American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon

Citation preview

AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon

Ian D. Copestake Editor

PETER LANG

AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY

This page intentionally left blank

ian d. copestake (ed.)

AMERICAN POSTMODERNITY essays on the recent fiction of thomas pynchon

PETER LANG OXFORD • BERN • BERLIN • BRUXELLES • FRANKFURT AM MAIN • NEW YORK • WIEN

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

Cover design: Thomas Jaberg, Peter Lang AG

ISBN 3-03910-017-3 US-ISBN 0-8204-6286-1

© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2003 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

Contents

IAN D. COPESTAKE Introduction Postmodern Reflections: The Image of an Absent Author

7

DAVID SEED Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

15

DAVID DICKSON Pynchon’s Vineland and “That Fundamental Agreement in What is Good and Proper”: What Happens when we Need to Change it?

35

DAVID THOREEN In which “Acts Have Consequences”: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon’s Recent Fiction

49

FRANCISCO COLLADO RODRÍGUEZ Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconciliation of Opposites

71

WILLIAM B. MILLARD Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction

83

MARTIN SAAR AND CHRISTIAN SKIRKE “The Realm of Velocity and Spleen”: Reading Hybrid Life in Mason & Dixon

129

6

Contents

JOHN HEON Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked!

147

ROBERT L. MCLAUGHLIN Surveying, Mapmaking and Representation in Mason & Dixon

173

IAN D. COPESTAKE “Off the Deep End Again”: Sea-Consciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon

193

Notes on Contributors

217

Index

221

IAN D. COPESTAKE

Introduction Postmodern Reflections: The Image of an Absent Author

The title of this collection of essays could well have contained a question mark after its first phrase, for although the American context of Thomas Pynchon’s fictional, historical and cultural concerns is not in doubt, the terms of his relationship to that most nebulous of categories, “postmodernism,” continues to be. Gathered here are nine essays which, both directly and indirectly, strive to make sense of that relationship and so give substance to that absent question mark. The publication in 1997 of Mason & Dixon provided an opportunity for assessing critical lines of connection with Pynchon’s past work at a time when possible shifts in direction had been perceived.1 Furthermore his work’s relationship to postmodernism was especially helpful in bringing to light these perceived developments in Pynchon’s work not least because they appeared to mirror shifts in the currency and character of postmodernism itself. Hans Bertens, for instance, defines changes in the nature of the postmodern within the literary field from the 1960s to the present day which have led, he argues, to the emergence of two postmodernisms: 1

Recent book-length studies and collections of essays which have also surveyed these lines in Pynchon’s work include Joakim Sigvardson’s Immanence and Transcendence in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon: A Phenomenological Study. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 2002; Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Eds. Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland. Oslo: Novus Press, 2002; Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins. Ed. Niran Abbas. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson, 2002; Pynchon and Mason & Dixon. Eds. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000; Charles Clerc. Mason & Dixon & Pynchon. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2000.

8

Ian D. Copestake The first postmodernism is the familiar one: in this sense the term refers to a set of loosely connected artistic innovations and strategies that begin to manifest themselves in the early 1960s (Thomas Pynchon’s V. [1963]), reach their highwater mark in the course of the 1970s (with, for instance, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow [1973], Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra [1975], Robert Coover’s The Public Burning [1976] and George Perec’s La Vie: mode d’emploi [1978]), and go into decline after the mid-1980s. (10)

Bertens identifies a second postmodernism as “the postmodernism of difference,” (10) which reflects the impact of French postructuralist thinking within the academic confines to which postmodernism had retreated by the 1980s. The key point here is that Pynchon’s work is central to the marking out of such shifts and continues to be so in the wake of the sense of change which Vineland (1990), his novel of eighties America, seemed to confirm through its more overtly “realistic” and political style and content. Another critic with an eye on the changing nature of postmodernity, Frank Palmeri, also positions Pynchon (along with Foucault) as central to his sense of a movement, whereby a moment of high postmodernism dominant in the sixties, seventies, and eighties has been succeeded by two forms of cultural expression that have continuities with, yet depart from, this cultural mode and stand in contrast to each other. A new structure of thought and expression that I call other than postmodern remains the less prominent and popular mode, by contrast with a late postmodernism that has been the dominant form of production in the nineties and the first years of the new century. (para. 1)

For Palmeri postmodernism encompasses A set of concerns and formal operations – including a frequent use of irony, satire, and pastiche, an interest in the layering of historical interpretations, and a strong paranoid strand – while also signifying the period from the mid-sixties until perhaps the present when most, but not necessarily all, of these features have been prominent. (para. 2)

The shift to an “other than postmodern” which Pynchon’s most recent fiction helps him elucidate is signified by a move “away from the representation of extreme paranoia, toward a vision of local ethicopolitical possibilities” (para. 5). In this we come back to an earlier

Postmodern Reflections

9

definition of literary postmodernism put forward, as Bertens reminds us, by Linda Hutcheon in The Politics of Postmodernism (1989): [Hutcheon] tells us that “postmodernism is a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory as well as unavoidably political” (1). It “ultimately manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge” (1–2) and it can do so because in a further contradiction it “juxtaposes and gives equal value to the self-reflexive and the historically-grounded” (2). In other words, the postmodern art that is Hutcheon’s subject here is simultaneously referential and non-referential, political (because of its referentiality) and apolitical (because of its self-reflexivity). (7)

What the essays in this collection also argue for is the continued importance to Pynchon’s work of its political and ethical seriousness. Reinstated is an awareness of Pynchon’s acute sense of the ethical possibilities inherent in individual human action, over and against the passive acceptance of a sterile relativism. Reflected in Pynchon’s work is the movement which is seen to be occurring in perceptions of postmodernism, argued for by Palmeri and Bertens, which reinstate or reconfirms the relationship between the political and the postmodern. However, as the essays in this collection also reflect such lines of connection between Pynchon and postmodernism must be informed by an awareness of the author’s own positioning in relation to this and other forms of definition. The relationship between Pynchon’s fiction and the array of styles, strategies and questions which postmodernism embodies is one that he has had no responsibility for directly determining other than to have produced a body of work which for a generation of critics has resounded with significance with postmodernism’s perceived characteristics. Pynchon can thus claim to be as far removed from any adherence to critical assertions of literary postmodernism’s identity as he can equally claim to be one of its foremost practitioners. That he chooses publicly to do neither allows his work to flow freely across the boundaries and borders which such definitions place upon it. The aim of such categorical assumptions, of Pynchon as postmodern writer, is not, however, to kill the work by pinning it down, but to hold it stationary for long enough that its possibilities can

10

Ian D. Copestake

be viewed and communicated for others to argue and agree with as they see fit. The work itself, reflecting Pynchon’s reclusive detachment from any conventional identification of himself with authorship and fame, is free from any obligations laid down by such definitions. The irony is, of course, that it is precisely that slipperiness which makes him for many the embodiment of a postmodernism which seeks to “install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge.” With Mason & Dixon came a novel about line-drawing and boundary-making, which, moreover, chose for its historical setting the impact of Enlightenment thought on the divisions and definitions which constitute America’s achievement of national self-identity. Postmodernity of course continues to gain both its impetus and identity from a reaction to (and hence an intimate relationship with) the same intellectual heritage. Pynchon’s most recent fiction is once again an open invitation for the exploration of such parallels. Of the nine essays which follow five look closely at Mason & Dixon, and these first cut their teeth as papers presented at King’s College, London between 10 and 13 June 1998, a conference which will live long in the collective memory of all who attended it. The remaining four offer connecting perspectives with Pynchon’s previous work through contexts which aid our understanding of his fiction in relation to evolving notions of American postmodernism. David Seed’s essay “Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49,” underlines the importance of cultural mediation to Pynchon’s fiction in general, and examines the particular relationship between The Crying of Lot 49 and the work of Marshall McLuhan. The tension between means of information transfer and the message conveyed is underlined by Seed’s focus on the role of such media in the novel as the telephone, film, visual and cultural spaces and finally fiction itself. The constant deferral of meaning which both Oedipa Maas and the reader experience in the course of the novel point towards the need to re-evaluate the relationship between media and meaning which McLuhan had been amongst the first to foreground. David Dickson writes on “Pynchon’s Vineland and ‘That Fundamental Agreement in What is Good and Proper’: What Happens when We Need to Change it?” Central to Dickson’s discussion of

Postmodern Reflections

11

Vineland is the question of the viability of individual action when measured against the pressures of historical and cultural conceptions of social value and meaning. By referring to the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s views on history and cultural change, the author suggests that Pynchon’s novel offers a critique of the hermeneutic theory of experience while holding out the possibility for the renegotiation of value within specific historical moments. The relationship between individual action and history is also a vital concern in David Thoreen’s essay, “In Which ‘Acts Have Consequences’: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon’s Recent Fiction.” Thoreen refutes the critical suggestion that Pynchon’s oeuvre embraces postmodern challenges to historiography to the extent that he rejects ideas of cause and effect. Pynchon is positioned as a postmodernist for whom not all is indeterminacy in action or knowledge but rather the need to know and act are vital determining factors in the critical relationship to history which Pynchon’s fiction promotes. This is highlighted with regard to American history in particular through Thoreen’s subsequent reading of Vineland in relation to Washington Irving’s political parable “Rip Van Winkle.” With the following essays we cross a boundary-line into considerations of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. In “Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconcilliation of Opposites,” Francisco Collado Rodríguez highlights the subversive character of Pynchon’s use of metafictional devices to disrupt objectives notions of history. Mason & Dixon is a novel in which historical knowledge and the art of the fiction-maker fuse. For Collado, what results is Pynchon’s attempt to negotiate the paradox whereby the human need to give order and meaning to reality through narratives is both a barrier to historical knowledge and a vital means by which individuals can empower themselves against the despotic imposition of lines of demarcation, categorisation and difference. William B. Millard’s argues in his essay “Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction,” that Mason & Dixon is both a novel of science and anti-science which confirms Pynchon’s continued desire to run the line between debates on this issue, including C. P. Snow’s

12

Ian D. Copestake

influential 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” As a writer Pynchon is acutely concerned at the antagonism between non-secular systems of belief and secular scientific reason, and Millard argues that Pynchon’s latest work confirms his distance from perspectives which are politically fatalistic or reliant solely on relativism. Instead Pynchon continues not only to resist and problematize the drawing of lines between notions of modern and postmodern, science and scientific Luddism, but that this provides the impetus for his own project of illumination. The essay co-authored by Christian Skirke and Martin Saar, “‘The Realm of Velocity and Spleen’: Reading Hybrid Life in Mason & Dixon,” underlines the central role of notions of hybridity in a novel which presents a typology of unreal creatures and composite creations. Throughout Pynchon’s work notions of progress and rationality have given rise to monstrous imaginings which combine the unreal with the historically all too real. In Mason & Dixon European and American history abounds with such creations, both humane and inhumane, and it is the memorable figure of the “automatic Duck” which Skirke and Saar highlight in this essay in order to read notions of hybridity in Pynchon’s novel. John Heon also looks at Pynchon’s utilisation of hybrid forms to disrupt categories of thought and convention, by focusing on the importance to his work of comic traditions exemplified by the work and career of Spike Jones. “Surveying the Punch Line: Jokes and their Relation to the American Racial Unconscious/Conscience in Mason & Dixon and the Liner Notes to Spiked!” sees Heon elucidate Pynchon’s project by analysing the role of laughter and the masking joker in giving credence to the shared seriousness of Pynchon’s and Jones’s “minstrelizing” of American history. “Surveying, Mapmaking and Representation in Mason & Dixon” sees Robert L. McLaughlin read Pynchon’s novel in relation to conceptions of mapmaking which reflect Pynchon’s own efforts to lay bare the power and prevalence of non-neutral and ideologically weighted processes of meaning-making. McLaughlin argues that a vital part of the drama of Mason & Dixon is the protagonists’ dawning realisation of their position as victims of the maps they are employed to draw. Their complicity in serving interests beyond the initially

Postmodern Reflections

13

undoubted objectivity of scientific line-drawing, provides a spur towards moral action and resistance. Ian D. Copestake’s essay “‘Off the Deep End Again’: SeaConsciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon,” highlights Pynchon’s fictional preoccupation with forms of insanity throughout his career, and through his analysis of Mason & Dixon charts its relationship to Pynchon’s entry into an American tradition of sea-writing. The history of delusion and its medical treatment is seen as central to this novel’s continuation of Pynchon’s career-long project of exposing the contradictions inherent in the human need for definitions and the insanity which results from their imposition across the globe. Taken together these essays constitute a further step towards understanding Pynchon’s evolving and ever-challenging oeuvre and offer a variety of perspectives which reflect the fascination he continues to hold for so many readers. This book will also appeal to those who are interested in Pynchon’s relationship to the ongoing debate over the status, currency and nature of American postmodernity at the end of that country’s century.2

Works Cited Bertens, Hans. “In Defense of the Bourgeois Postmodern.” Postmodernism and the Fin de Siècle. Eds. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung. Heidelburg: Winter, 2002: 1–11. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Palmeri, Frank. “Other than Postmodern? Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics.” Postmodern Culture 12. 1 (2001): 39 pars. 02 December 2002 . 2

The editor wishes to thank Graham Speake and David Edmonds for their assistance in the production of this volume, and also John Krafft and Niran Abbas for their advice and encouragement. Every publication carries with it an untold story of the struggle it has gone through to see the light of day and this is no exception. Final heartfelt thanks go to Rocío Montoro and Diederik Oostdijk for their editorial expertise and support.

This page intentionally left blank

DAVID SEED

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

To say that the sixties was the decade of the mass media is scarcely an exaggeration. American novelists complained repeatedly of being displaced. Bruce Jay Friedman introduced his 1965 anthology of black humour by declaring that “the satirist has had his ground usurped by the newspaper reporter” and in his 1960 essay “Writing American Fiction” Philip Roth described a related media-induced estrangement which brought the “writer of fiction to feel that he does not really live in his own country.”1 The writings of Marshall McLuhan pioneered the study of the media which were bringing about such perceptions and also provided an account of the “decentring of the subject” which Arthur Marwick has compared to the French neo-Marxists.2 McLuhan’s writings open up a productive line of inquiry specifically into Pynchon’s fiction since they help explain the latter’s concern with cultural mediation. The Mechanical Bride (1951), for instance, explores the “interfusion of sex and technology” promoted by advertising and the popular press, arguing: It is not a feature created by the ad men, but it seems rather to be born of a hungry curiosity to explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique on one hand, and, on the other, to possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. (94A, McLuhan’s emphasis)

The erotic attachment of characters in V. to high-speed cars and Pynchon’s juxtaposition of human actions to mechanisms reflect a process similar to that diagnosed by McLuhan where the self becomes extended into its own technology. Such extensions had already been described in the near-future world of Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952) where prosthetic limbs are designed to substitute a rational means of 1 2

Friedman x; Roth 177. See Marwick 310.

16

David Seed

control over “natural” human aggression. Ironically, the attempt fails when the prosthetics emerge as even more powerful weapons, “arms” in both senses, than their originals. Wolfe describes designer limbs; Pynchon’s obsessive V-searcher Stencil imagines the latest embodiment of V as a designer construct where technology has achieved a new kind of beauty by displacing the body: skin radiant with the bloom of some new plastic; both eyes glass but now containing photoelectric cells, connected by silver electrodes to optic nerves of purest copper wire and leading to a brain exquisitely wrought as a diode matrix could ever be. Solenoid relays would be her ganglia, servo-actuators move her flawless nylon limbs, hydraulic fluid be sent by a platinum heart-pump through butyrate veins and arteries. (411, emphases added)

The value terms here suggest not only an ideal simulation of body functions but also a female construct to be enjoyed by male “operators.” The dramatization of such a figure in action had to wait for the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and after; here it remains a static image, a visual speculation on a technological possibility. In The Mechanical Bride McLuhan still retains the concept of an autonomous self gradually being invaded or displaced by technology. His sixties writings on the media move away from this by privileging the figure of the mosaic. Introducing The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), he describes the latter as the only viable approach to examining the contemporary cultural situation: The present book develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing causal operations in history. (1)

McLuhan admitted in an interview that he was a compulsive “pattern watcher” and he weaves his concern with pattern into a series of works which develop Modernist collage into a medium of inquiry (Letters 117). In 1964 he was asked to write an essay on William Burroughs’s fiction and responded with enthusiasm to the “cut-up” method of Naked Lunch and Nova Express because they seemed to be using discontinuity to imitate the processes whereby the environment is perceived:

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

17

To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programmes is an experience in a corporate form – an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. (“Notes on Burroughs” 69)

In Burroughs McLuhan found a confirmation of his own awareness of “media as environment” (Letters 312) and of the following process of externalisation: “In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness” (Understanding Media 57). Throughout Understanding Media (1964), the work that bears most directly on The Crying of Lot 49, McLuhan stresses how the media have extended – his key word – the human consciousness into the environment. Pynchon too in The Crying of Lot 49 describes motor cars as “motorized, metal extensions” (8) of their owners. McLuhan’s new emphasis comes with his insistence that the media are means above all of information transfer. Predictably this conviction leads McLuhan to privilege information in human life: “Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing.” (Understanding Media 58) This proposition helps to explain why, as several critics have noted, Pynchon draws on the detective genre in The Crying of Lot 49 since this is a literary mode which revolves around the gathering and processing of information. McLuhan’s famous division between “hot” and “cool” media is drawn according to the information of each medium, which, he stresses, has nothing to do with the content of messages through the respective media. The startling originality of his approach was firstly to draw scholarly attention to the mass media themselves and secondly to project a cultural model of interlocking systems for information transfer. This field of systems finds expression in The Crying of Lot 49, as we shall see, generating both its comedy and its darker side. McLuhan for his part in Understanding Media glimpses a utopian end-point of totally shared knowing. The final phase of the extension of man will come “when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society”; but in the meantime, we have to negotiate the solicitations of the

18

David Seed

media: “This is the Age of Anxiety for the reason of the electric implosion that compels commitment and participation, quite regardless of any ‘point of view’” (3–4).. If this makes the present age sound like science fiction, so be it, McLuhan would say. In his “Notes on Burroughs” he recognises the contemporary threat of the most ominous technological form of the Cold War: “We live science fiction. The bomb is our environment” (73).3 For Pynchon too the bomb defines the Cold War situation. In V. he explores the cultural polarities which culminate in the super-power confrontations of that period; in Gravity’s Rainbow the bomb is the ultimate in a series of devices produced by a death-haunted technology. As befits its emphasis on media processes, The Crying of Lot 49 presents in Yoyodyne an instance of the aerospace corporations supporting military technology, similar to Boeing in Seattle where Pynchon himself worked for a year. The bomb, however, is only a focal object within a vast complex of networks and his sense of inter-connection leads McLuhan to stress again and again that we cannot understand one medium without considering its relation to others. Even the concept of understanding needs revision in the light of contemporary technology since, he declares: Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the whole situation, and not a single level of information movement (Understanding Media 26, McLuhan’s emphases).

