Hello, bibliophilic, literature-loving Kossacks! Timmyk here with the latest installment of Tuesday’s Literature for Kossacks series. Up this week is American novelist Thomas Pynchon (b. 8 May 1937–), a titan of late twentieth-century postmodern literature, whose masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), is a central document of our times, a landmark work of art, a serious candidate for The Great American Novel, an epic encyclopedia, etc.: like other great works, there really aren’t enough superlatives to describe its presence, its totalizing energies, its ambition and scope, its formal innovation, and its cultish, totemic status among critics and fans.
One of Pynchon’s great themes is information, particularly secret, hidden, difficult, information—his novels abound with secret societies and groups trading in hermetic, oracular, mysterious bits of data; a key motif is the quest for information, as in his marvelous short novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), in which protagonist Oedipa Maas seeks to decipher an increasingly bizarre influx of disturbing, inscrutable signs and portents—and in a nicely Pynchonian turn, his novels have mirrored themselves in becoming themselves holy relics for his devoted acolytes, the textual exegesis of Pynchon’s work oddly (and often hilariously) copying the obsessiveness depicted within the texts themselves. My aim is to talk about Pynchon and his works generally, and specifically about Pynchon as a progressive writer, which latter point I think is problematic in interesting ways and open to questions that I hope will prove fruitful for the community.
(A brief caveat: some of the plot synopses below may have a spoiler or two. Read, as you would anywhere about a book you haven’t read, with caution if learning the plot is a deal-breaker for you as a reader.) It’s extremely difficult to disentangle Pynchon the man and myth from Pynchon the body of work, the books that can be read, judged, and evaluated. Part of this is due to the somewhat legendary aspects of Pynchon’s own jealously-guarded biography: the literature class with Nabokov at Cornell; the work in aeronautic engineering and Pynchon’s aptitude for science; his travels in the counterculture; the spectacular kerfuffle over his winning the 1974 National Book Award, and his non-acceptance speech; and, certainly most famously, his hermit-like, Salingeresque reclusiveness, turning up only in blurry camera-phone photographs on the Internet, or bit cameos on The Simpsons. This larger-than-life figure often gets out in front of the books, obscuring the merits of the texts with the stuff of legend. I’m much more interested in the books and in my reading of Pynchon’s work that I’m going to leave the biographical stuff largely alone, and look at the books themselves: at Pynchon’s place as a postmodern author; at Pynchon’s style; at common themes across the works. A good, standard Pynchon bio. can be found at his Wikipedia article here.
Pynchon is the author of six novels—V. (1963); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Gravity’s Rainbow (1973); Vineland (1990); Mason & Dixon (1997); and Against the Day (2006)—a collection of stories, Slow Learner (pub. 1984, but containing stories from early in Pynchon’s career), and miscellaneous pieces of criticism: introductions to books, reviews, blurbs, etc. As an author, he’s usually lumped in with the postmodern movement and group of authors, particularly those belonging to American postmodernism. Before moving on to Pynchon’s works themselves, I’d like to briefly treat the topic of postmodernism: what it is, what it means, and how Pynchon does or doesn’t fit.
