Thomas Pynchon PDF
Preview Thomas Pynchon
Contemporary American and Canadian Writers Series editors Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith Also available Jonathan Lethem James Peacock Mark Z. Danielewski Edited by Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons Louise Erdrich David Stirrup Passing into the present: contemporary American fiction of racial and gender passing Sinead Moynihan Paul Auster Mark Brown Douglas Coupland Andrew Tate Philip Roth David Brauner Thomas Pynchon Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan Copyright © Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor 2013 The right of Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www,manchesteruniversitypress,co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 7628 2 hardback First published 2013 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate, Typeset in 10/12pt Cambrian by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Contents Series editors' foreword vi Abbreviations viii Introduction: 'the fork in the road' 1 1 Refuge and refuse in Slow Learner 12 2 Convoluted reading: identity, interpretation and reference in The Crying of Lot 49 48 3 Disappearing points: V. 74 4 'A progressive knotting into': power, presentation and history in Gravity's Rainbow 98 5 Cultural nostalgia and political possibility in Vineland 126 6 Mason & Dixon and the transnational vortices of historical fiction 154 7 'I believe in incursion from elsewhere': political and aesthetic disruption in Against the Day 182 Conclusion: Inherent Vice as Pynchon Lite? 212 Works cited 228 Index 239 Series editors' foreword This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing over the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of estab lished, emerging and critically neglected writers - mixing the canon ical with the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and analyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus on individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both the growing body of academic research in the field, and the increasing prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the world. Central to the series is a concern that each book should argue a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introduc tory survey, and that each contemporary writer will be examined across the trajectory of their literary production. A variety of critical tools and literary and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged to illuminate the ways in which a particular writer contributes to, and helps readers rethink, the North American literary and cultural landscape in a global context. Central to debates about the field of contemporary fiction is its role in interrogating ideas of national exceptionalism and trans nationalism. This series matches the multivocality of contempo rary writing with wide-ranging and detailed analysis. Contributors examine the drama of the nation from the perspectives of writers who are members of established and new immigrant groups, writers who consider themselves on the nation's margins as well as those who chronicle middle America. National labels are the subject of vociferous debate and including American and Canadian writers in the same series is not to flatten the differences between them but to acknowledge that literary traditions and tensions are cross-cultural and that North American writers often explore and Series editors' foreword vii expose precisely these tensions. The series recognises that situating a writer in a cultural context involves a multiplicity of influences, social and geo-political, artistic and theoretical, and that contem porary fiction defies easy categorisation. For example, it examines writers who invigorate the genres in which they have made their mark alongside writers whose aesthetic goal is to subvert the idea of genre altogether. The challenge of defining the roles of writers and assessing their reception by reading communities is central to the aims of the series. Overall, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers aims to begin to represent something of the diversity of contemporary writing and seeks to engage students and scholars in stimulating debates about the contemporary and about fiction. Nahem Yousaf Sharon Monteith Abbreviations ATD Against the Day CL The Crying ofL ot 49 GR Gravity's Rainbow IV Inherent Vice MD Mason & Dixon SL Slow Learner V V. VL Vineland Introduction: 'the fork in the road' v., Fifty years after the publication of his first novel, in 1963, Thomas Pynchon remains the most elusive and important writer of American postmodernity. For an author whose novels return again and again to the processes by which identity is structured by, and limited to, the shapes that society fashions for it, Pynchon's own biographical self has remained tantalisingly out of focus, as if always one step ahead, or to the side of, attempts to lo~ate and define him. It is one of the contentions of this book that such a stance of invisibility is more than a desire for privacy on Pynchon's part (although it certainly is that); rather, his deliberate refusal to participate in the customary round of interviews and readings - the expected forms and func tions of authorship - performs the kind of struggling resistance to social interpellation that we see at work in his texts. The tension between containment and freedom, in which the creation of precari ous sites of dissent is inevitably threatened by the systematic force of mainstream culture, represents one of the structuring paradigms of Pynchon's work. From the early short story 'Entropy' (1960) to the encyclopaedic reach of the recent Against the Day, Pynchon has been concerned to map the fault-lines of privacy and publicity, of interiority and exposure. His career has been feted by the literary establishment, with the award of the William Faulkner Foundation v., Award in 1963 for his first novel the Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1967 for The Crying of Lot 49, and the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974. Yet Pynchon has also refused such accolades, famously turning down the prestigious William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975 (imploring Richard Wilbur, President of the Academy, not to 'impose on me something I don't want. It makes the Academy look arbitrary and me look rude'V 2 Thomas Pynchon By refusing fully to play the part of celebrity author but yet doing enough within the culture to retain our interest in his mysterious status (twice appearing on The Simpsons, albeit masked by a paper bag over his head, for instance; and contributing the voice-over nar ration for the promotional video of his 2009 book, Inherent Vice), Pynchon enacts the oscillation between cherished autonomy and compromised engagement that is at the heart of his writing.2 Pynchon's desire for privacy has ensured that the story of his life remains sketchy, and the quest to uncover details of his biog raphy has generated much academic interest.3 One aspect of it, though, is worth noting at this point. His earliest American ances tor, William Pynchon (1590-1662), was one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and established the colonial settlement at both Roxbury and Springfield. William's place within the colony was undermined by the publication in 1650 of The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a book whose nuanced revision of Puritan doctrine was perceived as theologically and politically subversive by the governing elite. It bears the dubious honour of being the first book to be banned in the New World.4 As we discuss in subsequent chapters, in the writing of William Pynchon's descendant, Thomas, struggles over the legacy of Puritan structures of thought continue to rever berate. This is most explicitly found in Gravity's Rainbow, in which William Slothrop, a mess cook who arrives in America in 1630 on the Arbe/la, soon finds himself 'sick and tired of the Winthrop machine' (GR 554-5). Heading west to farm pigs, he enjoys their 'nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day - pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn't'. This somewhat bizarre but Sincerely felt incarnation of the outsider prompts Slothrop to write On Preterition, 'among the first books to've been not only banned but also ceremoniously burned'. By focusing on the preterite, defined as 'the many God passes over when he chooses a few for salvation', attention is shifted from 'the Elect in Boston [who] were pissed off about that' (GR 555) to those constituencies ostracised by, yet offering attractive alter natives to, religious and social orthodoxies. Slothrop, like William Pynchon, is forced to return to England, and the novel encourages us to consider this instance of fictionalised intellectual history as a defining moment in America's prospects. The narrator muses on the counterfactual Significance of what might have been, before the reader is granted access to the thoughts of Slothrop's mid-twentieth-
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