Already it should be clear how McLuhan’s theories are beginning to approach a version of postmodernism. In developing his unified field theory of the media McLuhan drew on Kenneth Boulding’s 1956 study The Image, among other things for Boulding’s notion of boundary breaking where systems merge into other systems.4 Apart from the proliferation of signifying systems, McLuhan denies any referential ground in the media by arguing that

3 4

McLuhan described his own Mechanical Bride as “really a new form of science fiction” (Letters 217). By “image” Boulding means the locatedness of an individual in organisations, etc.

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

19

the only way to understand one medium is in terms of another.5 He made sharply ironic comments on Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image (1962), despite the proximity of Boorstin’s material to McLuhan’s, accusing the other of giving a “literary,” and so anachronistic, interpretation of what was happening. Boorstin explains that The Image considers a CENTRAL PARADOX – that the rise of images and of our power over the world blurs rather than sharpens the outlines of reality […]. There is hardly a corner of our daily behaviour where the multiplication of images, the products and by-products of the Graphic Revolution, have not befogged the simplest old everyday distinctions. (228–29)

Boorstin’s use of the term “image” awkwardly focuses on the vocabulary of the media whereas McLuhan insistently stays with their syntax; but even more importantly, Boorstin implies an accessible reality against which commercialised representations can be measured. This assumption was being brought into question by US novelists in the sixties. For example, from at least 1959 (Time Out of Joint) onwards in works such as The Penultimate Truth (1964) and Dr Bloodmoney (1965), Philip K. Dick had been dramatising how the media were being used for reality management. In Dick’s writings the media are used again and again to promote political deception and commercial exploitation. McLuhan too argues that the media have always had such problematic effects as those Boorstin describes – and so therefore they cannot be unique to the present age – but then by minimising content he appears to make it impossible to recuperate meaning in any way other than transfer. We can only approach meaning, he suggests, by moving laterally across an endless sequence of media. It is appropriate that the protagonist of The Crying of Lot 49 should be a figure with a minimal past and social context since the narrative takes her through an extended present where she is constantly trying to decipher the cultural signs which bombard her. 5

McLuhan’s notion of content is problematic, though he never quite reaches the extreme position of Jean Baudrillard who extends McLuhan’s theories to justify a reading of cultural forms as simulations endlessly re-imaging each other.

20

David Seed

The first medium which Pynchon foregrounds in the novel, the telephone, had already been used in Burdick and Wheeler’s 1962 political thriller Fail-Safe which describes how the world moves to the brink of nuclear holocaust when a squadron of American bombers erroneously flies into Soviet air space with instructions to attack designated targets. Here the telephone supplies a means of communication between different sections of Strategic Air Command but, more importantly, between the American and Soviet premiers. Ironically, the crisis is brought about by technological failure, that of the so-called fail-safe mechanism which would order the bombers back to base. So one means of communication is used to counter the failure of another. The new “conference line,” the “hot line” as it became known, turns the limitations of the medium to political advantage in its abstraction of discourse into isolated verbal utterances. For Burdick and Wheeler the line frees the premiers from the scrutiny of public spectacle and hence from the need to adopt obligatory postures. It is also a double means of communication in the sense that the US President’s translator has to examine Krushchev’s tone and style for meta-messages which authenticate his spoken words. A year after Fail-Safe, the telephone figured once again in a nuclear drama, but this time one where communications break down and technology slips out of human control. Dr Strangelove subverts the decorum of political negotiation by opening up a grotesque gap of scale between the prosaic difficulties the US President has in communicating between his Soviet opposite number. In the film the President is told to try “Omsk information” for the premier’s number and, once he does get through, he discovers that the latter is drunk and almost inaudible over loud music. Later when an officer discovers the recall code for the bombers, there is more comic business when he almost fails to call the President from a pay telephone. In Dr Strangelove there is a mismatch between the comic familiarity of the difficulties of using the telephone and the scale of the mounting crisis. Such problems of connecting recur repeatedly in William Gaddis’s 1976 dialogue novel JR where the telephone becomes the means by which the protagonist builds up his paper “empire” of companies. Every telephone conversation in that novel falls victim to distortion,

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

21

interruption and misconception – so much so that the medium becomes an entropic channel of disorder. Pynchon similarly shows the telephone to be a disruptive force, taking a lead from two perceptions from McLuhan. Firstly, it is an “irresistible intruder in time or place”; secondly, it “demands complete participation” (Understanding Media 271, 267). When Oedipa receives a call early one morning it induces horror, “so out of nothing did it come, the instrument one second inert, the next screaming” (10). Neither Pynchon nor McLuhan consider the variations in volume; the phone is either ringing or not. And just as it blanks out the physicality of the communicator, so it technologically stylises the voice, indeed becomes a substitute voice, hence the “screaming.” The ghost in Oedipa Maas’s machine is Pierce Inverarity who is perceived primarily as a remembered voice doing a performance over the phone which compels participation from Oedipa: there had come this long-distance call, from where she would never know […] by a voice beginning in heavy Slavic tones as a second secretary at the Transylvanian Consulate, looking for an escaped bat; modulated to comicNegro, then on into hostile Pachuco dialect, full of chingas and maricones; then a Gestapo asking her in shrieks did she have relatives in Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston voice (6).

The “call” is only one of the many instances where the media solicit Oedipa’s attention, “call” being one of the synonyms for the verbal noun in the novel’s title. Although voice is the only way identity can be established on the telephone, that of Oedipa’s caller is screened through a series of guises which range from comic pastiche through different degrees of (simulated) aggression. “Crying” then suggests a process similar to Althusser’s interpellation where Oedipa is constantly being offered gobbets of information and being drawn into the possible systems which make this information meaningful. As N. Katherine Hayles has shown, the initial figures of enclosure (room, tower, etc.) give way to metaphors of exposure and entrapment (102–5). The comic game of Strip Botticelli she plays in the Echo Courts motel mimes out this shift as an opening up of the self to the media. McLuhan describes clothes as offering a “means of defining the self socially” (Understanding Media

22

David Seed

119). Accordingly when Oedipa sheds her clothes, she is removing her assumptions of stable individuality and entering a network of relations which will disorient her more and more severely as the novel progresses. One commentator on McLuhan notes that “the spectator becomes part of the system or process and must supply the connections” (Johansen 263) and this is exactly what happens to Oedipa. Throughout the novel she is shown to be surrounded by a dynamic environment which bombards her with information. The final guise in Pierce’s quoted series, as a number of commentators have pointed out, is taken from Maxwell Grant’s Shadow stories which ran from 1930 to 1949 in magazine form, was revived in 1963 as paperback novels, and which also were broadcast over the radio. Lamont Cranston is a successful business entrepreneur heading a large organisation with a female side-kick named Margo (the role opened up for Oedipa in the performance quoted above) and described as follows: The guise of Lamont Cranston was the major alter-ego the black-cloaked Avenger presented to the world to disguise his activities in the never-ending war against all evil. (11)

The Shadow is figured iconically as a dark shape which can flit from place to place with limitless versatility. In other words, we have the case of Pierce simulating an artist of simulations, one of the earliest instances of recessive layering in The Crying of Lot 49. The urban cultural spaces are opened up for Oedipa by the fact that she steps outside her rented car and thereby places herself within fields of cultural data. Pynchon is far too sceptical not to question the traditional use of the car as a means of liberating discovery and presents it instead as an initial buffering of Oedipa against experience. Similarly the freeways described in the novel are abstracted into information highways where she speculates on connections or seeks new ones. The city replaces her initial familiar setting of Kinneret as the site for new and complex perceptions. Pynchon knew of Jane Jacobs’s 1961 analysis of town planning The Death and Life of Great American Cities which, as one commentator suggests, “shows that what makes American cities so unbearable is that one must live in

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

23

complete isolation or in an intolerable promiscuity” (Dupuy 5). Oedipa’s urban experience also oscillates between these poles. At one point, as we shall see in a moment, she experiences a stream of encounters with city-dwellers; at another, she registers an ultimate, immobilizing isolation where irreconcilable interpretations of her experience paralyse her. Oedipa comes to experience what Michael Harrington designated the “other America.” In his 1962 study of American poverty with that title he discusses the invisible poor, those people never seen by the more prosperous “tourists.” “Middle-class women coming in from Suburbia,” he comments, “may catch the merest glimpse of the other America on the way to an evening at the theatre” (12); but it will remain just that – a glimpse. Oedipa is introduced to the reader as the very type of the suburban housewife attending Tupperware parties, i.e. the commercial simulations of social events. She responds to different urban scenes as if she is entering unknown cultural areas. Harrington points to a fragmentation of the USA into isolated regions of poverty which are sometimes visited by internal tourists. Oedipa too describes herself several times as a tourist. During her pivotal experience of San Francisco by night she enters the spaces of homosexuals, children, Chinatown and others, appropriating the city to herself without the usual insulation of tourism: The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safepassage tonight to its far blood’s branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameful municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. (81)

This sounds like an exhilarating sequence but her passage lies through an “infected city” whose operative codes she still has not quite penetrated. Here Pynchon conflates labyrinth with organism as if Oedipa is making her way through a single body. The shifting metaphors – typical of the novel’s discourse – destabilise her terrain while at the same time tantalizing her (and the reader) with its interconnections. In The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan lays down the general proposition that “every technology contrived and outered by man has

24

David Seed

the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization” (153). The resulting state of narcosis can be linked etymologically with the myth of Narcissus which in turn can be read as a parable of the following appeal: “men at once become fascinated by extensions of themselves in any material other than themselves” (Understanding Media 41). In The Crying of Lot 49 San Narciso becomes the site for Oedipa’s encounter with the film medium and with the reflected gaze. McLuhan was convinced that American culture reflected a “commitment to visual space and organization” (Letters 300). Questioning the reliability of the visual, therefore, would be tantamount to questioning the nature of reality, which is what happens to Oedipa. San Narciso firstly is described abstractly as a “group of concepts” (14) and embodied metonymically in the motel Echo Courts which has a “representation in painted sheet metal of a nymph” (16). This depthless simulation carries the expression of a “hooker” which complicates Oedipa’s recognition of herself in the figure. Once inside the motel she is joined by her lawyer Metzger who invites her to watch him act in a movie on the television. Here the doubling gets more and more intricate. As Metzger explains, our beauty lies […] in this extended capacity for involution. A lawyer in a court-room, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who becomes a lawyer (21).

Who in court becomes an actor once again, he could have added. These closed cycles of roles undermine Oedipa’s common-sense assumption of a stable distinction between what happens on and off the screen, and the episode in the motel becomes a test case of how the media can penetrate her. This is expressed sexually (Metzger’s “radiant eyes flew open, pierced her” (27) where the gaze of the other functions phallically and as a transformation into process of Pierce Inverarity; and also electronically by synchronizing her sexual climax with that of a pop group playing in the motel. This episode at Echo Courts opens up the postmodern dimension of The Crying of Lot 49 by problematizing the nature of representation and the authenticity of social behaviour. As Linda Hutcheon explains,

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

25

hostile commentators on postmodernism have accused its practitioners of a “narcissistic and ironic appropriation of existing images,” whereas “postmodernism works to ‘de-doxify’ our cultural representations and their undeniable political import” (3). Pynchon avoids vulnerability to the first charge by showing the materiality of the images and processes which bewilder Oedipa. Indeed, throughout the novel he strikes a balance between the “abstractifying” tendencies of the media and the materiality of their functioning and occurrence. Pynchon deploys figurative language throughout The Crying of Lot 49 to suggest that no image or process is autonomous, but always an aspect of another image or process. Similarly McLuhan argues in The Gutenberg Galaxy that “language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another” (5). Thus Oedipa’s experience is compared to film or, in another more famous example, she looks across a Californian cityscape and identifies a resemblance with the printed circuit of a transistor radio. In these metaphors Pynchon avoids contrasting the “natural” with the constructed in a way that might give priority to the former. Instead he uses metaphor as a means of mapping out cultural connections. This is made explicit when a scientist explains to the bemused Oedipa two meanings to the term “entropy,” asserting that it is a metaphor which “connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow” (72–73). The verb “connects” is the key term here since it signals to the reader an expansive mapping out of information which never concludes. Although Oedipa’s search might seem superficially to follow a linear trajectory, the discourse of the novel characteristically makes lateral moves where resemblances proliferate. The recurrence of the term “lot” (unavoidably foregrounded by the title) in semantic contexts suggesting marketable property, fate, an item in a series, and so on, is a lexical instance of this process. More typically, the figure of the muted horn (tantalizingly promising and witholding information) is repeated when Oedipa stumbles on an assembly of deaf mutes. By this stage in the novel every person she meets is viewed as a potential information source but here the key communicative faculty of speech is blocked for her. The most explicit commentary on metaphor in The Crying of Lot 49 comes when Oedipa encounters an ex-sailor sunk in alcoholism

26

David Seed

and suffering from the DTs. She realises: “Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare” (89). The paratactic sequence of this sentence assembles a series where each phrase extends the preceding one. Just as “metaphor” connotes a moving across, so the Latin phrase contains an embedded figure from ploughing which Pynchon makes explicit. Meaning is then spatialised as an ambiguity of metaphor itself: “The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost” (89). Needless to say, Oedipa’s disorientation has become so severe that she too feels lost, hence her identification with the old man. Then, through recall by association, the DTs remind Oedipa of dt’s in calculus from her university days and once again Oedipa experiences a kind of displacement: “Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years” (89). Pynchon here updates the root metaphor in “delirium” (in Latin, the displacement from a furrow) from plough to record player in order to articulate how Oedipa can share a common figure and therefore a common predicament with the sailor. This figure of transition through remembered time revises the polarity of inside/outside into an opposition between a lateral shift which might produce meaning but which might equally be disorienting on the one hand; and a linear movement along the determined grooves of her life which will probably not produce meaning but which will at least be safe. McLuhan’s attitude to the media oscillates between positive and negative positions. At one point he waxes enthusiastic over the possibilities of the computer which promises a “Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity” (Understanding Media 80), a notion which Pynchon parodies through ironic and ambiguous Pentecostal allusions to revelation. At other points McLuhan shows a much darker side to the media. For him advertisements are hidden persuaders working “quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing. The depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why” (227). In his conclusion to Understanding Media McLuhan generalises this point to include all contemporary media:

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

27

The electric changes associated with automation have nothing to do with ideologies or social programmes. If they had, they could be delayed or controlled. Instead, the technological extension of our central nervous system that we call the electric media began more than a century ago, subliminally. Subliminal have been the effects. Subliminal they remain. At no period in human culture have men understood the psychic mechanisms involved in invention and technology. (352)

By the early sixties the term “brainwashing” had become routinely employed to describe the ideological pressures exerted on the individual by cultural processes. Writers as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Malcolm X and Allen Ginsberg all described the workings of American society as a form of indoctrination to norms which was not even being understood, let alone resisted. In 1964, for instance, Ginsberg described the myth of American prosperity as a “great psychic hoax[,] a mirage of electronic mass-hypnosis” (Deliberate Prose 6). William Burroughs chose a different medium to articulate his comparable sense of social manipulation. In Nova Express (1964) conditions of total emergency operate as his subversives try to undermine the repressive processes of society. One of his figures “breaks out all the ugliest pictures in the image bank and puts it out on the subliminal so one crisis piles up after the other right on schedule” (18). Burroughs again and again describes a distortion of expected signals, more lurid and dramatic than happens in The Crying of Lot 49, but having a comparable effect of disturbing estrangement. At one point a figure named the “Subliminal Kid” plants microphones and transmitters in bars so that their environmental noise itself becomes a bizarre message. Pynchon characteristically deploys quieter instances where discrepancies and discontinuities defamiliarise every aspect of Oedipa’s environment. The misprints on stamps described in chapter 3 whose main medium is that of postal systems draws her startled attention to the possibility that an underground organisation might be covertly using the national monopoly to send messages to each other. Because such processes do seem covert, Oedipa starts rationalizing her experience through an anonymous agency: late in the novel she suspects: “they are stripping away, one by one, my men” (105). Like Burroughs, Pynchon describes a state of “agency panic,” a phrase used by Timothy Melley in a recent study to designate a paranoid

