Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Importance of Thomas Pynchon

1975; Duke University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/440705

2325-8101

Richard Poirier,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

One of the many distinctions between American literature and English literature, especially in the 19th century, is that most of the American writers whom we would call great were not, while most actively producing their best work, what we would also call popular. I'm thinking of Hawthorne, Melville, James, Eliot, Stevens. There has usually been a time lag between critical and general acclaim. Not that criticism has, by itself, kept up to the mark. There is the conspicuous case of Melville, who wasn't taken seriously until 1921, and even Faulkner had the misfortune of being popular not with his best but with his second best novels, like Sanctuary. His popularity, coming before literary critics could take credit for creating it, put them in no mood to be generous when they at first got round to him. The same condition, with certain variations, has been true of Robert Frost. Serious criticism is still in Frost's case exceptionally begrudging and self-protective. Even now he is looked into as if he aspired to be Yeats or Eliot, not as someone who proposes an extraordinary alternative to them and to the dominant so-called modernist line of the twentieth century. Among the remarkable facts about Thomas Pynchon is that if we are to believe the best seller list, the selections of the Book of the Month Club, the reviews, and the committee for the National Book Awards, then presumably we are to believe that Gravity's Rainbow is a popular book and, at the same time, that it ranks with Ulysses and Moby Dick in accomplishment and possibly exceeds them in complexity. Something peculiar is happening here. A writer is received simultaneously into the first rank of the history of our literature and also as a popular novelist. Only Mark Twain has been given such praise before, unless Hemingway and Fitzgerald are counted, though not by me, as of the first order.