Postmodernism has come to mean so many things by late 2007 that I despair of even beginning to describe it. Once a simple descriptive term—postmodern originally meant "after the modern," and was first used to describe architecture that came after Modernist builders like Van der Rohe and Le Corbusier—it quickly got loaded down with all sorts of cultural signifiers, and expanded beyond a simple indicator of style to become an entire aesthetic, a mentality, and a condition. Postmodern now generally stands as referring to any number of factors attendant upon middle and late twentieth century first-world civilization, including—although some maintain that we have moved beyond postmodernism and are now living in the post-postmodern period—our own times. These factors can be briefly listed: 1) The growth of technology and the emergence of the mediasphere: a frequent problematic for postmodern thinkers is the growth of our mass media to become an all-inclusive, 24/7, neverending web of media, information, surveillance, and power, what Situationist provocateur Guy Debord termed the spectacle in his influential book The Society of the Spectacle; 2) The questioning of humanistic standards and mores, including, perhaps, a limitation upon or a devaluing of the concept of the human: postmodernism is highly critical of human individuality and agency, preferring to treat the human subject as a vector of political power, social control, and the limitations of discourse and language. The concept of the posthuman arises: humans after humanity, humans as ciphers, numbers, aggregate data. Technology, again, points the way: think of how scientific developments—in pharmacology, say (pharmaceuticals that reliably alter moods: mind not as soul or spirit but as collection of chemicals), or in genetic mapping (we are all an elaborate coded string, like any computer program)—have severely critiqued old Enlightenment assumptions about "man as the measure of all things"; 3) A relentless sense, following Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Saussure et al., of language, culture, society, and their norms, as being constructed by human beings as image- and language-making animals, rather than having grown "naturally" as part of some ineluctable process. #3 reliably wigs out conservatives, as its humble historical prescriptions are anathema to rightist dogma: if gender is a societal construct, then are homosexuals maybe OK? If language is a fungible, provisional, largely arbitrary tool, open to the vagaries of historical change and individual usage, and not an exact one-to-one correspondance between things (think Adam naming the animals in Eden), then where resides truth? I love #3 because it lets, nay, necessitates, that I be constantly witty and ironic and talk with finger quotes to show you I don’t always really mean what I’m saying, or, better, that I realize all language is fiction, all truth merely narrative. I would also say that if you have any critically minded sense at all, then a lot of #3 will seem perfectly obvious to you—Duh that man made God in his own image, and not the other way around! Duh!—and that perhaps this postmodernism thing is a little overblown, but I digress. . . . As would be expected, Wikipedia has an excellent portal page to all things postmodern here: I just want to get some of the basic tenets as I understand them out of the way at the outset.
Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), reads as a dress-run for many of his later works, but already some key elements are firmly in place: a large cast of characters (many of whom have awfully punning names); multiple shambling, desultory plotlines, and a vaguely diffusive, incoherent quest motif; lots of crowd scenes, parties, antisocial behavior, fighting, etc.; and many extended off-key gags and parodic songs: lots of jokey metaliterary stuff, then, on a par with other American postmodernists like John Barth and Donald Barthelme. V. has two main plotlines, one following the adventures of US sailor Benny Profane and his bohemian friends, the Whole Sick Crew; the other narrating the quest of Herbert Stencil for the nameless female known only as V., who may or may not have been involved with the drowning of Stencil’s father off the island of Malta many years ago. The novel leaps herkily-jerkily between narratives, with the down-and-out beat theatrics of Benny and his pals playing out wonderfully against a backdrop of ’50s New York bohemia, and with Stencil’s quest moving transhistorically across several periods, most or all of them centering on events related to European colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Stencil chapters are the first major example of the recurring Pynchonian theme of the secret history, with Stencil’s quest for V. taking him across the globe (and back in time, as he reads about and imagines what must have happened) and reconstructing, in brilliant, bizarre detail, a shadowy demimonde of spies, agents, expansionists, and traders, through which the multiple women who might be V. pass like ghosts. Stencil’s quest is also revelatory of Pynchon’s later work in that it is inconclusive, fragmentary, and unfinished: virtually all of Pynchon’s intellectual quests—in which one of his characters sets out in search of a hidden, secret truth—end without resolution, recalling various theoretical limitations to knowledge (like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or chaos theory) that arose during the twentieth century. Especially relevant in chapter 9, which recounts the experiences of a group of Germans besieged during the Herero Wars in Southwest Africa: making his appearance is one Weissmann ("white man," get it: Pynchon’s never subtle!), who will reappear again as the archnemesis of Gravity’s Rainbow: Pynchon’s excoriation here of colonialist racism and of European privilege will find echoes in his later books.
Pynchon’s second novel is the slender The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), which I would recommend as the perfect starting-places for neophyte Pynchonians. The novel takes place in ’60s California, and centers on the actions of housewife Oedipa Maas, who has been receiving mysterious signs and portents that seem to point to the existence of a shadowy group, the Tristero, whose members seem to be part of some kind of crazy underground mail-delivery system—communication again—and who leave behind, ubiquitously, the symbol of the muted posthorn. Oedipa is also upset by the recent death of her lover, Pierce Inverarity, of whose estate she has become the executrix, and which seems entangled somehow in the actions of the Tristero and in other, possibly shady, quickly ramifying events; and the full-blown insanity of her husband, Wendell "Mucho" Maas, who was, well, kind of erratic to begin with, and who has been ingesting LSD and having visions. The novel operates as a kind of psychedelic noir mystery-cum-expressionistic nightmare-cum-information-age parable: Oedipa can only haphazardly track down the members of the Tristero, and her efforts to disentangle Pierce’s estate come equally to naught, and what we get instead of a traditional mystery plot—with the detective proceeding ineluctably through the pitfalls of the story toward the shining truth (Whodunnit?) that is revealed in the end—we get a meta-commentary on the processes of intellection, deduction, and ratiocination. Data and data analysis are also super-important, as this representative passage shows, in which a suburban housing project transforms into a circuit board:
[Oedipa] looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.