28

David Seed

suspicion of a “whole system of communications” being covertly at work (2, 7–16). Oedipa herself experiences an “onslaught” of cultural signals throughout the novel which induces a mounting paranoia over her inability to verify or make final sense of this data. As Thomas Schaub has argued, the different religious allusions in the novel support this drama of perception, functioning as a “foil to the inverted, profane culture it describes” (49). The references to imminent revelation thus become the signs of semantic inadequacy. Schaub continues: As the world about her takes on more and more the character of information, Oedipa’s evidence seems less like truth than clue to something beyond it; this is because her medium and its message are identical. (48)

All media for her are subject to decay, a point which Pynchon dramatises by accelerating the mortality of her human sources of information. The religious analogies have the further effect of stylizing characters in ritualistic postures (her husband in his radio studio, the auctioneer with spread arms at the end of the novel) which reflect her new attention to style. At first Oedipa’s paranoia is thematised comically as belonging to others: the name of a pop group, the delusions of persecution by her therapist, and so on. Maurice Couturier has argued that Oedipa’s search for “truth” is doomed since her experience repeatedly alerts her to how such a truth might be mediated culturally in endless deferral. “The media’s chief function,” he argues, “is not so much to facilitate communication as to create an unfulfillable need for it” (7). A kind of negative insight emerges into the “importance of death in the economy of her world” (16). We should remember that The Crying of Lot 49 begins with a death and rehearses a series of narratives where death figures prominently. The recycling of dead GIs’ bones in cigarette filters grotesquely exemplifies this process. The routine indoctrination of American society by its media is pointed out to her by Mike Fallopian who says of the Yoyodyne engineers: “In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor […]. Only one man per invention” (61). This process is explicitly questioned by the way corporations like Yoyodyne buy up

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

29

patents so that potential inventors find themselves reduced to minor functionaries in a commercial system. Earlier in the novel, Pynchon attempts to articulate the subliminal pull of the Pacific as a stimulusand-response just below conventional sensation: you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. (37)

The use of the hypothetical second person leaves it open and ambiguous how far Oedipa is registering this awareness. Nor can the human be separated from the technological. It is only when Pynchon describes Yoyodyne in more detail that we realise the twist in the reference to a microelectrode for this is exactly the kind of object the company would manufacture. Ironically, a metaphor of subliminal perception draws on the technology of a company which would have a vested interest in manipulating the public so as to promote its own ends. The one medium not considered so far is that of the novel itself. Pynchon closely identifies Oedipa’s quest with the reader’s processing of the novel’s text. As Tony Tanner notes, the very choice of the protagonist’s name estranges us from the text and blocks off a “transparent” realist reading (60). Possibly Pynchon took a lead in this from Catch-22 which he described in 1961 as “close to the finest novel I’ve ever read.”6 Here and in The Crying of Lot 49 characters’ names often link them to systems within the novels and Oedipa suggests at once a pathology and the confronting of enigmas. Her name at the same time functions as a cryptic sign which the reader tries to decode. Not surprisingly, a number of readings have emerged which stress the secrecy of text. For instance, largely on the strength of a detailed examination of its names, Charles Hollander has described The Crying of Lot 49 as “encrypted meditation” (61) on the Kennedy assassination. Probably unknown to Hollander, there is some justification for this view from Pynchon himself who in 1964 wrote to his then agent Candida Donadio that the shootings of Kennedy and 6

Letter to Candida Donadio. 2 November 1961.

30

David Seed

Oswald filled him with gloom about “language as a medium for improving things.”7 If these events had such a linguistic impact on Pynchon, this might help explain his projection of language as a manipulable medium operating within systems of control and surveillance. Pynchon dramatises the reader’s struggles with his own novel through Oedipa’s attempts to stabilise the text of The Courier’s Tragedy. Originally she experiences the play as performance but for the reader it is textualized from the start as a summary containing many incongruous formulations in colloquial American English. In other words, the reader gets no direct access to a pastiche text such as s/he might encounter in Nabokov other than through a few brief quotations which might remembered by another play-goer or reader. Indeed Oedipa herself quotes a passage later in the novel. The producer of the play Randolph Driblette articulates a kind of warning to the reader that the text is after all a script which can be altered in every performance, but, nothing daunted, Oedipa tries futilely to locate a version of the text which will verify her suspicions about the operations of the Trystero network. However, recession is always at work in the second half of the novel. A bookstore burns down, a version of the play proves to be locked away in the Vatican Library, and Oedipa, like the reader, is left juggling disparate fragments of information. Pynchon’s constant use of the term “clues,” as a number of critics have noted, misleadingly suggests that the novel belongs in the detective or whodunit genres and this effect is strengthened by the allusions to the Perry Mason television series which was running in the sixties. But we do not need to go far into the novel to realise that the generic category does not fit. Tzvetan Todorov has argued that the latter is defined formally by its double narrative: the “story of the crime and the story of the investigation.” The second is structured so as to give the reader gradual access to the first. It is therefore a means

7

Letter to Candida Donadio. 6 April 1964.

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

31

to an end and the style of the investigative narrative should be “kept neutral and plain to stop becoming opaque” (44, 47).8 This is exactly what happens in The Crying of Lot 49. From the very first page the reader is confronted with a narrative packed with so much descriptive detail, with a discourse so rich in metaphor, that the style becomes “opaque” with a vengeance. The smog or haze of the southern Californian cities which Oedipa traverses is a variation of a traditional metaphor of obscurity. Pynchon’s references to eyes fill out this motif in the novel and play repeatedly on the ways in which Oedipa is herself a “private eye.” Typically, the very first occurrence of this motif is the “greenish dead eye of the TV tube” (5) in Oedipa’s living room which displaces the human faculty on to technology. Instead of being an organ through which things are perceived, the eye repeatedly emerges as an object to be looked at or to be obscured. Oedipa’s paranoia grows when she sees more and more characters wearing shades, shades which she herself wears to make her way through the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the Yoyodyne buildings. One of the most striking instances occurs with Driblette: She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t. (52)

The agency of the gaze itself becomes the object of her gaze, momentarily reified into an image of scientific investigation. Then this effect is reversed as Oedipa projects a knowingness on to Driblette which is never confirmed. The proliferation of references to the visual media and to mirrors, to technological devices like a scope, and the reversals in the gaze which repeatedly take place in the novel all problematise the act of seeing and therefore of understanding the novel’s text and narrative. The reader and Oedipa alike await a final revelation which is deferred beyond the end of The Crying of Lot 49. This deferral is the last in a series of strategies which direct the reader to pay more attention to the means of information transfer than the content of individual messages. 8

The generic contrast between The Crying of Lot 49 and traditional detective fiction is noted in Tanner 56.

32

David Seed

Works Cited Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Boulding, Kenneth E. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1956. Burroughs, William. Nova Express. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Couturier, Maurice. “The Death of the Real in The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon Notes 20–21 (Spring–Fall 1987): 5–29. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. “Myths of the Information Society.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980: 3–17. Friedman, Bruce Jay. Ed. Black Humor. New York: Bantam, 1965. Ginsberg, Allen. Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. Grant, Maxwell. The Shadow. Destination: Moon. New York: Belmont, 1967. Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Baltimore: Penguin, 1963. N. Katherine Hayles. “‘A Metaphor of God Knew How Many Parts’: The Engine that Drives The Crying of Lot 49.” New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49. Ed. Patrick O’ Donnell: Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991: 102–5. Hollander, Charles. “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot 49.” Pynchon Notes 40–41 (Spring–Fall 1997): 61–106. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. John M. Johansen. “The Experience We Derive.” McLuhan Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanual Stearn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968: 258–67. Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1998. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. —— The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967. —— Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. —— “Notes on Burroughs.” Eds. Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg. William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991: 69–73. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000. Molinaro, Matie. Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye. Eds. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Toronto, Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. London: Pan Books, 1979.

Media Systems in The Crying of Lot 49

33

—— V. London: Picador, 1975. —— Letter to Candida Donadio. 2 November 1961. Heller Collection. Brandeis University. —— Letter to Candida Donadio. 6 April 1964. Book File for V. Jonathan Cape collection. Publishers Association Archive. Reading University. Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others. New York and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Schaub, Thomas H. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981. Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon. London and New York: Methuen, 1982. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.

This page intentionally left blank

DAVID DICKSON

Pynchon’s Vineland and “That Fundamental Agreement in What is Good and Proper”: What Happens when we Need to Change it?

What does it take for a person in the western world today to understand his or her own background? Although it has been claimed that Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is a comparatively straightforward narrative, the way in which this question is given focus in the novel indicates a complexity in the scope of its understanding of history that needs to be recognized in criticism. As discussed in this essay, Vineland poses questions to its readers on two philosophical levels. On a level of ethics, it raises the question about the individual’s freedom in-between the coercions of culturally conceived historical designs. On the level of philosophy of history, it asks whether these historical designs are eternally given, or if the acts of individuals can subject them to change. In this essay I argue that Vineland begins a rethinking of the hermeneutic view of history. In acknowledging the fundamental role of culturally conceived pre-understandings and prejudgements, it highlights the part played by the individual, and in so doing suggests that the individual act can be instrumental in changing not only the course of history but, more specifically, the designs by which cultures shape people’s lives. I am aware that this might easily reduce the view of history either to simplistic messianism or to a no less simplistic vision of social and historical engineering. However, with Vineland these acts, although they are inspired, mystical and even transcendental in the sense that they do succeed in setting aside the predesigned understandings that a culture offers, they are the acts of everyday crises – acts of whose import in a larger perspective the individual is largely unaware.

36

David Dickson

A critical perspective on Pynchon’s writing is that of Heikki Raudaskoski who discusses it as a kind of transcendental “diving.” Pynchon, he says is a diver in the vein of Emerson, Melville, and Roland Barthes. This is a vein of writing in which “thought-divers […] have been diving & coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began” – coming up, as Melville would suggest, sometimes with transcendental “oracular gibberish,” sometimes with intimations of “landlessness” as “the highest truth” (124).1 With reference to Barthes, Raudaskoski asks whether Pynchon’s texts are “writerly” – suggesting that they hilariously “leave behind the world of conventions” (124), abandoning the “lisible” or “readerly” as a writing which is “afraid of diving into anything new and unexpected” (125). At the same time, however, Raudaskoski asks an interesting and perhaps non- or even anti-poststructuralist question about Pynchon’s writing from the zones of landlessness. Could there, he asks, be “a way back” (134) – a way back, not to the security of the lisibility of the settled “intertextual code” (125), but, as Raudaskoski puts it, to “a weakly Messianic, possibility” paving the way “for new […] constellations and matrices in which the other could be heard by displacing the logic of the Same?” (134). It is true that Vineland has at times been discussed in terms that would suggest it as a “way back.” For instance, this was the point made by Marc Conner, who claimed in 1996 that Vineland announces a major shift back to “the traditional domain of the beautiful” (70), and that the novel marks Pynchon’s return to the traditional aesthetics of the beautiful. In my own analyses of Vineland, I have rejected this, suggesting instead that the novel marks the beginning, in Pynchon’s work, of an innovation in the strategies of narration that points forward to a fundamentally new conception of beauty and new strategies by which this new sense of beauty is transmitted. While Pynchon’s strategies in Vineland acknowledge the need to stop the eternal deferral of meaning that the “landlessness” of poststructuralism would suggest, at the same time they succeed in breaking the cultural transmission of that “hatred of anything new” 1

Raudaskoski quotes here from Melville, Letters 79, and from Moby-Dick Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976: 594.

“That Fundamental Agreement in What Is Good and Proper”

37

(Vineland 273) that characterizes the settled intertextual code of those American cultures that Vineland portrays. I want to demonstrate how Vineland engages with the discussion on cultural change that I have mentioned above – a discussion that involves a critical view of poststructuralist thinking and traditionalist intertextualism alike. To accomplish this, I shall outline Vineland’s conception of change against the background of the hermeneutic view of history and cultural change as defined by Hans-Georg Gadamer. The transmission of historical knowledge is one of the great issues in the world portrayed in Vineland. When fourteen-year-old Prairie compels the former revolutionary activist Darryl Louise Chastain (also called DL) to comply with her yearning for her absent mother Frenesi and tell all she knows about her, the question how to fill the needs of the present moment in-between the conventions of cultural transmission turns into one of the novel’s main themes. DL’s experience in the 1960s of Frenesi’s close friendship, revolutionary comradeship and deep treason makes the telling an affair of great difficulty for DL herself. Moreover, Prairie’s own previous knowledge of her mother’s personal history does not predispose her for taking in much of what DL has to say. As an image of the class struggles in the Western states between US socialist revolutionaries and the reactionary thugs of roughshod Capitalism, Frenesi and her extended family of radicals represent an important aspect in the history of American domestic politics in the twentieth century. When Pynchon brings this up in 1990, it is true that he gives us this history through the perspective of the leftists – a somewhat rare perspective in US American literature. He does it, however, not so much to vindicate the American left – ranging from the IWW-movement with Joe Hill, the Union struggles among Californian farm hands and film industry workers up to the anti-war movements in the 30s and 60s – as to find ways of telling about these parts of American history and to tell about them in ways that bring out their relevance in the present. To find ways of telling about American domestic politics in the twentieth century is a problem of narrative form which is brought into focus by DL’s intricate communication of information to young Prairie. A problem of high priority for DL, in trying to satisfy the

38

David Dickson

girl’s need to know about her mother is that “whatever story DL told this kid must not, maybe could never, be the story she knew”: Underground. Right. That’s the story DL should have known they’d tell the kid. Underground. Now, how could DL tell her what she knew, and how could she not? (101, emphasis in original)

The precise problem for narration in Vineland goes to the roots of narrative grammar. I have shown elsewhere, how American narratives in Emerson, Dos Passos and Pynchon continue to depend on or react to conventions that go all the way back to the polis or citystate in ancient Greece. In the terminology that I use, this notion of convention, and the conventional character of language are expressed by the terms contract and contractuality.2 My purpose in employing a different term is, mainly, to emphasize the element of human volition in the processes of language and concept formation. The widely accepted term “convention” has the tendency of emphasizing the determining (and even deterministic) elements of tradition. The term does denote a decision or decree taken in negotiations between individuals, but as can be seen more clearly in the inflexion “conventional,” the term tends to weaken or water out the connotations of human volition. In my analysis, the play of human will in Vineland in-between determining elements of culture and language is one of the novel’s most moving and challenging motifs. In using my own term – contract – for describing processes in language and thought, it is my intention to make it completely clear that among the determining elements that make up language, there is also the element of human volition. The classical narrative contracts, then, transform the sense impressions of calamities and adventures into experience through a politics of repression, aiming to protect the community from the most shattering aspects of new thought.3 In Vineland, Pynchon suggests a similar repression of newness in referring to the nineteenth-century 2 3

See Dickson. See Dickson, especially 76–82 and “Appendix” 191–202. My indebtedness on this point to Pease and his idea of an “adventurer’s cultural contract” (174) should be acknowledged here.

“That Fundamental Agreement in What Is Good and Proper”

39

phrenologist Cesare Lombroso and his “misoneism” (272) or “hatred of anything new” which operates “as a feedback device to keep societies coming along safely, coherently” (273). Lombroso’s “misoneism” is introduced in Vineland as Brock Vond’s philosophy, and its hatred of the new thus defines the fascism of this character and, to an important extent, that of his employers in the American State as well. Even more interesting, perhaps, is that, as portrayed in Vineland, the radical American left, too, incorporates a similar hatred of the new in its rhetoric. In between these “misoneistic” bodies of thought, narration about history becomes a highly problematic task for the characters. My analysis of Vineland makes use of the fact that, in Pynchon’s novel, the metaphors that language provides for the characters’ understanding of the present is a matter of conflict in the field of US American domestic politics. For those (e.g., on the traditional political left and right) who have knowledge about the near past to communicate to the twenty-first century, the forms provided by the “hatred of anything new” are too limited to make history a resource for living, perceiving, and acting in the present. These connections in Vineland between language, history, perception and human action make it relevant to bring the discussion back to one of the main recent thinkers on issues of humanism, language and history – Hans-Georg Gadamer. His hermeneutic theory of experience puts great weight on the transmission of preunderstandings, or the transmission (as he would also put it) of prejudices. His theory idealizes human caution in relation to new ideas at the same time as its point of departure is a fundamental trust in human creativity. It is my aim here, as I have mentioned, to suggest how Pynchon in Vineland begins to formulate a critique of the hermeneutic theory of experience. Pynchon’s critique does not try to do away with the idea of the hermeneutic circle. What it does, as I see it, is to introduce a question, asking whether, at some moments in history, there is not new energy to be brought into a situation by a breakage in the transmission of basic pre-understandings. The new energy thus introduced would facilitate new ways of understanding crucial experiences and the making of new concepts.

