LISS/STEPVR political overtones

[Erik T. Burns]

As if 2020 needed an epigraph...

  "To submit; but above that, to endure."

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 6:36 AM Raphael Saltwood <PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com>
wrote:

> peterthooper places politics 5th among desirable novel attributes:
>
> - pentateuchly, after the scenery. Among an author’s Rasselas-like
> qualities...
>
> That’s Greek to me. Maybe it’s quintessential. Didn’t TRP do a memorable
> paper on _Rasselas_ at Cornell? https://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/abrams.htm
> <https://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/abrams.htm>
>
> When l talked with John Freccero recently about parallels between Pynchon
> and Dante, he suggested l phone M. H. Abrams to see what he remembered
> about Pynchon. l did. Abrams recalled receiving a term paper from Pynchon
> when Pynchon was a junior at Cornell. Abrams thought it was too good to
> have been written by an undergraduate, and he suspected it had been
> plagiarized. He suggested discreetly that Pynchon make an appointment to
> discuss the paper (a pretext for an oral exam). Within the first few
> minutes of their meeting, Abrams recognized that Pynchon was the paper’s
> author. (Funny how little things stick in the mind: forty years later,
> Abrams recalled Pynchon as tall and slim and sporting a pencil–line
> moustache.) That was their most memorable meeting. The ending of Pynchon’s
> paper made such a haunting impression on Abrams that he read it to his
> classes for years, even before Pynchon became PYNCHON. l asked him if he
> could find it. He said he would look and leave word on my answering machine
> if he did. When l came back from walking my dog, Diz, this message awaited
> me:
>
> Charles Hollander, this is Mike Abrams at Cornell. l found that Quotation
> from Pynchon’s term paper, which was in English 313, on eighteenth–century
> English literature. It was a paper discussing Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas in
> conjunction with Voltaire’s Candide. And the paper ended with these
> sentences: "Like Candide, Rasselas ends on an imperative note: again, to
> submit; but above that, to endure. It leaves us with less hope than
> Voltaire, but with more determination." l hope that can be of use to you.
> It seems to be an interesting Quotation. Good luck.
>
> This is also the message at the end of Vineland: "fuck it, play to the
> end. . . . Zoyd . . . found himself listening to the Eagles’ Greatest Hits,
> in particular ‘Take It to the Limit,’ basically his whole story these days,
> singing mournfully along" (373-74). Maybe submit, but for sure endure. In
> his Student days, Pynchon viewed Voltaire as a farceur and Johnson as a
> stern moralist. Exactly this dichotomy runs through all Pynchon’s work: the
> comedy of fools against the episodes of high seriousness. The term paper
> suggests he may have been trying to teach himself to write like Voltaire
> and like Johnson in one alternation in one work. As a mere lad, Pynchon was
> working out his own philosophical stance and inventing a way to express it.
> Within a year, he had developed the literary equivalent of the musical
> fugue, in "Entropy," and he was off and running. He has been using that
> zany/portentous formula ever since. You can’t teach an old writer new
> tricks.
> –Baltimore, MD
>
>
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