Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon

188 Pages·1982·21.027 MB·English

by  Richard Pearce (Editor)

Critical Essays on
Thomas Pynchon
Richard Pearce
G. K. Hall & Co. • Boston, Massachusetts
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MANl'FACTl'UED IN TilE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CRITICAL ESSAYS ON
AMERICAN LITERATURE
This series seeks to collect the most important previously published
criticism on writers and topics in American literature along with, in var
ious volumes, original essays, interviews, bibliographies, letters, manu
script sections, and other materials brought to public attention for the
first time. Richard Pearce's volume on Thomas Pynchon offers fifteen
essays on this major contemporary writer, including articles by Josephine
J.
Hendin, Alan Friedman and Manfred Puetz, and Maureen Quilligan.
s
In addition, it contains an important original essay on Gravity Rainbow
by Marcus Smith and Khaehig Tololyan and a useful annotated
bibliography of Pynchon criticism by Beverly Lyon Clark and Caryn
Fuoroli. We are confident that this collection will make a permanent and
significant contribution to American literary study.
JAMES NACEL, GENERAL EDITOR
Northeastern University
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Richard Pearce 1
ESSAYS
Richard Wasson, UNotes on a New Sensibility" 13
Richard Patteson, "What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude
in Pynchon's V. .. 20
J2..,~W,..BUDt·, uComic Escape and Anti-Vision: V. and Tlae
Crying of Lot 49" 32
Josephine Hendin, "What is Thomas Pynchon Telling Us? V. and
Gravity'S Rainbow" 42
TJ!21m"a's- -S-chaub, 'A Gentle Chill, An Ambiguity': The Crying of
U
Lot 51
J.
Alan Friedman and Manfred Puetz, "Science as Metaphor:
Thomas Pynchon and Gravity; Rainbow" 69
Speer Morgan, "Gravity's Rainbow: What's The Big Idea?" 82
Lawrence Wolfley, "Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of
Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Nover' 99
Scott Simmon, ··Beyond the Theater of War: Graoity's Rainbow
as Film" 124
Steven WeLenburger, "The End of History? Thomas Pynchon
and the Uses of the Past" 140
Elaine B. Safer, "The Allusive Mode and Black Humor in
Pynchon's Graoityi Rainbow" 157
Marcus Smith ah~ lChachig Tololyan, "The New Jeremiad:
Gravity, Rainbow'" 169
Maureen Quilligan, ["Thomas Pynchon and the Language of
Allegory"] , 187
Richard Pearce, "Where're They At, Where're They Going?
Thomas p)PJlchon and the American Novel in ~fotion" 213
Beverly Lyon Clark and Caryn Fuoroli, "A Re,iew of Major
Pynchon Criticism" 230
Index 255
INTRODUCTION
For Henry Adams at the turn of the century, history "'as like a can
non ball coming directly towards him, and he could trace its five
thousand year curve. Its momentum increased just before Constantine set
up the Cross; it swerved as Gutenberg printed the Bible and Columbus
discovered a new world; it was given a new curve by Galileo and Bacon.
But in 1900 .. the continuity snapped." And Adams con\reyed the disloca
tion not only in his metaphors but by picturing himself in the third
person:
Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the
steUar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of
matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his
wrists and Oung him about as though he had hold of a live wire
or a runaway automobile; which \\'as very nearly the exact
truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid si!1gle gentleman
in Paris, who never drove down the Champs without
EI)'s~
expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found
himself In the neighborhood of an official without calculating
the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held
good, these bombs ,,'ould double in force and number every
ten years. l
Thomas Pynchon opens Craoity i Rainbow ",ith the experience of a
rocket-bomb that goes beyond Adams's prediction. "A screaming comes
across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it
to now." For. Pirate Prentice uit is too late. ... No light any
where. ... He's af.raid of the way the glass will fall-soan-it "ill be a
spectacle: the f&\w( a crystal palace ..• : But Pirate Prentice Is only dream-
ing, and when he wakes up we a nightmare that makes his dream
e~ter
and Adams' vision nostalgic interludes. For the V- 2 rocket that appears
as a brilliant point of light in the pink morning sky does not scream. ult
travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the
blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the sound of it coming
in .... You couldn't adjust to the bastards. No ,vay.":' than the
Wfir~.!
nightmare experience of an ordinary air raid is anticipating the ne,,'
rocket-which travels with unprecedented speed, confuses direction
through time and space, and denies the logic of common sense. It not only
snaps continuity it explodes virtually before it arrives. It indeed signals
t
that fall of a crystal palace-the rational, orderl)· world that had been the
dream of nineteenth-century science and that, Henry Adams not
withstanding, had continued as an Ideal of progress in America into the
middle of the twentieth century.