40

David Dickson

In Gadamer’s view of history and the way in which experience and ideas are transmitted, the question of concept formation is important. In using Plato and Aristotle, the main drift of his discussion is towards Aristotle and the process of induction. As the Aristotelian process of induction is often understood, memory and the human ability of abstraction take their point of departure in “the general concept meant by the word.” With Aristotle, the general concept “is enriched by any given perception of a thing, so that what emerges is a new more specific word formation which does more justice to the particularity of that act of perception” (429). This Aristotelian “logical schema of induction and abstraction,” however, is “very misleading” according to Gadamer. Universals and classification of concepts belong to the “theory of logic.” Language, on the other hand, is a very different affair. In Gadamer’s view, the character of language is fundamentally metaphorical. In obeying the metaphorical character of language, what a person looks for are “similarities, whether in the appearance of things or in the significance for us.” Not universals. Not classificatory concepts, but similarities that are expressed metaphorically (429). “It is important to see,” says Gadamer, “that to regard the metaphorical use of a word as not its real sense is the prejudice of a theory of logic that is alien to language” (429). The metaphor, then, is the way in which human beings use language to express the real. And the perspective of language on reality is that of similarity in the appearance of things and similarity in significance for “us.” This is how I interpret Gadamer’s analysis of “language and concept formation” (428–29) and it should be emphasized that Pynchon’s Vineland is a demonstration of this view of language and truth. Gadamer concludes his discussion here by saying that “the particularity of an experience finds expression in metaphorical transference, and is not at all the fruit of a concept formed by means of abstraction” (429). But – and this seems important for how we regard the results of classificatory logic – “it is equally obvious that knowledge of what is common is obtained in this way” (429, my emphasis). Here, Gadamer acknowledges connections to Heidegger and, as Gadamer puts it, “the closeness of meaning between legein ‘to say’, and legein ‘to gather.’” Whether it is a perception of a thing or

“That Fundamental Agreement in What Is Good and Proper”

41

the understanding of a logical schema, thought does turn, and has to turn to the stock of metaphorical descriptions of similarities (i.e., similarities in appearance and similarities in significance for us) that language has worked out. In doing the work required for speaking, thought picks up or gathers among the similarity-metaphors that language has put in store. Even for logic, Gadamer says, this stock of metaphors is the “advance work that language has worked out for it” (430). So, whether one works through logic or through experience, one part of the work is for thought to “turn for its own instruction to this stock that language has built up” (429). Vineland describes the transmission of historical experience largely in line with the hermeneutical view of history. Language provides stocks of metaphors as an “advance work” for the narration of experiences that are relevant for subjectivation and action in the present, and we thus see Prairie caught in-between two such stocks of metaphors, both of which seem to be endorsed by her mother – that of the radical leftist movement and that of the repressive apparatus connected with the FBI, and with capitalism. In this way, Vineland exemplifies the hermeneutic structure of experience and understanding, the fundamentally metaphorical character of language, the fact that the metaphor is the way in which human beings use language to express the real. One key example that I will return to is Prairie’s session with DL and Ditzah in the revolutionary film archive, in which the forming of new metaphors helps Prairie begin to understand her history and her present reality. Another is the narrator’s description of Frenesi’s struggle with the mother-role through which patriarchal pre-understandings are transmitted between generations. Frenesi’s fate as well as Prairie’s exploration of it exemplify how thought does “turn for its own instruction to this stock that language has built up” (Gadamer 429) and how thought, in the Heideggerian sense, picks up or gathers among the similarity-metaphors that language has put in store. But however much Vineland proves the hermeneutic structure of experience and understanding, the raison d’être of this novel is not to repeat that truth. The novel indicates a complication in the transmission of experience as it pictures Prairie’s position between two political cultures, whose metaphors are opposed to each other in

42

David Dickson

terms of twentieth-century political values but are in very basic agreement about the danger of new ideas and unexpected thoughts – an agreement that has existed within Western cultures for a very long time. In Vineland this agreement, then, is explicitly described as going back to nineteenth-century Lombrosianism. In my analyses of “thought-divers” in American literature such as Emerson, Dos Passos, and Pynchon, I have, as mentioned, traced a similar agreement back to ancient Greece. 4 Vineland’s criticism of hermeneutics takes its starting-point in the stalemate of Prairie’s position between two basically similar bodies of metaphors. She needs to take out the bearings for her own orientation in her world, but the instruction she can gather from either of these stores of meaning will conceal rather than illuminate what she needs to understand – her mother’s part in recent historical issues. At this juncture, Vineland indicates the need to come out of the stalemate in the creation of metaphors for American domestic politics that Prairie’s situation represents. Vineland aims its criticism at one particular point in the hermeneutic theory, namely its understanding of beginnings and the role of human creativity in beginnings. By beginnings, I mean the beginnings of what Gadamer refers to as “that fundamental agreement in what is good and proper” (431–32). Gadamer goes back to Aristotle for whom “speech and thought remained completely unified,” even as his main concern was “to reflect the order of things and to detach it from all verbal contingencies.” And the historical factor by means of which speech and thought are unified is this “agreement on which human community, its harmony with respect to what is good and proper, is founded” (431). According to Aristotle/Gadamer, then, the processes of formation of language, thought and community are all determined by – are expressions of – “that fundamental agreement in 4

In my book The Utterance of America, where Vineland is the object of analysis in one of the chapters, I have also analysed Sophocles’ “Ode to Man” – a poem in the tragedy Antigone. My analysis of this classical poem suggests a fundamental agreement on the communication of experience in the Greek polis (= city state) in which one of the basic elements is a similar fear of anything that is new.

“That Fundamental Agreement in What Is Good and Proper”

43

what is good and proper” (431–32). In the context of Vineland, the agreement is that of an age-old “misoneism” or “hatred of anything new.” With Gadamer, the question of the origin of the “fundamental agreement in what is good and proper” is dealt with in passing. He says that, although the Greeks usually thought of the agreement as “the decree and the achievement of divine men,” Aristotle speaks about this convention of language formation without implying anything about its origin (432). As a result, there is a gap left in Gadamer’s hermeneutic theory too, a gap in the understanding of how new agreements in what is good and proper as concerns the processes of formation of language, thought, community and identity are proposed and realized. Vineland does not, actually, try to fill this gap, or even try to formulate the questions, the answers of which might fill it. Vineland’s focus is on bringing onto the agenda the thought that a new fundamental agreement on the formation of concepts is at all possible in the present time. Vineland portrays Prairie’s captivity in-between two politically opposed world-views whose one point of agreement is this fundamental contract, stipulating the new as a danger to be warded off. At the same time, the novel’s peripety pictures the possibility of a new contract designed to illuminate what is otherwise supposed to be kept in the dark. This happens in the aftermath of the film sequence from the archives of the former revolutionaries and is the peak in Prairie’s quest for knowledge about her mother. It is a moment in which the narrative about her mother finally disposes Prairie to break through her earlier prejudgements: Prairie, reentering nonmovie space, felt like a basketball after a Lakers game – alive, resilient, still pressurized with spirit yet with a distinct memory of having been, for a few hours, expertly bounced. Her mom, in front of her own eyes, had stood with a 1,000-watt Mickey-Mole spot on the dead body of a man who had loved her, and the man who’d just killed him, and the gun she’d brought him to do it with. Stood there like the Statue of Liberty, bringer of light, as if it were part of some contract to illuminate, instead of conceal, the deed. (261)

The act of narration has this illuminating potential for Prairie. DL’s oral commentary orchestrates the scattered information about

44

David Dickson

Frenesi into a narrative, and Prairie can make her own interpretation of it. There is, however, one crucial circumstance that gives DL’s narrative about Prairie’s mother (or, from a somewhat different perspective, about the history of American domestic politics in the twentieth century) its illuminating potential. The crucial circumstance is Prairie’s mother’s refusal, or avoidance, of playing the role of mother in Prairie’s childhood. This was the mother’s desperate line of action when Prairie was still a baby, at a time when she – Frenesi – was herself completely tied up by the coercions of left-wing radicalism and society’s crypto-fascism alike. Her refusal to play mother has the effect of introducing an element of uncertainty in the cultural line of transmission by which the hatred of the new is reproduced. As a mother in compliance with that fundamental agreement, Frenesi would have stayed with her new-born child. She would have become “just another mom in the nation of moms” (292), a patriarchal mother, obediently transmitting the fundamental agreement in what is good and proper, and obediently letting the story of her life be told inoffensively and without illumination. Frenesi does not know herself and her motives well enough to tell to anyone about her life and actions as a combined revolutionary, FBI infiltrator and frame-up agent. Moreover, anybody else that tried to tell her story, would tend to do so in compliance with what is agreed upon as inoffensive within his or her community, whether revolutionary leftist, fascist, or politically disillusioned. And this is exactly the way in which DL tells Prairie about Frenesi’s life. In Vineland’s point of view, this is the outcome of a vicious hermeneutic circle in which pre-understandings and prejudgements serve the safety of a community at the expense of new perceptions. However, the desperate act of abstaining from the care of her child – of rejecting her role as a link in the transmission of the hatred of anything new – creates the possibility of an opening in the closed hermeneutic circle of “misoneism.” By absenting herself from the family, she never turns into a teller of inoffensive stories about her life. Instead, this act introduces her as a space of silence that weakens the effect on Prairie of any prejudgements that others might want to impose on her. It whets the drive to explore the unknown that Prairie

“That Fundamental Agreement in What Is Good and Proper”

45

has in common with her mother and it turns Frenesi and her life into the irresistible object of her daughter’s explorations. What happens here from a hermeneutic point of view, is that “the agreement on which human community, its harmony with respect to what is good and proper, is founded” (Gadamer 431) is annulled in being thus counteracted. This annulment is perhaps temporary or conditional as is suggested by the ambiguous conclusion of the novel. The effect, however, is twofold. On the level of philosophy of history, it leads to the far-reaching questioning of the theory of hermeneutics, whether, at some historical junctures, it is perhaps both possible and needful to come to new fundamental agreements on what is good and proper. The effect, on the level of ethics, is to pose a real question about resistance to the reader, a question about his/her own every-day actions, whether they matter enough to be insisted upon in the face of coercive traditions. The key to the criticism that Vineland formulates against the hermeneutic theory, then, is the way in which the illuminating narrative is made possible. Through this criticism Vineland suggests that the good and proper must not be viewed as something that was agreed upon once and never again, but that it is a judgement of value that is renegotiated in certain historical situations. The focus in this essay is on the question that Vineland poses to the theory of hermeneutics. Although it may concern all production of knowledge, Pynchon is mainly concerned here with the transmission of historical knowledge. While this is posed as a general question in Vineland, it is also a more particular concern with the problem of writing the history of American twentieth-century domestic politics. What it means, for the writing of history to create a new agreement of what is good and proper is, however, not explicated in Vineland. It may be that Pynchon’s own explorations of the matter – both generally and with reference to American history – are further spelled out and practised in his great novel Mason & Dixon, where, according to one critic, strategies are practised which allow “conceptualization outside traditionally monologic conventions” (Troy 206). What does it mean, then, to come – from the everyday point of view that Vineland adopts – to a new agreement about the formation of concepts – a new agreement on which human community, its

46

David Dickson

harmony with respect to what is good and proper, can be founded? The novel looks forward to an answer to these questions, and to a new conception of beauty – one that might allow the appreciation of relativity as well as closure that Raudaskoski suggests. Possibly, this is what Frenesi’s rejection of motherhood is about – an act of love that includes the insecurity of “landlessness” as much as the certainty of home. Could it be, even, that Vineland looks forward to an aesthetic “displacing the logic of the Same?” (Raudaskoski 134). Whatever the goal and aim of a new agreement on what is good and proper, Vineland strongly suggests that the individual act can be instrumental in changing not only the course of history, but specifically the agreements and designs by which history and people’s lives are shaped. In taking the point of Vineland’s ambiguous ending, I understand that these are things that remain to be accomplished in the everyday use of language – in the narratives of actual people. Finally, then, what Pynchon asks us – as people and as philosophers of language alike – is simply to pay attention to the question whether, and if so how a liberated conceptualization could be made possible. Raising these questions and indicating this possibility are Vineland’s main achievement.

Works Cited Conner, Marc C. “Postmodern Exhaustion: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and the Aesthetic of the Beautiful.” Studies in American Fiction 24.1 (1996): 65–85. Dickson, David. The Utterance of America: Emersonian Newness in Dos Passos’ U.S.A. and Pynchon’s Vineland. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1998. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. 1960. 1989. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1999. Melville, Herman. The Letters of Herman Melville. Ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman. New Haven: Yale UP: 1960. —— Moby-Dick. 1851. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Pease, Donald E. Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

“That Fundamental Agreement in What Is Good and Proper”

47

Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. 1990. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1991. Raudaskoski, Heikki. “Pynchon, Melville, and the Fulcrum of America.” Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Eds. Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland. Oslo: Novus Press, 2002. Troy, Mark. “… ever in a Ubiquity of Flow, before a Ceaseless Spectacle of Transition.” Blissful Bewilderment: Studies in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Eds. Anne Mangen and Rolf Gaasland. Oslo: Novus Press, 2002: 206–26.

This page intentionally left blank

DAVID THOREEN

In which “Acts Have Consequences”: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon’s Recent Fiction

1. Not So Much Visited by Understanding as Allow’d Briefly to Pay Attention to What Had Been There All the Time Father, why did you work? Why did you weep, Mother? Was the story so important? (Simpson 37–38)

Since the publication of V., and particularly since the adoption of Gravity’s Rainbow as a central postmodern text, critics have attributed to Pynchon a denial of causality. The contributing factors to this denial are many: textual, cultural, and, insofar as the literary-critical world is hegemonic, institutional. For the most part, critics have assumed that Pynchon’s tacit rejection of cause and effect is consonant with that perennial poststructuralist project, destabilizing the bourgeois humanist subject, presumably in an effort to arrive at a less deceptive relation to subjective experience. Let Molly Hite, whose Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon was one of the earliest book-length studies of Our Author, articulate the now orthodox view: [I]n order to link the atoms of experience together, Pynchon’s characters and narrators look for causes. In this enterprise they resemble the classical physicist who aims to trace all the phenomena of his world to a system of laws [...]. The inhabitants of Pynchon’s worlds continually try to exchange their freedom for the security of a wholly coherent causal explanation. (38)

50

David Thoreen

Hite’s choice of language could not be more deliberate. By referring to “atoms of experience” which cannot be held together, she reflects the essential indeterminacy of a world view predicated on quantum physics. If only we could make ourselves resemble quantum physicists, Hite seems to say, we could, by abandoning causal explanation, secure our freedom. Although this critical approach would appear difficult to reconcile with either Vineland or Mason & Dixon, it has nonetheless persisted. As a more recent example of such wistful analysis puts it: Nowadays many cultural critics and philosophers of science coincide in pointing out that the twentieth century has brought about a new interpretive paradigm. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics [...] represented the first attempts of the century to warn humans that reality could no longer be explained by the mere recourse to “common sense,” Newtonian physics, and sensorial data [...]. In a sense, it can be argued that quantum mechanics entails such a tremendous shift from classical Greek and Newtonian notions that many people are not yet ready to accept it. (Collado Rodríguez 475)1

I admit to being one of the “many” not yet ready to accept metaphors from Relativity theory and quantum mechanics as models for living,2 1

2

A page later, Collado Rodríguez reveals the depth of his longing even more directly: “It seems clear that people are not ready to get rid of traditional common-sensical views about the character of a stable reality, but Pynchon’s readers know better: randomness, indeterminacy, fractal cartography, unstable selves, and early cultural announcements of the coming of chaos into commonsensical Aristotelian reality are all constantly repeated motifs in his fiction” (476). See also Collado Rodríguez’s essay in this collection in which he analyses Pynchon’s “latest attempt [in Mason & Dixon] to disrupt the still existing Newtonian confidence in categorical thinking” (72). Alan J. Friedman emphasizes that the three historical models of the universe are – and this is true even for scientists – only metaphors. Asking whether these metaphors have been helpful to their various adherents in Gravity’s Rainbow, Friedman admits that they have not been. Taking Slothrop as his test case, since “he has been exposed to each of the alternative world views from paranoia [the clockwork universe] to anti-paranoia [the universe described by quantum physics],” Friedman notes that Slothrop “reaches no ultimate conclusions” and reminds us that “we last see him with ‘not a thing in his head.’ None of the metaphors from science has remained with Slothrop” (95, quoting Gravity’s Rainbow 626). Friedman is careful to warn against the adoption of too narrow a

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

51

particularly as applied to questions of morality and individual responsibility. More, I argue that Pynchon also rejects these models, and that he has gone out of his way in Vineland and Mason & Dixon to correct such mistaken critical explications. It is not that Pynchon fails to see the contradictions between historical methodology and the human desire for order, but that those philosophical objections are ultimately overridden because to refuse to make such causal connections is finally to exist in a moral vacuum. In “a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized,” Vineland’s Frenesi Gates understands that she “must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect” (90, emphasis added). Since Frenesi obviously views her impending return to the earlier conception of the universe with such distaste, we should weigh carefully the “freedom” she is offered by the quantum model against the “responsibility” demanded by its clockwork counterpart. But it will first be helpful to rehearse some background regarding the status of cause and effect in Pynchon’s fiction. Postmodern challenges to historiography are at the core of the discrediting of cause–effect, and for readers of Pynchon such challenges appeared most directly in 1973. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon offered a historical novel that, strangely, defied traditional historical method and chastised its own readers: “You will want cause and effect” (663), the narrator says at one point, forcing us to acknowledge our own desires for order and then pandering to us: “All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis ” (663). Many critics were caught off guard by such passages, but for the most part consigned themselves to using the novel’s various statements about cause and effect as metaphors to help world view: “Alternatives to the world views with science as metaphor are many, and are expressed by other characters [...]. No predominant pattern of earthly success follows any of the theoretical approaches, and neither salvation nor success is identified with any one theoretical system in Gravity’s Rainbow” (95–96). Finally, says Friedman, “The metaphors from science [...] reinforce the importance of the choices of world view made by the characters. It is harder to dismiss an unpopular choice [such as Pointsman’s mechanistic, Pavlovian world view] when we see that it is parallel to a major theme in the development of science” (99–100).

