Prose and Cons

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Notes

notes

1. See Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of P., written and directed by Donatello and Fosco Dubini (Dubini Filmproduktion, 2001). Pynchon self-reflexively lampoons the mystique of the disappearing author in “Diatribe of a Mad Housewife” (The Simpsons episode 323, Season 15, Jan. 2004) and “All's Fair in Oven War” (The Simpsons episode 337, Season 16, Nov. 2004).

2. For an account of Marco Polo's apparent plagiarism of Arabic and Persian sources, see Wood.

3. That “indirect” acknowledgement of Baedeker, for example, is an overstatement. For while Pynchon evidently sought permission from the editors of The Noble Savage to reprint “considerably altered” portions of his own story “Under the Rose” as the third chapter of his novel V., Baedeker's Egypt – the apparent source of the earlier story – goes unacknowledged except for the occasional use of punctuation to signify direct quotation (in the novel's fourteenth, but significantly not its third, chapter). On the whole, Slow Learner is no less selective in its acknowledgement of copyrighted material: of all the book's allusions, quotations and apparent plagiarisms, only Noel Coward's “A Room with a View” and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer are directly acknowledged.

4. Donald Larsson details Pynchon's extensive borrowings from The Berkshire Hills, as evidenced by both Gravity's Rainbow and “The Secret Integration.” Robert D. Newman parts company with the community of Pynchon scholars by asserting that Pynchon was in fact raised in the Berkshires (29). Isn’t this just the kind of apocryphal discrepancy that befits a cult of the disappearing author?