1
2 Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon .
The experience culminating in Pynchon's third novel is of more than
the terror that pervaded England toward the end of World War II. It is of
the acceleration of unprecedented events that followed, especially as they
affected the American psyche: the explosion of an atomic bomb that
threatened a holocaust, a "cold war" that created worldwide tension and
paranoia, a Korean War few people could understand, and then the Viet
nam War-which showed us that what Whitman once heralded as
"Nature without check," America's "original energy,"4 had been chan
neled into forms of exploitation and imperialism giving rise to riots in the
t
ghettos, factionalism in our major institutions, and a revolution in taste
and manners. The acceleration also gathered its impetus from new forms
of electronic communication, computerization, space exploration, and
growth of multinational industries; it would continue to gain momentum
in the experience of Watergate and the energy crisis.
On the one hand, we are living with the results of unchecked
energy-and Whitman's metaphor has become frighteningly literal. On
the other hand, we are living with the results of a gathering rationalism
that has sped up communications and made more information available
as it has overloaded our circuits and subjected us to the possibility of total
if undefinable control. And this paradox Henry Adams had also foreseen:
The child born in 1900 would ... be born into a new world
which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to
imagine it. and an education that would fit it. He found
himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before;
where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature;
artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every
free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being merely
occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last. He could
not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much
that had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish
treatment of man by man; the perpetual effort of society to
establish law, and the perpetual revolt of society against the
law it had established; the perpetual building up of authority
by force, and the perpetual appeal to force to overthrow it; the
perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse
to a lower one; the perpetual victory of the principles of
freedom, and the perpetual conversion into principles of
power; but the staggering problem wa... the outlook ahead into
the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred.
5
Pynchon gives palpable shape to the "new world" Adams tried to
imagine-in his fictional landscapes and the very form of his novels,
which are at once multiple and monolithic, anarchic and ominously pat
terned. The landscape of V. is vast and inanimate. Called by William
Plater "Baedeker Land, "e it is populated by tourists (explorers, agents,
hedonists, pursuers, sailors, wanderers, refugees, outcasts) and governed
Introduction 3
by an inescapable illusion of reality. If we find it difficult to keep track of
the novers characters (of Benny Profane as he aimlessly yo-yos, Herbert
Stencil as he ceaselessly searches for V., V. as she continually transforms
herself into new guises, and a host of cartoon characters who are always
on the move) we also intimate that they are moving in obedience to some
universal but unnatural law . In The Crying of Lot 49 the "new world" is
a megalopolis, sprawling incoherently but likened to a printed circuit. It
is either an accidental conglomeration or a network of freeways, motels,
used car lots, suburban lounges, television stations, corporate industries,
and communications systems. And the novel develops through a series of
similar and intricate plots that may be real or imagined, connected or
disconnected, actually or apparently related to a series of events
originating in the early days of modem history and involving the official
mail service and its revolutionary counterpart. In Grav'ty's Rainbow the
"new world" becomes "the Zone" through which Tyrone Slothrop travels
trying to escapepursuers of both the allies and axis, who may all be know
ing or unknowing agents of the multinational synthetics industry that
burgeoned on World War II. Now the very life force of the universe is also
the force of death, manifesting itself in the shape of both Slothrop's erec
tion and the V-2 rocket. But, though Slothrop draws us into "the Zone,"
he disappears two-thirds the way through a formless novel that is
populated by hundreds of major and minor characters, that shifts its locus
from one country to another, leaps from scientific formulas to the comics,
from myth to tin pan alley, from terror to slapstick-and yet ends where
it began, with the nightmare of an approaching rocket. In the dark Or
pheus moviehouse we are addressed in the second person-it is our
senseless nightmare and inescapable reality. And we are enjoined to sing
along as the rocket ·'reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the
roof .... Now,everybody-(.]"7
History, for both Adams and Pynchon, is accelerating out of control
and yet govem~by an impersonal force. And both are obsessed with
history at least partly due to their personal stake in it. Like Adams's, Pyn
chon's ancestors played a distinguished if not central role in American
history. William Pynchon, who becomes William Slothrop in Gravity"
Rainbow, was a patent holder and treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, helped found both Roxbury and Springfield, and served as a
magistrate at the witchcraft trials of Hugh and Mary Parsons. But he also
wrote a heretic tract correcting the "common Errors" of the New England
Puritans, who condemned the book to be burned in the Boston
marketplace. His descendents included Joseph Pynchon, who was in line
for the governorship of Connecticut until he supported the British in the
Revolution. a judge and physician who corresponded with Hawthorne to
protest his characterization of the Pynchon family in The HOlUe of ,he
Seven GtJbles, a surgeon who invented the kind of instruments that Dr.