52

David Thoreen

account for its dizzying array of voices, narrative modes, and rapid shifts in time and space. Molly Hite, for instance, took her cue from Leni Pökler’s often quoted “Not produce [...] not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems” (Gravity’s Rainbow 159), and argued for “relations of resemblance” as a “structural principle in Pynchon’s novels and in the worlds of those novels” (40). But Hite’s thesis – that events need not be ordered through causality or chronology but can be ordered equally well through correspondence and metaphor – carries with it a moral problem, in that it removes time’s arrow, not only from Pynchon’s novels but from the real world to which they bear some mimetic relation:3 Hite’s idea of order conveniently leaves out magnitude. Though there may be no causal connection between the Germans’ extermination of “about 60,000 people” (V. 245) in 1904 and of six million during World War II, there is a chronology, and it is accompanied by an undeniable increase in magnitude. Hite’s “relations of resemblance” thesis has, unfortunately, taken on a life of its own, and despite passages in Vineland and Mason & Dixon which would seem to preclude the application of such a scheme, critics show no sign of abandoning it. Other alternative structuring principles have also been proffered, but these too shortcircuit Pynchon’s insistence on individual responsibility. In “Visible Tracks: Historical Method and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, applying a typological model, argues that “Vineland’s historical method becomes something outside linear, causal history” (100), concluding that “what Pynchon’s history does not enact [...] is the historicizing gesture that places the past behind and subordinate to the present” (101). But what Douglas Keesey a decade ago dubbed “Pynchon’s newly explicit political activism” demands such a historicizing gesture (110). 3

This mimetic relation is, I would argue, an essential component of the experience of reading Pynchon. What’s terrifying about Gravity’s Rainbow is that the reader proceeds with foreknowledge of the V2’s evolution into the ICBM. What is tragic about Mason & Dixon is that the reader knows that the Line will eventuate in the Civil War.

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

53

Although Hinds argues that Pynchon’s technique is to present his narrative in such a way that the past and present effectively coexist,4 the passages she marshals as evidence occasionally underscore the fact that Pynchon’s characters have no trouble distinguishing between past and present (e.g., “As DL acknowledges early on, ‘Brock ain’t in the past right now, he’s in the present tense again’” [99, quoting Vineland 103]): the one who pretends to have difficulty with this exercise is the critic. A close reading of the novel reveals the limits of the typological approach.5 An examination of Hinds’ discussion of the novel’s final scene will illustrate my point. I quote at length, to dispel any notion that I am being editorially unfair: As she has done throughout her search for the past through iconic screen media, Prairie-the-historian has formulated a method of history that actuates the past upon the same plane as the present. The temporal variants are literally 4

5

“Prairie’s historical quest,” Hinds writes, “does not invoke her own position as a progression from past history, but in fact ‘discovers’ a past that still exists. This past, further, is ongoing, both prefiguring and reflecting the present. Her historical method is based in reflexivity over time, bypassing the causality inherent in ordinary historiography” (94). In one of the most stunning revelations, which sounds like either the set-up or punch line for a hillbilly joke, we learn that “Prairie has indeed moved back to a time during which she can not only know her mother but can actually be her mother” (99). In “Sari, Sorry, and the Vortex of History: Calendar Reform, Anachronism, and Language Change in Mason & Dixon,” Hinds offers yet another scheme. Here, she offers persuasive evidence (the text’s profusion of anachronistic details) to support her claim that “Pynchon’s version of temporality resists the linear bias of ordinary historiography, and [...] this temporal structure, rather than partitioning data into isolated and manageable portions, instead links and complicates experience into webs of more complicatedly connected meaning” (205). Shortly thereafter, however, Hinds, who cannot resist playing a round or two of academic games, argues that “[w]ith his anachronisms fleshing out Mason & Dixon’s temporal compressions, Pynchon thickens this dialectic of time by reversing causality: the present interacts with the past, too” (207). That such statements are mere posturing becomes obvious when Hinds completes her inquiry by drawing a clear line of cause and effect: “Mason & Dixon makes the argument [...] that the machinations and mechanization of early market capital – political, economic, and psychic – have come to result directly in the postmodern culture of increased disorientation” (209).

54

David Thoreen indistinguishable, just as Prairie is now indistinguishable from her mother and grandmother. “Obliged” or predestined, Prairie fulfills Frenesi’s early suggestion of a biological basis for typological interpretation; Frenesi has “felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men […] and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence.” (100, quoting Vineland 83)

Note that Hinds accepts Frenesi’s suggestion of “some Cosmic Fascist [...] splic[ing] in a DNA sequence” – she must accept it, for this is the only way in which Prairie can be said to be “indistinguishable” from her mother and grandmother. If, like Hinds, we take Frenesi’s belief seriously, how then do we account for it? Are we to believe that the stipulated “Cosmic Fascist” simultaneously inserted this genetic trait into every generation of the Becker-Traverse-Wheeler line? No, and this is the whole point of Frenesi’s consideration of heredity, of DNA. Such a DNA sequence would be an effect of evolution and could be traced along the maternal branch of the family tree, not only from Prairie to Frenesi to Sasha, but back on into pre-history. What more direct causal link between past and present could there be than a genetic one? The “temporal variants” are not only distinguishable, they are chronologically and causally ordered. But two other passages in Gravity’s Rainbow also devalued the currency of cause and effect among Pynchon’s readers. Early in the novel, Roger Mexico tells Pointsman that there’s a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less narrow, a less ... sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle. (89, emphases added)

Then, near the end of the novel, the narrator assures us that Pointsman will be “left only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium...” (752–53, emphasis added).6

6

Another, more poetically just, meaning suggests itself here. As an oblique reference to the conditioned erections of Infant Tyrone, this late invocation of

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

55

Although Edward Mendelson noted as early as 1976 that “[i]n Gravity’s Rainbow, as in life, people think about the world in ways related to the work they do much of the day” (179), this important observation has been forgotten. Despite Roger Mexico’s occupation (his work as a statistician would preclude consideration of causeeffect), and despite the explicitly limited subject matter of his remarks to Pointsman, critics have attributed an implicit authority to the above statement, as if Mexico is not merely one more subjective point-ofview character, but is really (heh! heh!) Thomas Pynchon. Taking “science” as signifier for humanity, they have too-often concluded that for “Postmodern Postman” to “carry on,” he must abandon the “sterility” of cause and effect. But what is really sterile, Pynchon makes clear in Vineland, is Frenesi Gates’s willingness to “go along in a government-defined history without consequences” (354). Here, in his fourth novel, Pynchon returns to the earlier model of the universe, applying it, significantly, not to the onto-epistemological framework adopted by his characters, but to – imagine, of all things – a moral system. When, roughly seventy pages into Vineland, we are first introduced to Frenesi and granted access to her point of view, we meet a character who has for all practical purposes been living according to a moral system constructed on the principles of the new physics. The result is far from ennobling. It would be difficult, in fact, to mistake this mode of existence as one that is in any way endorsed by Pynchon. Having “understood her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them” (71–72), Frenesi becomes Pynchon’s dramatic presentation of someone who lives in a continuous present characterized by the absolute absence of cause and effect – that is, according to the world view based on quantum physics and championed by so many poststructuralists. The result? Nearly every reason human beings find it possible to get up in the morning and make it through another day the detestable Pavlovian suggests that Pointsman is impotent, thus his “sterile armamentarium.”

56

David Thoreen

has been sucked out of her existence, which has become an interminable series of disconnected moments. Far from being liberating – much less uplifting or transcendentally spiritual – Frenesi experiences the freedom of causal constraints as merely another form of “servitude.”7 In this regard it is interesting to see what has happened to the ideology espoused by Leni Pökler in Gravity’s Rainbow. Leni rails against being a “mother” to her daughter Ilse, because they want a great swollen tit with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its shadows. [...] “Mother,” that’s a civil-service category. Mothers work for Them! (219).

The radical arguments set forth by Leni, however, are essentially the same as those picked up by Brock Vond in Vineland; Brock, of course, uses the arguments with Frenesi not to free her from social mores but to bind her to himself. In the midst of a deep postpartum depression, and feeling guilty for her resentment against the newborn Prairie, Frenesi hears Brock’s voice assuaging her guilt, leaning darkly in above her like any of the sleek raptors that decorate fascist architecture. Whispering, “This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells...” (287)

This is a clear reversal of the position set out in Gravity’s Rainbow. While Leni sees the maternal relation as a social construction aimed at 7

Dixon similarly experiences anti-Newtonian reality – emblemized by the watch given him by Emerson before his voyage to America – as constraint and servitude. As he or the narrator reflects, “If this Watch be a message, why, it does not seem a kind one” (318). As emblem for anti-Newtonian reality, the watch becomes “a Burden whose weight increases with each nontorsionary day” (320), until at last Dixon experiences it as a “curs[e]” (320), and shortly thereafter finds that “his only Thoughts are of ways to rid himself of it” (321), an event which Mason styles “release” (324). When at last RC, a “local landsurveyor employ’d upon the Tangent Enigma” (321) internalizes antiNewtonian reality by swallowing the watch, his personal relationships suffer; his wife “moves to another Bed, and soon into another room altogether” (324). In the end, the watch colonizes RC’s stomach.

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

57

constraint and militates against it, Brock understands familial love, and perhaps particularly maternal love, as a bond that threatens state control. Employing a variation on the radical rhetoric of the earlier period, Brock encourages Frenesi to see the biological relation as a constraint; by severing it, he can reassert his own control. Thus the radical ideal of an earlier age (the child’s freedom from the maternal relation) has been twisted into the mother’s freedom from maternal duties. But because Frenesi has been released from these duties only in order to work for Brock and the State, her “freedom” translates into just another form of “servitude.” In contrast to Frenesi, Pynchon gives us DL Chastain, whose major action throughout Vineland is accepting responsibility for having mistakenly applied the “Vibrating Palm” to Takeshi Fumimota. And at the end of the novel, while assenting that human life consists of struggling against the inexplicable, against “unrelenting forces [...] simply persist[ing], stone-humorless, beyond cause and effect” (383), Pynchon counterposes an assertion of free will, highlighting a conscious choice made by DL and Takeshi. The annually renewed contract in which they dedicate themselves to each other bears certain affinities to a marriage contract. Their decision at the novel’s end to forego the no-sex clause in the contract signifies the ultimate acceptance of cause and effect – and in the manner that most affirms the human.8 That their union may produce a child is foreshadowed in the speculations of the Head Ninjette, who is “interested at least in a scientific way in [...] the Baby Eros, that tricky little pud-puller” (383). Given the object of the Head Ninjette’s “at least scientific” speculations, the passage also provides a correction to Pointsman’s “sterile armamentarium” of cause and effect. 8

If as exemplar of responsibility DL embraces cause and effect, Frenesi’s husband Flash and the other members of the underground community serve as Pynchon’s warning of what happens when an entire society or subculture adopts quantum physics as the basis of its moral system. The result is a nation of snitches, a society so lacking in community that there can be no counterforce, no family gathering capable of celebrating the “secret retributions [...] of the divine justice” (369). The very notion of such retributions lies outside – indeed, has been ruled out by – the onto-epistemological system to which the society has so enthusiastically subscribed, and on which it has based

58

David Thoreen

While one might argue that every Pynchon novel includes at least one scene dramatizing a moral act (Fausto Maijstral’s administration of the sacrament of Extreme Unction to the Bad Priest in V. [343–44], Oedipa’s mothering of the dying sailor in The Crying of Lot 49 [102], Franz Pökler’s gift of comfort and his gold wedding band to the “breathing” Dora survivor in Gravity’s Rainbow [433], Jeremiah Dixon’s attack on the slave-driver in Mason & Dixon [698–99]), DL’s acceptance of responsibility in Vineland is noteworthy both for its duration – roughly a dozen years – and for its evolution from externally imposed to voluntarily embraced.9 An evolution of similarly extended duration operates in Mason & Dixon. This evolution too details ethical transformation, in this case effected by a three-stage pun set up and delivered over 350 pages, in which “Men of Science” (343) become “m[e]n of conscience” (699). This transformation yokes the two great evils of the novel, the Lancaster Massacre of “26 Indians, Men, Women and Children” (340) and world-wide slave traffic, with the protagonists’ moral educations. At the pun’s fulcrum, Dixon perceives, in a moment of paranoid clarity, something of the purpose of the Line:

9

its morality. Happily, we have not all adopted quantum physics as the basis of a moral system, and we are not yet a nation of snitches. And so Jess Traverse can still celebrate a variety of religious experience in his annual reading of Emerson. It is significant that the passage he recites is an assertion of cause and effect, though Emerson’s conception is of a relation less mechanistic than transcendental. Less easily observable than pushing a button to call for an elevator, “the divine justice” Jess Traverse calls for, which operates through “secret retributions,” is nonetheless an effect in response to a cause. DL’s acceptance of responsibility for Takeshi marks a departure from these earlier scenes of moral action in another way as well; it is untainted by selfinterest. Maijstral admits to spending much of the night “pray[ing] for [him]self” (V. 345). Moments after comforting the sailor downstairs, Oedipa uses the squalid upstairs room in which he has been living as a launching pad for a fantasy featuring her own magnanimity; the fantasy is so involving that she doesn’t notice he has let go of her hand (The Crying of Lot 49 103). And Pökler, brought to tears and vomiting at his discovery of “the other side” of “his vaccums, his labyrinths” (Gravity’s Rainbow 432), engages a psychological defense mechanism of “Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow” (432) before locating, “[w]here it was darkest and smelled the worst,” the “random woman” upon whom he bestows his redemptive gesture (433).

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

59

“A Global Scheme! Ah knew it!” Dixon beginning to scream, “what’d Ah tell thee?” “Get a grip on yerrself, man,” mutters Mason, “what happen’d to ‘We’re Men of Science’?” “And Men of Science,” cries Dixon, “may be but the simple Tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a Hammer knows of a House.” (669)

With the question Pynchon gives Mason in this exchange – “what happen’d to?” – he cues us, with an elbow-nudge in the gut (watch what happens to this phrase), for the pun that will follow thirty pages later, when Dixon attacks a slave-driver and frees his slaves: “Dixon still greatly desires to kill the Driver, cringing there among the Waggon-Ruts. What’s a man of conscience to do?” (699). This pun, and Dixon’s meditation on the Line, recommend close examination of two additional passages which comment upon cause and effect. Returned from his solo visit to Lancaster Gaol, the site of “last Year’s Massacre,” Mason, who we are told is “not as a rule sensitive to the metaphysickal Remnants of Evil,– none but the grosser, that is, the Gothickal, are apt to claim his Attention,–” says, “Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must” (346).10 In the second passage, Mason considers the effects of the Line (and by implication himself and Dixon, its immediate causes), and “groans”:

10

The “they must” that Pynchon appends to Mason’s dialogue here serves several functions. First, it removes from the statement its categorical certainty, its dogmatism, which is, in Pynchon’s worlds, suspect at best – and at worst a marker for the presence of evil. In terms of “character,” Mason’s insistence that “they must” reveals his psychological depth. Although Mason speaks of “the Debt” these “Louts” have taken on, and claims to smell “Lethe-Water” (346), as if some Divine Retribution is at hand, the appended phrase reveals his doubts and represents his attempt to convince himself such injustice will not go unanswered. Most importantly, however, Mason’s insistence pushes us – and Dixon – toward personal responsibility. If forces unseen will not right the wrongs of the world, we must be prepared to right them ourselves; we must see to it that acts have consequences – putting it more kindly, that people are held accountable for their actions. Mason’s “they must,” then, should be understood as one of the several motives leading Dixon to attack the slave-driver in Maryland.

60

David Thoreen “Shall wise Doctors one day write History’s assessment of the Good resulting from this Line, vis-a-vis the not-so-good? I wonder which List will be longer.” “Hark! Hark! You wonder? That’s all?” One of the Enigmata of the Invisible World, is how a Voice unlocaliz’d may yet act powerfully as a moral Center. ’Tis the Duck speaking, naturally,– or, rather, artificially. “What about ‘care’? Don’t you care?” (666)

Pynchon has again encoded an important moment in a pun. The truly “unlocaliz’d voice” here is the narrator’s, which is enveloped by the Duck’s dialogue. Mason’s question emanates from Mason, the Duck’s scoffing rejoinder emanates from the Duck, but whence the narrator’s voice? Two possible meanings of this sentence are that something approaching a Universal Human Conscience may yet – even at this late date – act powerfully as a moral Center, or that the narrator or author of a work of fiction may do the same. But to what extent does the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, narrator of the Mason & Dixon passages cited here thus far, speak for Pynchon himself? Why should Cherrycoke be understood as a more reliable mouthpiece for Pynchon than was Gravity’s Rainbow’s Roger Mexico? As an Anglican clergyman, for instance, Cherrycoke might be expected to have a vested interest in upholding cause and effect, since the sacrifice and redemption at the heart of Christianity depend upon it. Despite his self-interest, however, three factors recommend a provisional identification between Cherrycoke and Pynchon. First, there is the existence of the novel’s framing device, Cherrycoke’s tale itself being governed by an outer narrator, one of whose roles is to ironize Cherrycoke, even as Cherrycoke presents a catalogue of “Crimes of [his] distant Youth” (9). This outer narrator is significant because he in effect places constraints on the “Authorial Authority” accruing to Cherrycoke/Pynchon (354).11 Second, the “Crimes” of Cherrycoke’s “distant Youth” read as a metaphor for Pynchon’s career as a fictionist: 11

For David Cowart, Cherrycoke’s “joking about his ‘Authorial Authority’ (354) in one place and calling himself an ‘untrustworthy Remembrancer’ (8) in another, draws the reader/audience’s attention to his own possible unreliability as narrator” (356–57), one strategy by which Pynchon refuses “the imposition, more or less fascistic, of a single, official perspective” (356).

