Talking Big

Today is the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow.

Here’s Harold Bloom in his 2003 Introduction to his Modern Critical Views volume on Pynchon.

The not unimpressive polemic of Norman Mailer—-that Fascism always lurks where plastic dominates—-is in Pynchon not a polemic but a total vision. Mailer, for all his legitimate status as Representative Man, lacks invention except in Ancient Evenings, and there he cannot discipline his inventiveness. Pynchon surpasses every American writer since Faulkner at invention, which Dr. Samuel Johnson, greatest of Western literary critics, rightly considered to be the essence of poetry or fiction. What can be judged Pynchon’s greatest talent is his vast control, a preternatural ability to order so immense an exuberance at invention. Pynchon’s supreme aesthetic quality is what Hazlitt called gusto, or what Blake intended in his Infernal proverb: “Exuberance is Beauty.”