I call this "Ethereal America": a postmodern, information-obsessed version of American Gothic, if you will. Pynchon continually sounds this numinous, liminal note: everything in the book is immanence, about to come into being, but holding mysteriously back, inscrutable. The narrative shimmers like a mirage or like the landscape of a dream: people come out of nowhere, promising leads turn comically into nothing, everyone is portentously intoning words of dubious meaning. What Pynchon’s really after is a lesson on the limitations of our knowledge, on our unknowingness, and the book is wonderfully frustrating in its continual denial of certain knowledge about Oedipa’s quest and its simultaneous proliferation of hints, signs, and wonders. And it’s short, so read it, already!
In 1973 Pynchon published his masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, which I confidently predict will stand the test of time as the—not a, but the—Great American Novel. (If you’re into score-carding, I’d put it second to Ulysses in the line of Great Twentieth-Century Novels.) Move over Melville and Moby Dick, sit down Heller and Ellison and Bellow, run away Gaddis and Gass (and kindly fuck off forever, thou arch-plagiarist Jonathan Safran Foer, thou!), Pynchon’s got y’all beat, and forever. Gravity’s Rainbow actually models itself after Melville’s earlier epic quest, itself being an ill-fated, disastrous, suicidal epic quest; much as Melville’s Pequod sailed after the great white whale, so Pynchon’s gang of fools seeks an impossible goal: the new Nazi (the book is set in the waning months of, and immediately after, World War Two) 00000 rocket, the latest in a chain of airborne rockets that have been falling on Britain. At the head of the quest is the hapless Tyrone Slothrop (another "speaking name": Tyrone from tyro [beginner, neophyte, novice], Slothrop connoting slothfulness, laziness, lack of agency: The Lazy Initiate, if you will, or Powerless Hero), a feckless young American stationed in London, and who, true to the quest motif, has a most unusual power: he gets erections when in the presence of German rocket bombs. Slothrop’s abilities (such as they are) become known to the all-pervasive, ubiquitous cartel of industrialists, government men, scientists, etc., known throughout the book as They and Them, and he is catapulted into a bizarre, Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole world of clairvoyants, spies, military adventurers, smugglers, and freaks that populate wartime London and, later, postwar, occupied Germany (called, because of its state of flux, the Zone). Like V., Pynchon peoples the book with all number of fascinating minor characters, of whom some fairly steal the narrative from Slothrop, and are presented by Pynchon with far more backstory, far more "human interest," than his ostensible hero: one thinks of Franz Pökler, German rocket engineer and Nazi collaborator, who loses first his wife, Leni, to his obsession with aerodynamics and equations, and who loses in turn his daughter and, finally, his humanity—all are ground down by the machine of war, sacrificed to the Nazis and their bloodlust. Pökler’s section is the longest single section in the book, which is divided into four parts with many sections each, and Pynchon thus presents a decentered, fractal narrative, one that departs from the ostensibly main line of the story (Slothrop’s quest) to fall into digression, reacapitulation, wandering, errancy. This is particulary true of the last part of the book, in which the narrative disintegrates before the reader’s eyes: Slothrop disappears althogether, and what happens is a textual equivalent to, say, the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: a breaking apart into chunks and fragments, disconnected mini-narratives that bring us finally down to the modern-day ’70s and the presidency of Richard M. Nixon (here, Richard M. Shlubb, hehheh). Gravity’s Rainbow stands right up there with other sprawling, all-inclusive, encyclopedic works of twentieth-century American art—a Rauschenberg canvas, or Sonic Youth’s album Daydream Nation—in its stylistic heterogeneity; its embrace and command of popular, "nonliterary" sources (comic books, movies, engineering manuals, etc.: Pynchon’s got it all here); its astonishing register of voices, from Slothrop’s proto-slacker wide-eyed American to the more wary, sullen Europeans; its visionary, vatic tone, which places it squarely in the line of American prophetic writings, from Jonathan Edwards to Whitman and Melville down on to today. Gravity’s Rainbow is mega-long, but somehow I’ve never experienced it as such: each time I’ve read it (three time through, innumerable pickings-up and glimpses) I’ve been floored at the book’s amazing generosity, its provision of textual pleasure, its imagination and scope.