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

61

Along with some lesser Counts [...] the Crime they styl’d “Anonymity.” That is, I left messages posted publicly, but did not sign them. I knew some nightrunning lads in the district who let me use their Printing-Press,– somehow, what I got into printing up, were Accounts of certain Crimes I had observ’d, committed by the Stronger against the Weaker,– enclosures, evictions, Assize verdicts, Activities of the Military,– giving the names of as many of the Perpetrators as I was sure of. (9)

Certainly that “anonymity” brings to mind Pynchon’s carefullyguarded privacy, and the Crimes he had “observed” and publicized find corollaries in the other novels: for “enclosures” we have the labyrinths of Gravity’s Rainbow,12 and for “evictions, Assize verdicts, and Activities of the Military” we have the War on Drugs’ civil RICO asset seizures referred to in Vineland. Finally, one thinks of Douglas Keesey’s ironic rejoinder to David Streitfield’s Washington Post review of Vineland: “True art is ambiguous about the source of threat; bad art names names” (Keesey 109). Third, and what finally establishes Cherrycoke’s role as Pynchon’s mouthpiece is that, unlike the Weissmanns, the Pointsmans, and the Vonds in Pynchon’s fiction, Cherrycoke never speaks categorically or monologically, never claims exclusive rights to the past, never trumps his prerogative at “having been there.” Quite the opposite. In his treatise on Christ and History, “part” of which appears as the epigraph to chapter 35, he sets down an historiography that sounds suspiciously Pynchonian: Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,– Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,– nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other,– her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit,– that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever,– not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All,– rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long 12

See for instance, Francisco Squalidozzi’s history of Argentina: “Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky” (Gravity‘s Rainbow 264), as well as the mental labyrinths of Franz Pökler (432).

62

David Thoreen and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in common. (349)

Far from claiming the sanction of Official Rembrance, or of The True Chronology, Cherrycoke insists that a History’s value lies precisely in being one subjective strand among others. Not surprisingly, when, in a parenthetical aside provided by the outer narrator, Ives challenges Cherrycoke’s narrative authority – or lack thereof – Cherrycoke playfully foregrounds the fictionality of history, even as he insists on his original plot line, merely providing support by way of additional improvised detail, saying, let us postulate two Dixons, then, one in an unmoving Stupor throughout,– the other [...] assum’d to’ve ridden [...] out to Nelson’s Ferry over Susquehanna, and after crossing, perhaps, tho’ not necessarily,– on to York [...] ever southing, toward Annapolis, and Virginia beyond. (393)

Pynchon is a postmodernist. But despite the fictionality of history, despite the historicity of his fiction, not all is Representation, not all is Indeterminacy – either in Pynchon’s novels or in the world to which they refer. In fact, it is in breaking the frame that separated the modernist work of art as an internally consistent and self-sufficient world from “the base mortal World that is our home and our Despair” (Mason & Dixon 345) that Pynchon performs his most crucial function as a writer and a citizen. Quantum physics may represent a better approximation of the physical universe, but in the moral realm, Pynchon would remind us, application of any but the Newtonian physics is disastrous. The Human Conscience “may yet act powerfully as a moral Center” (Mason & Dixon 666), but it must be carefully attended, provided with representations – and examples – of moral resistance in order for it to grow.

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

63

2. Pynchon’s Political Parable: Parallels between Vineland and “Rip Van Winkle”13 I have argued elsewhere that postmodern assertions aside, historical trends do exist, and they are not merely the manufactured cabals of subjective and subjectivizing personalities. As a historical novelist whose subject is America and whose passion is politics, Thomas Pynchon is aware of “the imperial presidency.”14 Vineland (1990), his fourth novel, reflects the steady encroachment in the twentieth century of the executive branch on the legislative and dramatizes some of the attendant threats to Americans’ civil liberties.15 It is fitting, then, that Pynchon has embedded in his novel an extended parallel to an early American political parable, Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” Although Irving’s style has been criticized as excessively British, the thematic concerns of “Rip Van Winkle” are distinctly American and are quite relevant to Vineland and the presidential usurpation of power in the 1980s.16 Because readers of Pynchon’s texts always stand the risk of “Stencilizing” those texts, that is, of succumbing to their own “unacknowledged desires for [order]” (Vineland 269) by forcing intertextual connections of their own device on a neutral, unsuspecting, and otherwise innocent text, I offer the following extensive treatment of the parallels between “Rip Van Winkle” and Vineland. In addition 13 14

15

16

This part of my article originally appeared in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews. 14.3 (2001): 45–50. The phrase is the title of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr’s study of executive aggrandizement, first published in 1973, the same year as Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that features a Nixon look-alike driving a “black Managerial Volkswagen” like a mad führer down the Los Angeles freeways (755). For a concise history of executive aggrandizement, including an account of the judiciary branch’s reluctance to hear cases involving such issues, see Jules Lobel’s excellent discussion. For more detailed, although less contemporary discussions, see Rossiter and Schlesinger A more extensive discussion of the historical and thematic context surrounding this parallel appears in my article “The President’s Emergency War Powers and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in Pynchon’s Vineland.”

64

David Thoreen

to the thematic parallels, I shall mention a few parallels of plot and place. My goal here is not to belabor the point, but to establish definitively the connection between the two and to assure the reader that the novel is not, in my reading, being “Stencilized” (V. 228). Vineland is Pynchon’s wake-up call to the American voter, who, like Rip Van Winkle and Pynchon’s own protagonist Zoyd Wheeler, has been asleep for twenty years. Indeed, both texts involve scenes of awakening. The first sentence of Pynchon’s novel reads, “Later than usual one morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig [...] with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof” (3), an ominous updating of this mid-story passage from “Rip Van Winkle”: “On awaking he found himself on the green knoll [...]. He rubbed his eyes – it was a bright, sunny morning. The birds were hopping and twittering among the bushes” (776). Rip has obviously slept later than usual, and Irving points up this irony by having Rip say to himself that “Surely [...] I have not slept here all night” (776). Calling for his dog, Rip is “only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows” (777);17 these crows are replaced in Vineland by the blue jays that, in Zoyd’s dream, had been carrier pigeons, “each bearing a message for him” (3). The military formation of the blue jays, along with their arrogant “stomping,” the “creeping” fig, and the profusion of “messages,” evoke the manytentacled military and government bureaucracies that shape so much of modern life – and their publicly accountable apex, the president and commander-in-chief.18 But the parallel does not end here. Both texts also include arrival scenes wherein the protagonists, oddly dressed, are attended by the heckling of children and by feelings of disorientation. As Rip 17

18

After Rip’s twenty-year nap, his dog Wolf has “disappeared” (777). Similarly, Zoyd’s dog Desmond disappears for much of Vineland. Rumored a ghost dog, “spotted out by Shade Creek [...] with a pack of dispossessed pot-planters’ dogs [...] who were haunting the local pastures” (357, emphases added), Desmond returns “home” only on the last page of the novel (385). Readers of Gravity’s Rainbow will also recall the intelligence messages delivered to Pirate Prentice via V2 rockets and the grating high-ranking government voice that “tells Pirate now there’s a message addressed to him, waiting at Greenwich” (11).

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

65

approaches the village, he notes with surprise the costumes worn by its habitants, and when we find that “[t]hey all stared at him with equal marks of surprise,” we must recall the outlandishness of Rip’s own outmoded dress. As he enters the village itself, “[a] troop of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him” (778). Similarly, Zoyd, wearing a colorful dress (bought at a discount shop specializing in large sizes, called, appropriately enough, “More Is Less”19), and en route to a bar known as the Log Jam, gets stuck in “a convoy of outof-state Winnebagos [...] among whom [...] he was obliged to gear down and put up with a lot of attention, not all of it friendly” (5). One girl screams that Zoyd “ought to be locked up” (5). Rip’s feelings of disorientation (“The very village was altered – it was larger and more populous [...] his familiar haunts had disappeared [...] every thing was strange” [778]) are echoed by Zoyd’s experience at the Log Jam, where “right away he noticed that everything, from the cooking to the clientele, smelled different” (5). The Log Jam has been recently renovated and is now outfitted with “designer barstools” and a “jukebox [...] reformatted to light classical and New Age music that gently peep[s] at the edges of audibility” (5, 6). “[A]bout the only thing that ha[s]n’t been replaced [is] the original bar” (7). Not only is the architecture different, however. On returning to the village, Rip discovers that “[t]he very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility” (779). When a “short but busy little fellow [...] pull[s] him by the arm [...] and enquire[s] in his ear ‘whether he was Federal or Democrat?’” (779), the uncomprehending Rip gets himself in a tight spot by crying, “Alas [...] I am a poor quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King – God bless him!” (780). Rip has slept through the change in governments; Zoyd and the contemporary American voter have done much the same. Despite his somnolence, however, Zoyd recognizes that the Log Jam is only the latest in a long line of Vineland County bars to undergo gentrification and that the assiduous remodeling by so many 19

Pynchon’s pun here also reverses the 1980s mantra of minimalist fiction.

66

David Thoreen

bar owners has worked another kind of change in the “very character of the people.” As Zoyd explains to Buster, the owner of the Log Jam: [O]nly reason I’m up here is ’at the gentrification of South Spooner, Two Street, and other more familiar hellraisin’ locales has upped the ante way outa my bracket, these are all folks now who like to sue, and for big bucks, with hotshot PI lawyers up from the City. (7, emphasis added)

This new litigiousness takes the place, in the late twentieth century, of the early republic’s impassioned political discussion.20 The Vineland County locals are no less “busy” and “disputatious” than the citizenry that greeted Rip Van Winkle, but while that citizenry had fought and won a war for independence (and so cultivated an immediate interest in politics), the loggers Zoyd meets, “sipping kiwi mimosas” and clad in “three-figure-price-tag jeans by Mme. Gris” (5, 6), are interested only in maintaining the feverish materialism of the 1980s. Both Rip and Zoyd, then, wind up at drinking establishments, but even before entering both men experience a dislocation akin to finding themselves in foreign countries. For Rip, that dislocation is ironic and literal. He is, of course, in the same geographical area, but that area is now literally a new country: Instead of the great tree, that used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall naked pole [...] and from it was fluttering a flag on which was a singular assemblage of stars and stripes – all this was strange and incomprehensible. He recognized on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe, but even this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff; a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre; the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was printed in large characters GENERAL WASHINGTON. (779)

For Zoyd, the dislocation is ironic and metaphorical. The first of “several rude updates” he encounters at the Log Jam is the “collection 20

We see another sign of the litigiousness that has come to dominate American life later in the novel when, in a burst of nostalgia for “the malls [she’d] grown up with,” Zoyd’s daughter Prairie recalls that “there even used to be ice rinks, back when insurance was affordable, she could remember days [...] where all they did for hours was watch kids skate” (326).

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

67

of upscale machinery parked in the lot, itself newly blacktopped” (5). In response to Buster’s claim that he and his clientele are “just country fellas,” Zoyd says, “From the looks of your parking lot, the country must be Germany” (7). This metaphor ironically and humorously introduces what will become one of the novel’s key themes, the movement in the United States in recent years away from democracy and toward dictatorship. Thus Pynchon’s novel updates Irving’s story, which marked the transition from monarchy to democracy. The basis for another parallel is Rip’s first view of his grown son. After asking about his old cronies, all apparently dead or gone away, the despairing Rip cries, “Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle?” At this, two or three startled people exclaim: “[O]h to be sure! – that’s Rip Van Winkle – yonder – leaning against the tree.” Rip looked and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged! The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man. (781)

The scene’s corollary in Vineland comes when Zoyd takes his infant daughter north. After hitchhiking to San Francisco, they take the bus the rest of the way. Meanwhile, Zoyd’s running buddy Van Meter has agreed to drive Zoyd’s car: Zoyd caught up with Van Meter in Eureka, at the corner of 4th and H, as, suddenly disoriented, he observed his ’64 Dodge Dart, unmistakably his own short, with the LSD paint job [...] and at the wheel a standard-issue Hippie Freak who looked just like him. Woo-oo! An unreal moment for everybody, with the driver staring twice as weirdly right back at Zoyd! (315)

In Irving’s story, Rip’s identity crisis is a synechdochic reproduction of the early republic’s crisis of political identity. The question of Federal or Democrat, first foregrounded by Rip’s arrival at the polling place on Election Day, is quickly overwhelmed by Rip’s pledged allegiance to King George, reminding us of the more fundamental shift from monarchy to democracy. In Vineland, the shift in the political paradigm is similarly fundamental. Although Zoyd’s moment of identity crisis occurs in a flashback to 1970 or ’71, the

68

David Thoreen

zeitgeist to which the flashback refers sets up an implicit contrast between the mid-sixties and 1984, when he arrives at the Log Jam. But rather than presenting the mid-sixties as the moment of ultimate freedom, Pynchon presents that time as the halfway point between a “green free America” and a “scabland garrison state” of the future (314). In San Francisco, the halfway point of his journey up the coast, Zoyd and Mucho Maas listen to and are comforted by The Best of Sam Cooke, “though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into” (314). More is involved, however, than the simple modulation of a Democratic administration into a Republican one. Indeed, the fact that the Vietnam War was prosecuted by the administrations of both parties (and dramatically escalated by a Democratic one) suggests that party politics has little to do with the real change in America’s political direction. As in Irving’s story, then, Zoyd’s identity crisis points to a shift from one political order to another – in this case, from democracy to dictatorship.21 In addition to these parallels, Pynchon counters Rip’s “naturally [...] thirsty soul” (776) with Zoyd’s once regular marijuana use and tubal intoxication, physiological manifestations of the political apathy displayed by the majority of Americans since the 1970s. That there are reasons for that apathy is beside the point: Pynchon is not interested in excuses, but effects. As Pynchon himself put it in “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee”: In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920s and 30s being perhaps Sloth’s finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. (57)

Neither is Rip’s invocation of the tyrant George III irrelevant, considering the Reagan administration’s systematic attempts to extend 21

In Pynchon’s view, this shift in political orders is not simply a parallel beyond good and evil. In Pynchon’s theology, this is precisely the sort of shift we are supposed to resist.

In which “Acts Have Consequences”

69

its authority while avoiding accountability. The message sent to Zoyd “from forces unseen” is that Johnson is no longer in the White House, and it is time to start paying attention (3).22

Works Cited Collado Rodríguez, Francisco. “Trespassing Limits: Pynchon’s Irony and the Law of the Excluded Middle.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 24.3 (Fall 1999): 471–503. Cowart, David. “The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon.” American Literature 71 (1999): 341–63. Friedman, Alan J. “Science and Technology.” Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Ed. Charles Clerc. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983. 69–102. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “Visible Tracks: Historical Method and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.” College Literature 19.1 (February 1992): 91–103. —— “Sari, Sorry, and the Vortex of History: Calendar Reform, Anachronism, and Language Change in Mason & Dixon.” American Literary History 12 (2000): 187–215. Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983. Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle.” Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches. Ed. James Tuttleton. New York: Library of America, 1983: 769–85. Keesey, Douglas. “Vineland in the Mainstream Press: A Reception Study.” Pynchon Notes 26–27 (Spring–Fall 1990): 65–73. Lobel, Jules. “Emergency Power and the Decline of Liberalism.” Yale Law Journal 98 (1989): 1385–433. Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Eds. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little, 1976. 161–95.

22

The Great Society and the Civil Rights movement not withstanding, Johnson occupies no idealized (or even privileged) position in either Pynchon’s political reckoning or in the history of executive aggrandizement. I invoke Johnson’s administration not because he represents the high point of civil libertarianism in America but because Zoyd’s lack of attention and political responsibility can be traced to Johnson’s years in office. The earliest flashback dealing with Zoyd dramatizes his years in Gordita Beach, “shortly after Reagan was elected governor of California” (22), which would be 1966.

70

David Thoreen

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1990. —— Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973. —— Mason & Dixon. New York: Holt, 1997. —— “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” New York Times Book Review 6 June 1993: 3FF. —— V. 1963. New York: Harper-Perennial, 1989. —— Vineland. 1990. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1991. Rossiter, Clinton L. Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1948. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Imperial Presidency. 1973. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1989. Simpson, Louis. “My Father in the Night Commanding No.” At the End of the Open Road. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1963. 37–8. Thoreen, David. “The President’s Emergency War Powers and the Erosion of Civil Liberties in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Oklahoma City University Law Review 24 (1999): 761–98.

FRANCISCO COLLADO RODRÍGUEZ

Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction and the Unstable Reconciliation of Opposites1

I would like to start from the premise that with Mason & Dixon Thomas Pynchon has built a powerful and ideological postmodern artifact that fits into the literary category that, some years ago, Linda Hutcheon called “historiographic metafiction” (5).2 That is to say, Mason & Dixon is a novel where metafictional devices, by pointing out the self-referential quality of language, systematically erase any possibility of ultimately believing in the objectivity of the historical events that the book allegedly reports: in this way, episodes that – from a humanist and Newtonian stance – readers would have qualified as fantastic or unreal (the Learnèd English Dog, the automaton duck, the beaver-man, etc.), acquire the same epistemological status as those other historical events that are reported in the story (including the clearing of the Visto itself, or the very existence of the protagonists). The human propensity to narrativize reality thus stands as the ultimate insurmountable barrier in our necessity to know the historical real, but it also becomes, in Pynchon’s hands, a paradoxical liberating force that helps the reader to doubt and inquire into the official or historical discourse of authority.3 1

2

3

The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education (DGICYT, Programa Sectorial de Promoción General del Conocimiento, 1998–2001: PB97–1022). The Canadian critic uses this expression to refer to “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Midnight’s Children, Ragtime, Legs, G., Famous Last Words [...] its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past” (5). On the notion of narrativity, see White.

