When we read a Pynchon text we may be disconcerted by it, but we usually find ourselves comfortable with at least one of its elements: setting. In fact, Pynchon's mise en scène may be the only reason for calling his books novels. He is as archeologically precise about places and things as Flaubert, although he should probably be compared to the Flaubert of Salammbô. In that text, Flaubert transports Emma Bovary's problems back to Carthage, rendering both Emma and the setting abstract. Pynchon, on the other hand, creates a false familiarity in the mind of the reader which makes him forget that what he is reading is not a study of people in a historical setting but the clash of personified ideas surrounded by the things of the twentieth century. Flaubert and Pynchon are opposites that converge: Flaubert makes the alien familiar by recreating the problems of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in Carthage and Pynchon makes the familiar strange by having his personifications collide in a setting we know only too well.
This disjunction between character and setting is the first indication that Pynchon is a satirist, that he is reworking satire as a modern-day disciple of Petronius, Apuleius, or Voltaire might. In addition to this use of a pasteboard, trompe-l'oeil setting, there are three other aspects of his work that support a reading of them as satires: his characters are associated with ideas or idées fixes, his scenes take precedence over his plots, and his characters' psychological development is reduced to a minimum. The difference between satire and, for example, novel may be seen in two areas: character and plot. Novelistic plots, as Fielding suggests in Tom Jones, both echoing and modifying Cervantes, tend toward history writing, and it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the particular form of history used as the model for novelistic plots is the developmental sort we associate with Hegel. (pp. 555-56)
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