Schoenmaker would use in the nose job of V., and a stockbroker who con-
4 Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon
tributed to the military-industrial complex prior to the Second World
War.
But while Pynchon has a personal stake in American history, he does
not view the past from a personal, let alone official, perspective-indeed,
in "Entropy" and V .• he parodies Adams's speaking of himself in the third
person. Quite the contrary, Pynchon strives for anonymity, as if he were
trying to become one of the dropouts of The Crying oj Lot 49 or the
preterite of Gravity's Rainbow; and searching for clues to his life is like
entering one of his novels. Mathew Winston (to whose "Quest for Pyn
chon"· I am indebted for the biographical information I have found)
discovered that there is no picture of him on his book jackets or on the
freshman register at Cornell, that his transcript mysteriously vanished
from the University and that his service record was burned after an ex
t
plosion at the Naval office in St. Louis.
Like Adams, Pynchon also studied science. But Adams only grasped
the outlines of what he read-admitting that he "greedily devoured"
Poincaire "without understanding a single consecutive page, and in
It
sisting that a student of history has no need to understand the scientific
ideas of great men. Moreover if he was stirred by the revolutionary im
It t
pact of modem science, he could not fully accept the loss of unity or break
the hold of mechanistic explanation. The law of acceleration, by which he
explained the dynamic of history, is classically mechanistic: it allows for
neither discontinuity nor a change in the material properties of the mov
ing object. In contrast, Pynchon studied engineering science at Cornell
before becoming an English major and worked at Boeing aircraft for two
years after college. Moreover, he was born in 1937, well into the century
that astonished Adams, and seems to see nothing but discontinuity. That
is, he not only understands but has fully assimilated the concepts of
modern science-where unity gives way to multiplicity, order to disorder,
progress to entropy, continuity to discontinuity, the law of cause-effect to
the rule of probabUity, the ideal of certainty to the necessity of uncer
tainty. And Pynchon confronts the paradox which Adams only began to
glimpse: of a "new world" that is absolutely anarchic and yet totally
governed by an impersonal order. But first let me outline some funda
mental concepts that underlie Pynchon's imaginative construction of the
"new land."
According to the classical Newtonian view, the physical universe was
like a machine; its movement was continuous, and it could be completely
explained in terms of matter and force. That is, through systematic in
vestigation, it would be possible to know all of its parts, formulate its laws
with certainty, and harness Its power for the benefit of man. At the end of
the 18th century Laplace postulated the ideal: "an intellect which at a
given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of aU
things of which the world consists . . . would embrace in the same for
mula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the
Introduction 5
sUghtest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the
past, would be present to its eyes. And the novel developed toward the
"10
same end-as the omniscient narrator, knowing the situation of all his
characters and the laws of human motivation, embraced his world in a
formula called the plot.
By the end of the nineteenth century, developments in thermo
dynamics were beginning to undermine the classical view. Adams was no
more ambivalent about the challenge than some of the scientists who con
tributed to it. The first challenge arose from changing the model for the
J.