72

Francisco Collado Rodríguez

Many are the techniques that Pynchon uses in this novel to produce this subversive activity, and many of them can also be found in his previous writing, but Mason & Dixon incorporates an innovative element in the writer’s fictional approach: for here he disguises a postmodern understanding of life by referring to the first historical epoch that seriously questioned the ideology of modernity, that is to say, the (early) romantic period. This Pynchonian novelty adds to a story in which readers may, of course, discover some of the author’s favorite metafictional devices as well as multiple references to the twentieth-century’s new scientific paradigm (relativity and quantum physics, fractal geometry, and chaos theory). Some specific devices become, in my view, most effective in carrying out the writer’s latest attempt to disrupt the still existing Newtonian confidence in categorical thinking. I intend to concentrate my analysis, more specifically, on the unreliable character of the narrative voices, and on the overcoming of clear-cut discursive and ideological limits, an activity that is symbolized in – among other devices – the crossing of narrative boundaries, the use of doubles and impersoators, the intertextual winks to the reader, and the unstable characters of the two protagonists. In all these cases, the above-mentioned convergence of romantic and postmodern views, and the scientific understanding of the relativistic and chaotic quality of life help to highlight the subversive component of these rhetorical devices and, ultimately, of Pynchon’s project. As regards the unreliable character of the narrative voices, I decidedly oppose the simplistic views that some earlier reviewers of the novel were quick to defend (Menand’s “Entropology,” Pelovitz’s “Linear Pynchon,” Enterzone; or Bradbury’s derogatory “Is This the Greatest American Novel Ever”), who insist that the story of Mason and Dixon is only narrated by Reverend Cherrycoke.4 However, using a technique already present in V., the novelist introduces a first-level unknown narrator characterized by its ironic attitude when reporting on events: this voice soon comments about the fact that Cherrycoke is temporarily staying at his sister’s house in Philadelphia. Her husband, 4

Whose name intertextually evokes that of a minor character in Gravity’s Rainbow. The reader may also discover the appearance of some other names that belong to the Pynchonean cosmos, such as the celebrated Bodine.

Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction

73

Mr J. Wade LeSpark, is ironically qualified as the Sultan by this mysterious narrator, who immediately confirms Cherrycoke’s role as the new Scheherezade, who can stay in Mr LeSparke’s house “for as long as he can keep the children amus’d” (6) by telling them tales and stories. Cherrycoke’s role as a second-level narrator and as an ironic and inventing fabulator starts soon after, with his report of the adventures of Mason and Dixon to his family audience, a report partly based on the fact that he was a witness in some of those adventures, but mostly created by assumptions, interpretations of written documents, or mere inventions whose doubtful status some of his relatives are quick to denounce. Here and there, the reader may also glimpse the first-level unknown narrator, a figure always ready to intervene and confuse the reader a little more in a reported quest where the metafictional devices of the mise-en-abyme (with its suggestion of rhetorical infinite regress),5 and the metalepsis or trespassing of narrative levels,6 further enhance the more than dubious truth of all narrated events – both the fantastic and the historical ones. Examples of these devices abound – as usual – in Pynchon’s latest novel. Let us consider one of them. Chapter 39 soon discloses a typical Pynchonian mixture of narrative levels and narratorial unreliability. The reader who has been paying attention to Cherrycoke’s report suddenly has to face the use of brackets, the assumption that a first-level voice is narrating the Reverend’s telling of the story, and the latter’s total disregard of historical truth: (“Dixon was first to leave,” the Revd relates, “and with no indication in the Field-Book of where he went or stopp’d, let us assume that he went first to Annapolis,–” “How ‘assume’?” objects Ives. “There are no Documents, Wicks? Perhaps he stay’d on at Harland’s and drove all of them south, with his drunken intriguing after ev’ry eligible,– meaning ev’ry,– Milkmaid in the Forks of Brandy-wine.” “Or [another unspecified character says] let us postulate two Dixons, then, one in an unmoving Stupor throughout,– the other, for Simplicity, assum’d to’ve ridden [...] out to Nelson’s Ferry over Susquehanna, […].”) (393)

5 6

On the concept of mise-en-abyme and its use in the contemporary novel, see Stonehill. On this notion, see Genette 234– 37.

74

Francisco Collado Rodríguez

The reader then has to put up with the notion that what is being reported here is subject to the mixture of different narrative voices, and that assumptions are for those narratorial voices a valid means to report on the adventures of Mason and Dixon: the historicity of the two characters and of their celebrated line is thus counter-attacked by a human tendency strongly foregrounded in postmodern times: our insistent capacity to create fictional stories or interpretations of reality. The paragraph quoted above also discloses another motif that is frequently favored by Pynchon: the use of doubles, an old literary device equally related to the doubling quality of mirrors, to the concept of symmetry, and ultimately to the line (the frame of the mirror) that separates the human subject from its external double. The motif itself also became a favorite one in the fiction written by two genial predecessors of the American postmodern novel, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, and here Pynchon uses it again to enhance his ironic criticism of categorical thinking: lines or borders that would define the limits imposed by Western dualist thinking are also metaphorically blurred with the help of a number of mise-enabymic doubles that invade the different narrative levels of the book. Once the mysterious first-level narrator has introduced readers to Cherrycoke’s family, we face the first pair of twins, Pitt and Pliny, themselves believers in the condition of Geminity of the two protagonists in the main story: “Boys!” their Parents call. “Bed-Time.” “Us. To bed?” queries Pitt. “Who should be listening to a Tale of Geminity,” explains Pliny, “if not Twins?” “Your Surveyors were Twins,– ” “– were they not, Uncle?” (315)

Their uncle’s reply is uncertain: he advances the protagonists’ convergence at a certain point in their adventure, but also announces their eventually divided destinies: readers fond of chaos theory will probably recognize in Cherrycoke’s words a new hidden drawing of that celebrated letter, the v, that metaphorizes a bifurcation point.7 7

This is what the Reverend replies to the Twins: “‘Up to a point, my barking Fire-Dogs,’– the Revd having thought it over,– ‘as it seem’d to me, that Mason and Dixon had been converging, to all but a Semblance– till something…

Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction

75

Later on in this tale of doubles the two protagonists will be impersonated by two members of their own team but, more surprisingly, readers will also discover a female version of the historical couple of astronomers in Franklin’s friends Molly & Dolly, whose very initials are clear evidence of their reflective nature. The Chinese astronomers Hsi and Ho also reduplicate Mason’s and Dixon’s roles within the embedded story Captain Zhang told about their legendary lives (chapter 64). Even Zhang’s belief in the earthly Dragon of his pantheistic interpretation of life also has its heavenly correlate in the constellation of Draco, that has traditionally ruled England from the sky. Early critics related this Pynchonian insistence on enhancing similarities to quantum theory and Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity,8 scientific notions that systematically take us to conclude the author’s rejection of dualist thinking and, correspondingly, of Western rationalism and of the clear-cut experiment of modernity.9 However, Pynchon’s book offers its readers a further ironic loop on categorical thinking: in Mason & Dixon the term line is frequently used to suggest its pernicious and finally useless condition. Lines are continuously trespassed not only in the main story but, as we have seen, also between narratorial voices and different narrative levels. This transgressive activity that scientific readers may also want to connect to chaos theory and fuzzy logic,10 is remarkably enhanced by the authorial use of a radical type of metalepsis as manifested in chapters 53 and 54 of the book. Although it is not the only example existing in the novel of the technical subversive device, however this particular moment of the narrative is especially interesting because it also incorporates the typical postmodern technique of introducing specific literary subgenres within the main frame of the story. In effect, chapter 53 starts with a quotation from Cherrycoke’s paradoxical Undeliver’d Sermons where the “postmodern” preacher discusses the possibility that Thomas and Christ were twins, and

8 9 10

something occurr’d between them, in ’sixty-seven or ’sixty-eight, that divided their Destinies irremediably...’” (315). See the seminal chapter on Pynchon’s fiction by Nadeau. For an extended analysis of this Pynchonean motif, see Collado Rodríguez. On the impact of these concepts in contemporary culture, see Kosko.

76

Francisco Collado Rodríguez

defends the notion that the “final pure Christ is pure uncertainty” (511). This parodic device gives entrance to the story reported in the chapter, the kidnapping of a white woman, a certain Eliza Fields, by the Indians: the technique is parodic again, Pynchon is borrowing here from a sub-genre that has been recently recuperated by American literature programs, the narratives of captivity. The problem is that the reader ignores what that narrative is doing there and who is reporting it; is it Cherrycoke? Later on, this apparent story within the story discovers the conceited forces existing behind the kidnapping: the sect of the Jesuits, one of the hidden, unofficial powers of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the reader is introduced to the ironized archenemy of the book, Padre Zarpazo, also referred to as “Lord of the Zero,” a wink to the reader that evokes the figure of that other criminal mind, Lt Weissmann, from V. and Gravity’s Rainbow. Chapter 54 surprises the reader with a homodiegetic or first-person report: the kidnapped woman, now being converted into one of the “Viudas de Cristo,” narrates her own experience. However, only one page later we are informed that this apparently embedded story is written in a volume of The Ghastly Fop that Cherrycoke’s nephew ’Thelmer is reading: Brae has discover’d the sinister Volume in ’Thelmer’s Room, lying open to a Copper-plate Engraving of two pretty Nuns, sporting in ways she finds inexplicably intriguing... (526)

Later, readers are also informed that The Ghastly Fop has already run into a series of more than a dozen volumes (including some Borgesian reflective forgeries, 527), eventually becoming a weekly. In the Captive’s Tale the reader also meets Zarpazo’s opposing double, the Chinese Capt. Zhang, a new Z, and expert in Feng-Shui, thus a believer in the integration of opposites. This character is also in love with the captive maiden and he is even capable of transforming himself into his fierce enemy, Padre Zarpazo. The logical transgressions represented by the Chinese figure add in this chapter to a series of narratorial interruptions where we know more about the relationship between ’Thelmer and Brae, the readers of this tale, till finally metalepsis operates again and the narrative of captivity fuses

Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction

77

into Mason’s and Dixon’s main story: the Viudita and Zhang “arrive at the West Line, and decide to follow the Visto east, and ere long they have come up with the Party” (534). Obviously, at this moment in the narrative readers are forced to wander about the line that separates the reading of The Ghastly Fop from Cherrycoke’s oral report. Also characteristic of Pynchon’s novels is their play with different ontological levels that, by transgressing their boundaries, produce a continual impression of instability and uncertainty in the reader that tries to apply western logic to the act of reading. As we have so far considered, Mason & Dixon does not differ much from the writer’s earlier fiction in this sense. However, the historical period and the protagonists’ task further enhance this authorial obsession with blurring categorical limits. The metaphorical importance that the term line has in the novel is also paralleled by the presentation of two protagonists whose very job is to understand, control, and put to a practical use the so-called natural laws that the Enlightenment believed would eventually help humans to explain the mysteries of life.11 Servants of modernity, Mason and Dixon are however continuously presented as men suspicious of their own mission: there are times in which they hint at the political implications that their American line will eventually have (692–93), but it is in the depiction of their characters where Pynchon stresses again the necessity to escape categorical thinking. The two astronomers are frequently presented as having opposite characters, however they are also historical incarnations of the romantic cultural effects that, for a while, opposed the far-fetched pragmatism of the experiment of modernity. It seems to me that Pynchon’s choice of the novel’s historical settings and his description of the two protagonists as being on the one hand melancholic and gothic, and on the other romantic, are elements that also respond to his manifested and continuous ironizing of either/or categorical structures. The gothic and romantic period (re)introduced within a culture still dominated by Aristotelian, Newtonian, and humanist values, the alternative belief in the “reconciliation of opposites.” This is a notion that becomes epitomized in William Blake’s poetry and painting, for instance, and 11

On this matter, see Markley.

78

Francisco Collado Rodríguez

that in the novel itself is also to be associated to the Eastern beliefs defended by Zhang.12 And similarly Mason and Dixon, far from showing two radically different characters from beginning to end, gradually start to exemplify in themselves the insistent postmodernist motif of the instability of the subject. Along the book’s totally unstable narrative line, the reader discovers many moments and circumstances that highlight the social differences existing between the two characters: the one is Anglican, an astronomer, likes wine and tea, and is frequently attracted to melancholic fits; the other is a Quaker, a surveyor, likes beer and coffee, and has a romantic and rebellious spirit. However, these differences and the continual disputes of the two men eventually account for nothing: quarrels are followed by reconciliation and mutual respect and, by the time they have to face the possibility of trespassing the Indian War Path, their characters have, at last, become textually interchangeable. Chapter 70 opens with Mason’s insistence that they must cross the Indian line and continue their own surveying activities: Mason, stubborn, wishes to go on, believing that with Hugh Crawford’s help, he may negotiate for another ten minutes of Arc. “But Mason, they don’t know what thah’ is...?” “We’ll show them. Let them look thro’ the Instruments or something. Or they can watch us writing.” (678)

Notwithstanding, only one page later readers are informed that the protagonists “at some point exchange Positions, with Dixon now for pushing on, razzle-dazzling their way among the Indians at least as far as Ohio.” (679) The obvious instability of their characters has produced their very interchangeability, thus adding to the continually transgressive ethos of the book,13 an ethos epitomized in the very 12

13

This mythic integrative notion is not strictly “positive,” though, as Pynchon frequently associates it to the notion of entropy. In agreement with my understanding of Pynchon’s oeuvre, I would suggest a linguistically impossible evaluation of this integrative notion as being both positive/negative. The issue is not new in Pynchon’s fiction: the emotional interchangeability of Stencil’s and Profane’s characters comes easily to mind. However, being a Spaniard I cannot stop thinking of the similar character flaws of the celebrated figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose roles actually become interchangeable in the second part of Cervantes’s novel.

Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction

79

linking & of its title. Ultimately, all the devices commented on here converge in Pynchon’s denunciation of the artificial and dangerous barriers humans invent, such as the ill-fated line drawn by his protagonists, a Visto – a new v –, devised for economic reasons and whose effects were to be dramatically felt in the Civil War. However, Mason & Dixon is above all a novel characterized by the decontextualization of its narrative. The book abounds in references to the poststructuralist interpretation of life as a Text, and frequently enhances the human activity of Representation, also insisting on that favorite metaphor of Michel Foucault: the mapping of reality.14 Not surprisingly the Mason and Dixon line had interested the author since, at least, the writing of his first novel:15 the activity of the surveyors is basically one of mapping reality but it also combines with that other celebrated Pynchonian motif, the human need for transcendence. “As above, so below” becomes a celebrated phrase in the book, suggesting not just the esoteric understanding of a fractalic reality, but the clear metaphor that situates the surveyors as draftsmen of the US map: however they are also the readers who try to make sense of the hidden message apparently written in the heavens. By the end of the book readers fond of Pynchon’s fiction should not be surprised to find again an ironic glimpse at transcendental revelation: Benjamin Franklin asks Mason whether he has already found or read a final Design in the skies, and Mason replies in the affirmative: Sir, you have encounter’d Deists before, and know that our Bible is Nature, wherein the Pentateuch, is the Sky. I have found there, written ev’ry Night, in Astral Gematria, Messages of Great Urgency to our Time, and to your Continent, Sir. (772).

An old madman or a real visionary, his mysterious answer will never be totally clarified because, again, Pynchon’s readers have to face an open ending. And that happens in a book that is saturated with references to story-telling: almost everybody, on every narrative level, 14 15

Many examples can be offered of this postmodern/poststructuralist understanding of reality. See, for instance 482, 497, 540, or 687. V. offers some references to the Line and to some of the technical problems the surveyors had in drawing it, see especially 419 and the very end of the novel.

80

Francisco Collado Rodríguez

is ready to tell a tale or to experience a dream reported to the reader in the form of a tale, a notion that is furthered again in chapter 73, a bifurcative invented episode in which the narrator imagines an alternative ending. In it Mason and Dixon are together again, their mission now being to draw a line across the Atlantic Ocean: “A thoughtful enough Arrangement of Anchors and Buoys, Lenses and Lanthorns, forming a perfect Line across the Ocean, all the way from the Delaware Bay to the Spanish Extremadura” (712). Pynchon’s encyclopaedic knowledge and authorial irony are further enhanced by the fact that Extremadura – the place where, incidentally, I was born – is a Spanish region so named because it used to be the fighting, everchanging frontier that separated the Muslims from the Christians in medieval Spain.16 The remarkable combination of all the above-mentioned devices, ends up forcing the reader – or, in any case, my own reading – to reflect on the line that separates truth from falsehood, historicity from fiction, and on the way we construct our interpretations of reality. The fight against the limitations imposed by artificial – textual – barriers, Pynchon seems to suggest, is not limited to the Gothic and Romantic revolt against the rational excesses of the Enlightenment. The fight against despotic discursive lines and natural boundaries still goes on today, and, he seems to warn us, it is everybody’s task to suspend our categorical and pragmatic beliefs and so give a chance for a more understanding fusion of opposites where ideological values have no clear limits.

