 5-10 pages - but
> his temporal bandwidth is huge, so everything is echoed and refracted
> by the past that still lives in the present. It's not as simple as one
> thing triggering a memory, but everything in the novel's present
> conjures up the past as a kind of field. We're not just given a line
> of dialogue, but a bunch of lines that people used to say in those
> moments. Or a handful of situations that collectively describe the
> broader world, rather than merely one. It's hard to describe but it's
> extremely reminiscent of Pynchon's big books.
> "They rappelled from gunships into key intersections, eliminating a
> hundred shuddering skels before clipping back to the cables and
> floating out of the strike zone, camoed fairies of destruction. They
> strafed, loosed fusillades, and mastered the head shots, spinal
> separators, and cranial detonators that diverted the dead to the
> sidewalk against newspaper boxes, fire hydrants, antiterrorism
> planters, and inscrutable corporate-sponsored public art. The soldiers
> terminated targets on fire escapes, where they slumped like moths
> caught in wrought-iron cobwebs. Kill techniques cycled in their fads,
> in this week and out the next, as the soldiers refined and traded tips
> and accidental discoveries. Everyone had their own way of handling
> things. The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares
> and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and
> franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer. Exquisite
> glass panes crashed down in their music, manufacturing geometric
> shapes that had never before existed in the history of the world,
> which in turn sharded into newer shapes and brilliant white dust.
> Shell casings danced and skipped on the asphalt like tossed cigarette
> butts. The gun smoke was sucked up into braids and curtains by the
> atmospheric patterns created by skyscrapers and avenue crevices, those
> mountain faces and valleys, and when it cleared the creatures gushed
> in renewed fortified lines.
> The soldiers discussed work over dinner."
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>