For me, Pynchon’s other novels—Vineland (1988), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006)—fall a little short of the sublimity of Gravity’s Rainbow; worse, they all fall like lapses into mannerism, Pynchon writing Pynchon rather than breaking newer ground for thought and expression. Of the three, only Mason & Dixon holds up for me: if you’re new to Pynchon, I’d read it third, after The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a lovely, long story of the settling of America, the heartwarming (and heartbreaking: the warmth of the book is indeed a fresh departure for Pynchon that distinguishes it from the rest of his work) story of the friendship between the explorers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, and the adventures and dangers they face while drawing their famous Line. The book also wonderfully pastiches eighteenth-century spelling, syntax, and vocabulary, a consummate act of ventriloquism that, while not the kaleidoscopic funhouse of styles in Gravity’s Rainbow, is nevertheless a wonderful achievement, a constantly bizarre and grotesque reinvention of the birth of the novel. But both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day lack, for me, the feverish invention, the sense of inescapability, that Gravity’s Rainbowhas. They feel more like V., fascinating and fun roller-coaster rides packed with funny characters, amusing non-plots, exotic locales, etc.: wonderful novels, then, as opposed to one of the all-time greats.
I want to cut short my discussion of Pynchon’s works to briefly talk about Pynchon’s progressivism, or lack thereof, and what this might or might not mean to the progressive community. I would say that Pynchon’s progressivism, such as it is, is quite tied into his time, that of the ’60s: there’s the same anti-authoritarianism, the same love of the counterculture (sex, drugs, and rock and roll all play central roles in all of the books), the same preoccupations with colonialism (Pynchon speaks of the German destruction of the Herero as "the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration," something that could have been said by Joseph Campbell, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, or George Lucas, to take some random examples) and war and the plight of the dispossessed. Pynchon takes ’60s counterculturalism a step further, I think, by offering such a sustained, wildly inventive, and devastating critique of modern, industrial society: in all of the books a determined cadre of elites seeks to wrest power from, and ultimately destroy, an embattled group of heroes and victims, and its not hard to map all of the novels onto the same imaginative territory, that of the post-nuclear, globalized present, in which the means of surveillance and destruction gain increasing power, people are increasingly alienated from one another and from their world, and capital and death hold sway over all. Insofar as Pynchon is a critic of "the Man," of our militarized, corporatized state, he’s unbeatable; furthermore, you can think of the novels as vivid anti-histories, or counternarratives, that explode and discredit the established historical verities pawned by the powerful: one big Fuck You, if you will. But Pynchon never offers a detailed counter-program to Them and Their way of doing business; worse, the novels inhabit the same imaginative space as certain Frenchy McTheorists whom I won’t deign to mention: the West’s Empire is All and Inescapable and We are All Doomed. There’s little hope and scarce resistance, the latter of a jokey, ineffectual kind. The concept of the people or the grassroots or whatever as an effective, localized, democratic counterweight to the depredations of corporate warmongers is nowhere present. I would say this makes Pynchon’s status as a progressive author rather fascinatingly problematic, perhaps analogous to the plight of many politically-minded folks everywhere, liberal and conservative: a sense that the game is fixed, a sense of agonized powerlessness and creeping fear (got FISA?), and a sense of paranoia, that everyone is in on it. Fortunately, progressive action and the success of things like the Internet and Daily Kos have worked out a real-life alternative to this solipsistic narrative of despair; our world looks terribly close to Pynchon’s own, and incomparably worse for being real, but we still have (for now) each other, sharing and negotiating together a growing measure of power and the consequent hope for change.
And before I forget, tune in next week, where the series goes back to its proud parent, pico, for a look at the Athenian tragedian Euripidies. Awww yeah! Euripides in 'da house!