16

In a literal sense, Extremadura means “the limits of the Duero,” a large river that crosses Northern Portugal and Spain and where the actual medieval frontier stood for a while. Later on the Christians fought their way down the Iberian Peninsula but Extremadura came to represent the limits with the Muslim kingdoms, even if Extremeñean lands now stood very far from the river Duero.

Mason & Dixon, Historiographic Metafiction

81

Works Cited Bradbury, Malcolm. “Is This the Greatest American Novel Ever?” Literary Review July 1997: 24. Collado Rodríguez, Francisco. “Trespassing Limits: Pynchon’s Irony and the Law of the Excluded Middle.” The Oklahoma City University Law Review 24. 2 (1999): 471–503. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse. 1972. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988. Kosko, Bart. Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic. London: Harper Collins, 1993. Markley, Robert. “Representing Order: Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, and Theology in the Newtonian Revolution.” Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991: 125–48. Menand, Louis. “Entropology.” Rev. New York Review of Books (12 June 1997): 22FF. Nadeau, Robert. Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst. U of Massachusetts P, 1981. Pelovitz, David. “Linear Pynchon.” Enterzone 11 (1997) . Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. —— Gravity’s Rainbow. London: Picador, 1973. —— V. London: Picador, 1963. Stonehill, Brian. The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1988. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.

This page intentionally left blank

WILLIAM B. MILLARD

Delineations of Madness and Science: Mason & Dixon, Pynchonian Space and the Snovian Disjunction1

The deconstructionists have made the binary oscillation of Western decorum a desperate affair. It is not a desperate affair; it is an error-checking operation. It represents [...] a way in which style can control content, formal pleasure balance conceptual thought, self-consciousness satirically ventilate out hierarchical urges. (Lanham 84)

If the voluminous display of interdisciplinary knowledge in Thomas Pynchon’s fiction is to serve a reader as an open field for serious investigation and contemplation then the reader who senses that Pynchon’s work is substantial as well as impressive faces a correspondingly demanding task.2 Short of comprehending all the 1

2

An earlier version of sections I and II of this paper was presented as “Ducking the Snovian Disjunction: The ‘both/and’ logic of Mason & Dixon” at International Pynchon Week, London, 12 June 1998. The entire paper appeared in extended form as chapter 3 of my doctoral dissertation, “American Nonfoundationalism’s Triple Play: Emerson to Twain to Pynchon.” Diss. Rutgers University, 2000. It has been argued that Pynchon overwhelms the reader in a barrage of bewildering but poorly integrated information, displaying an “indexical intelligence [that] intimidates his readers [so that] few question the banality, or worse” of Pynchon’s ideas (J. Wood 210). Wood’s choice of the unusual term “indexical” in this context appears to be a direct (if snide) challenge to the more common description of Pynchon’s breadth of knowledge and interdisciplinary referentiality as “encyclopedic,” as described in Edward Mendelson’s influential “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” (Jed Rasula elaborates further on theories of encyclopedic narrative, citing Mendelson’s work as a paradigm of critical recognition of encyclopedism as a specific genre and Gravity’s Rainbow as a paradigmatic text.) Should a critical school generally antagonistic to Pynchon (and to the writers who claim him as an influence) ever develop, disparagement of the scale of Pynchon’s background knowledge as merely accumulative (as “indexical” implies), rather than meaningfully masterful, is a plausibly predict-

84

William B. Millard

diverse discourses that Pynchon outlines through his narratives and references, one needs at least to develop a well-defined sense of how, and why, Pynchon integrates such a cornucopia of information into his narratives. The ambitions and mysteries of the postmodern era’s most influential fiction writer call for a reading style that is both intellectually ambitious and receptive to mystery.3 Such a reading must be capable of apprehending the distinct qualities of forms of knowledge that rarely make an appearance in fiction, while resisting any formulaic or reductionistic claims to divine the inner structure of the writing or the ultimate truth-content of those forms of knowledge. Mason & Dixon, Pynchon’s most ambitious leap through the deceptive convolutions of history, presents an exceptionally strong challenge, one that may or may not ever be adequately answered in the languages of literary critical theory. I want here to present one of the possible responses to that challenge without pretending the response can be definitive. I also frankly acknowledge that its method of weaving between selected major and minor moments in the text of the novel and assorted critical, scientific, and philosophical texts external to it is, and perhaps ought to be, far from systematic.

3

able commonplace. A different anti-Pynchonian or post-Pynchonian position, a reaction against the proliferation of unstable social irony in his wake, appears in novelist David Foster Wallace’s comment to Larry McCaffery: “If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon. Because, even though their selfconsciousness and irony and anarchism served valuable purposes, were indispensable for their times, their aesthetic’s absorption by U.S. commercial culture has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else” (McCaffery 146). Rick Moody, reviewing Mason & Dixon for Atlantic Monthly, cites Pynchon as the solitary, inescapable influence behind an entire generation of writers’ anxiety: “The novelist Robert Coover, speaking of influences in American fiction, once remarked that apprentices of his generation found themselves (in the 1950s) grappling with two very different models of what the novel might be. One, Coover said, was Saul Bellow’s realistic if picaresque Adventures of Augie March; the other was William Gaddis’s encyclopedic Recognitions. Writers my age (mid-thirties), however, don’t have the luxury of a choice. Our problem is how to confront the influence of a single novelist: Thomas Pynchon” (Moody 106).

Delineations of Madness and Science

85

Like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, unable to declare which component of its tactical arsenal is its “chief weapon,” Mason & Dixon offers too many descriptive possibilities to allow for coherent prediction of any single critical consensus. In the early stages of the book’s scholarly reception, the critical community has heard the following: that Mason & Dixon is a novel of the foregone possibilities that we call America; that it is a novel of friendship, placing its paired protagonists among “other immortal male pairs in literary history, as rich in their interactions and as unimaginable outside of their bond as Vladimir and Estragon, Ishmael and Queequeg, Boswell and Johnson, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise”;4 that it “is, among many other things, a book about learning, rather slowly, to care instead of wonder”;5 that it is a novel of deep ecology, or of Luddism; that it is a novel of religion; that, as Louis Menand in the New York Review of Books, has argued in one of the most insightful early assessments, it is a novel of colonialism and its discontents; that it transforms Pynchon’s longtime master-trope of paranoia, in the view of David Cowart, into a “pharmakon – at once the poison and its remedy” in that “the paranoia of Mason and Dixon, at first the measure of their inconsequence, becomes the gauge of their sensitive resistance to rationalist excess,” allowing them to “recognize in the Line an epistemic watershed, a boundary between dispensations”;6 that it is, as Stefan Mattessich describes it in his review for Postmodern Culture, “a novel about its own narrativity and, precisely through this reflexive turning around upon itself, about America too, about its delimitation and colonization, about the enclosure of space in proper places (or properties), and about its own (and our) complicity in that enclosure”;7 that it is a novel of the psychology and pathology of modernity, defining the cripplingly acute introspectiveness of the Romantic self through exploration of the mind of Charles Mason, in continuously useful contrast with that of Dixon; that it is, contrarily, a novel of the post-paranoid mindset, arguably a 4 5 6 7

Schmidt paras. 2–3. M. Wood 122. Cowart 359. Mattessich para. 14.

86

William B. Millard

kind of anti-Gravity’s Rainbow, conjuring its historical conspiracies (the Society of Jesus, the Royal Society, the British and French military interests, the East India Company) only to dispense with them or even make sport of them; and that it is manifestly a novel of language itself, both an elaborate text so polyvalently allusive that it forces a reader to take quite literally the overfamiliar Derridean precept that “there is nothing outside the text,” and also a vast language game, performing operations on the reader that make constructive use of the experiences of disorientation, saturation, resistance, obliquity, and irresolution. It has also been described, antagonistically and perhaps somewhat predictably, as not a novel at all but an “allegorical picaresque,”8 that compiles endless, disconnected comic set pieces in the interest of an ultimately nihilistic cultural politics. As I will later argue, there is some perverse value in this assessment, along with enormous misprision and oversimplifcation. In these respects and more, Mason & Dixon is both consistent with its precursors in the Pynchon canon and unique in its expansion and enrichment of that canon. For my own purposes, I would like to argue that Mason & Dixon is a novel of science and anti-science, a novel that asks its late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century readers to use the heuristic of history to rethink the Enlightenment’s dichotomy between scientific and non-scientific activities of the mind. Of the many polarities Pynchon has examined, this particular schism is of immense, enduring, and probably increasing social importance. This is because it not only cleaves the intellectual community in half, as C. P. Snow observed in his 1959 Rede Lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” but because it generates social divisions far deeper and more destructive than mere misunderstandings between academic specialties. Antagonism between secular scientific reason and non-secular systems of belief is intertwined with some of the most profound cultural conflicts of our time. Accelerated changes are being wrought by research in all fields of science and technology, including the arms industries. As a consequence, the fascinating and dangerous

8

J. Wood 201.

Delineations of Madness and Science

87

dance of scientific and nonscientific ideologies would appear to be a component of most realistically envisioned models of the future.

1. A Field Guide to Comparative Luddisms Gravity’s Rainbow ranks with Finnegans Wake and A Brief History of Time among books that large numbers of readers have obtained, and perhaps begun reading, but never finished. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture may hold pride of place in a related category: works that are cited as intellectual landmarks, touchstones, or even commonplaces by large numbers of commentators who have never actually read them. Judging from his New York Times Book Review essay “Is it OK to Be a Luddite?” Pynchon is one of the diminishing number who have read Snow’s text deeply and aggressively. Before moving on to consider Luddism itself, he strives to make sense of the problems Snow’s lecture crystallizes, even while taking Snow to task over the “immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion” that “[i]ntellectuals, particularly literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites” (Snow 22). Here, before examining the fictional bodying-forth of some of Pynchon’s ideas about science and its alternatives in Mason & Dixon, I would like to return momentarily to Snow’s text. This is in order both to differentiate his observation of a cultural chasm from some of the interpretations and accusations that have accumulated around it, but also to re-embed his best-known idea in the explicit context of its origin, much as Pynchon historicizes the concept and practice of Luddism.9 Snow’s explicit purpose in decrying the poor communications between the literary and scientific intellectual cultures was to remove obstacles to the spread of industrialism into the Third World for the express and singular purpose of alleviating poverty. He thus aimed to 9

An example of this is the charge by some contemporaries that Snow approved of the chasm, though his entire polemic expresses the opposite intent; his name is now historically linked with something he deplored.

88

William B. Millard

marshal more of the resources of intellect and opinion in the service of equalizing the worldwide distribution of wealth. He originally thought of calling the entire lecture “The Rich and the Poor,” the subhead for its final segment, and in his 1963 re-examination “The Two Cultures: A Second Look” he expressed the wish that he had used that title instead (79). Snow minces no words about these priorities, in either the lecture or the follow-up piece. Thus both writers, despite their glaring disagreements over the social benevolence of industrialism and secular science, share an antipathy toward the organized economic and political forces that are so eloquently and succinctly named, in Gravity’s Rainbow, as “Them.” Like Vineland’s Beckers and Traverses holding fast to family history, Snow directs his historical attention, at a highly personal level (discussing the views of his grandfather, a self-educated artisan, about the life of his own grandfather, a peasant), to the ways class shapes one’s tone toward industrialization: [My great-great-grandfather] was a man of ability, my grandfather thought; my grandfather was pretty unforgiving about what society had done, or not done, to his ancestors, and did not romanticise their state. It was no fun being an agricultural labourer in the mid to late eighteenth century, in the time that we, snobs that we are, think of only as the time of the Enlightenment and Jane Austen. The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below [...]. To people like my grandfather, there was no question that the industrial revolution was less bad than what had gone before. (27)

Snow also issues a challenge to American and English novelists to begin considering applied science and its attendant social structures as a worthy topic for fiction (31) – a challenge to which it is easy to imagine the Pynchon of the 1960s, with Gravity’s Rainbow in gestation, replying consciously and directly. Intriguingly, Snow even identifies the nascent field of molecular biology (72–73) as extraordinarily promising, anticipating Pynchon’s own enthusiastic predictions for the same discipline as part of a potentially revolutionary convergence. Snow and Pynchon obviously part company at important points. It is likely that Snow drastically underrated the responsibility of the scientific and engineering

Delineations of Madness and Science

89

establishment for the bicultural breach and its human consequences, charging the literati with the chief responsibility for parochialism to an unbalanced degree. More importantly, his sanguinity over what industrialism would bring about in the Third World becomes ever harder to see through the smoke of an Indonesian or Brazilian forest fire. Still, the objectives and priorities he has in common with Pynchon are far from trivial. Leaving aside Pynchon’s comments about the proliferation of specialist cultures rendering the dualistic Snovian scheme obsolete,10 a gulf of incomprehension nevertheless remains between the worlds of empirical science and of literature or critical theory. Whether one identifies a dipole of cultures, as Snow does, or the Brownian motion of myriad microcultures, there are still a small number of broad personality categories defined by attitudes toward science, as Pynchon credits Snow with observing “with the reflexes of a novelist after all.”11 It may be tempting to relegate Snow’s delineation of the Two Cultures – or, as Pynchon dubs this line, the “Snovian Disjunction” – to the realm of bygone controversies, of enduring interest only to historians of the donnish disputes of the mid-twentieth century. Certainly Pynchon treats Snow’s lecture more as a launching point for his discussion of the historical Luddites, and of other iterations of his archetypal figure the Badass, than as the object of sustained examination. However, anyone who would dismiss Snow’s idea outright might find it productive to examine such contemporary documents as the manifestos of the online discussion group edge.org. This highly select group of futurists, digerati, techno-pundits, and interdisciplinary scholars, is affiliated loosely with Wired magazine and more closely with the science-publishing agent and entrepreneur 10 11

This is another point Snow took up explicitly and proleptically in the original lecture (8–9, 65–66). Pynchon, “Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?”: 1. I should mention in passing that my own personal experience editing an interdisciplinary research magazine, pursuing an explicit mission of improving communications among disparate fields, provides ample anecdotal evidence that misunderstandings across the Two Cultures are rife. Sometimes this even extends to a reluctance to admit that another field’s most rudimentary terms of art may be admitted into the English language.

90

William B. Millard

John Brockman. Edge’s ambitious essay “The Third Culture,” in particular, explicitly and aggressively identifies Snovian literary intellectuals as an irrelevant rump group whose exit from center stage in the public discourse is under way and long overdue: [T]he playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time [...]. [Snow] noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as “the intellectuals,” as though there were no others [...]. How did the literary intellectuals get away with it? First, people in the sciences did not make an effective case for the implications of their work. Second, while many eminent scientists [...] also wrote books for a general audience, their works were ignored by the selfproclaimed intellectuals, and the value and importance of the ideas presented remained invisible as an intellectual activity, because science was not a subject for the reigning journals and magazines.12

Manifestoist Brockman, celebrating the thorough inversion of the situation he noted in previous decades, now identifies a “third culture.” This arises not from a synthesis of the other two or from improved communication between them, as Snow came to envision in “A Second Look,” but from the simple combination of intellectual vigor and direct communication with the public on the part of the ascendant scientific culture. Nonscientific intellectuals, according to this view of history, are practically Thanatoids, dead without quite being ready to admit it. The claim by Brockman and his Edge colleagues that science is now well within the purview of journalism, lowbrow and high-, finds unambiguous support in the steady proliferation of scientific bulletins and features for daily newspapers. Books on science are regularly 12

Anon. [John Brockman], “The Third Culture,” http://www.edge.org/3rdculture/index.html: paras. 2–4. Brockman frequently erases his own individual presence as an author for anti-individualist reasons best understood through examination of works such as By the Late John Brockman, available at the same website.

Delineations of Madness and Science

91

considered in the book review sections of at least major newspapers and magazines, indicating an incursion of one Snovian culture onto the other’s media turf. Still, these developments hardly imply that the gap has been erased, that substantial proportions of the members of one culture speak the languages of the other. The merits of Edge’s broadly triumphalist position are best assessed in other contexts. This is also true of the various well-publicized interpretations of physicist Alan Sokal’s notorious hoax on the editors of Social Text and on the critical-theory community in general, to name another broadside fired from the scientific side of the chasm toward a purported cabal of antirealists across the way.13 At the very least, however, such writings and controversies indicate that the depth of the Snovian Disjunction persists and may even be increasing, no matter what shifts occur in the forms and degrees of cultural capital accrued by either side. None of this has ever been news to Thomas Pynchon. As the novelist most closely associated with the adaptation of scientific and technological ideas into fiction, he has crossed the Snovian Disjunction more often, with more expertise and more confidence, than any literary figure alive. One of the first inferences he draws from his aghast rereadings of his early stories is recounted in the introduction to Slow Learner. Acknowledged here is his realization of the fruitlessness of adhering to canonical literary values, such as conscious allusion to recognized and academically sanctioned precursors. In “The Small Rain,” he confesses, “I was operating on the motto ‘Make it literary,’ a piece of bad advice I made up all by myself and then took” (4). Though he would never shake his allusive habit, he has aggressively expanded it into non-literary realms. He has followed alternative versions of that motto to make it technical, make it 13

For background information on Alan Sokal’s initial parody of assorted postmodern theorists’ use of scientific terminology, useful online archives have been created by the historians’ consortium H-Net Humanities OnLine (), by computer scientist Jason Walsh (), by mathematician Gen Kuroki (