From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: T.S. Eliot
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 22:25:48 -0500


Steve wrote:

where is the evidence to support the Pynchon/Elliot statement ?

Steve,

Apparently there is an autobiographical sketch which I have only seen
paraphrased, but it has the following quote taken from the official
archives of San Narciso Community College (hee hee):

This brought him safely up to the present, to 1959, where he saw himself
''entrenched on the T.S. Eliot side of no man's land'" ( from "Thomas
Pynchon at Twenty-Two: A recovered Autobiographical Sketch" by Steven
Weisenburger; American Literature, Volume 62, Number 4) 


The same autobiographical sketch reportedly describes what he perceived
as a constant fluctuation between Classicism and Romanticism within his
writing style, structure, and subject matter. 

Ironic? Pynchon said (and the italics are ours), "the Cornell seminars
taught him the way of crafting a fiction around one central metaphor
that unifies its sometimes very disparate and complex elements of
character, imagery, and action." 

The MLA Bibliography lists citations for studies addressing Pynchon and
his sources in such authors, personalities, and genres as: Richard
Farina, James Bond, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, William Faulkner,
T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Hobbes, Hogarth, science fiction,
Vladimir Nabokov, Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), classic spy
novels, Ernest Hemingway, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Franz Kafka, Karl
Baedeker's guidebooks, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Herman Melville, Mark
Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller (Catch-22), Beat poets/novelists,
and Samuel Beckett 

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Also in his introduction to "Slow Learner" Pynchon has this to say about
his first short story "The Small Rain":

"Apparently I felt I had to put in a whole extra overlay of rain images
and references to the "Waste Land" and "A Farewell to Arms". I was
operating on the model "Make it literary," a piece of bad advice I made
up all by myself and then took."

Influences aren't always totally negative. Sometimes they have to be
worked through.  These fragments Tom have shored against the ruins in GR
include the Kenosha Kid, a giant Adenoid, a "T.S. Eliot April", Tarot,
Grail and Kabbala references. He didn't invent the game of modernism,
but he turned it inside out.  

You also need to unpack a little more your comments about Eliot and
native influences. Certainly, Deleuze had no qualms about appropriating
Celine despite his fascist qualities for certain insights, so despite
the well-known anti-semitism and reactionary tendencies in the Possum,
there are still things there for use. Must literature always be
politically correct or must it be untimely?

eric

  

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