physical universe from a machine to a cylinder of gas. Alan Friedman,
who is both a physicist and an illuminating reader of Pynchon, elucidates
the consequences of this change in his useful "Science and Technology in
Gravity B Rainbow. He points out that a cylinder no bigger than a can
"II
of bair spray contains a trillion atoms bouncing off one another trillions of
trillions of times a second. And since it would be impossible to apply
Newton·s laws directly to all of them, the scientist applies statistical law ,
computes the typical path of an atom, and predicts the total pressure with
extreme accuracy. Sacrificed in this approach, though, is the ability and
even the attempt to predict the behavior of any particular atom. Indeed,
a particular atom may behave unpredictably-subject only to chance or
accident. As a result, the scientist no longer thinks in terms of certainty
but only probability, which, however high, can never reach 100%. And
wbUe statistics are appUed within the framework of Newton·s laws, the
framework is threatened by the shift in strategy and the acceptance of
chance even as a practical convenience. Pyncbon plays with the image of
the unpredictable atom in The Crying of Lot 49 when Oedipa, preparing
for a game of Strip BotticelU, accidentally knocks over a can of spray
deodorant and cowers on the bathroom Ooor as it caroms off the walls.
Still thinking conventional terms, though, she imagines that God or a
i~
computer could predict its path. Indeed, her search for order throughout
the novel ref1~r refusal to accept the law of the "new world." In
CraoltysRafnbow, Pynchon works with the image more seriously: Roger
Mexico can predict the striking pattern of the V- 2 rockets with extreme
accuracy, but never where a single rocket wUlland; and in this novel the
antagonist Dr. Pointsman, rather than the protagonist, refuses to accept
the limits of probability. Moreover, as Pynchon develops his singular
form-or formlessness-from V. to The Crying oj Lot 49 to Gravity's
Rainbow, the paths of his characters become less easy to plot.
J.
Alan Friedman also points out that the model of thermodynamics
does not in itself challenge classical physics; it only leads to the applica
tion of statistics and probability. In fact, the first law of thermodynamics
is a statement of classical unity, for it asserts the conservation of
energy-that energy cannot be created or lost but only transformed. But
the second law, as Adams recognized, threatened the ideal of a perfect
machine whose power could be harnessed for the benefit of man. It states
6 Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon
that systems tend to run down in time, for processes tend toward disorder.
"Entropy," the measure of disorder, is the title of an early Pynchon story
which schematizes a theme developed imaginatively in aU of his novels.
Indeed, he recognizes that entropy is a measure not only of energy but in
formation. According to Norbert Weiner, whose ideas were still being
hotly discussed when Pynchon was in college, information is order; but,
like energy, it is subject to disorganization in transit. Moreover. the very
II
gathering of information (which, it was thought, enabled Maxwell's
hypothetical Demon to maintain order and counter entropy) takes energy
out of the system and contributes to the disorder. Anne Mangel argues
that this is the ironic consequence of Oedipa's heroic quest: the more
meanings and connections she finds, the more she contributes to the
disorder of her world. But Pynchon also seems to have recognized that
13
information may be defined as disorder rather than order. In information
theory, the more uncertain a message the more information it can convey.
And entropy, being a measure of increasing information, becomes a
positive tendency. In this light, as Thomas Schaub points out, Oedipa's
search offers the possibility of hope-although the more she, and the
reader, learn about the Tristero, the more we are overwhelmed by the
amount of information and its uncertainty.14 Indeed, in each of his
novels, Pynchon draws us into a search for order, where the information
and uncertainty become overwhelming, and where the search itself,
while necessary and even ennobling, tends toward disorder.
But a key word in the second law of thermodynamics is "tends." A
system tends to run down. We are back to probability. There is always a
small chance of a system not running down-or of a force that counteracts
thermodynamic entropy. The possibility of such a force is embodied in
p)rnchon's characters who search for order-Herbert Stencil in V.,
Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, Slothrop in Gravity, Rainbow-as
well as in the reader, whom Pynchon compels to join in the search. As I
have pointed out, the search may contribute to the disorder. Moreover,
the very intimation of order may be a form of paranoia-and in each of
his novels Pynchon taps the power of this pervasive modern phenomenon.
But he may be discovering a positive as well as a negative source in
paranoia, for it leads not only to solipsism but to genuine community.
And if it becomes a form of modem religion, it is also shown to be a fun
damental religious impulse throughout Western history.
While thermodynamiCS threatened the classical view scientists share
with historians and artists, quantum mechanics demolished it. The
science of elementary particles was just being formulated as Henry Adams
wrote The Education; in fact the breakthrough was made by a man who
anticipated Adams' mentor, Josiah Gibbs, in recognizing the importance
of thermodynamics. In 1900 Max Planck solved what had been an un
solvable problem by upsetting a fundamental assumption of classical
physics: the continuity of nature. Although he struggled against having to