Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power

226 Pages·1990·12.22 MB·English

by  John Dugdale (auth.)

THOMAS PYNCHON
Also by John Dugdale
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, INDIAN SUMMER (editor with Tony
Tanner)
HERMAN MELVILLE, THE CONFIDENCE MAN, WHITE
JACKET (editor with Tony Tanner)
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
(editor with Tony Tanner)
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE
(editor with Tony Tanner)
FILE ON SHEPARD
Thomas Pynchon
Allusive Parables of Power
John Dugdale
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-10809-1 ISBN 978-1-349-10807-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10807-7
©John Dugdale 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-49110-2
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-04630-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dugdale, John.
Thomas Pynchon: allusive parables of power/ John Dugdale.
p. ern.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-04630-9
1. Pynchon, Thomas-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PS3566.Y55Z63 1990
813'.54-dc20 89-78245
CIP
For my parents
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Notes on editions, abbreviations and conventions ix
Preface X
Introduction 1
1 Three Short Stories 17
The White Indian: 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna' 17
Man on the dump: 'Low-lands' 37
A few bugs to work out: 'Entropy' 54
v.
2 77
Things I've read for courses 77
A fierce ambivalence 105
3 The Crying of Lot 49 124
A woman's point of view 124
Almost offhand things 141
Echo Courts 168
Epilogue: Gravity's Rainbow 186
Notes 190
Bibliography 203
Index 212
vii
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to some of the people who
have given me guidance and support in the course of my research.
Frank Kermode, Adrian Poole, Edward Mendelson and Mathew
Winston read pieces of work when my ideas were some way from
being fully formed. I am particularly indebted to my Tutor at
Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr Martin Cowley, for his patience
and practical assistance; and to Eleanora Holiday for her invaluable
contribution. Finally, it is no exaggeration to say that without the
encouragement and lucid advice of my research supervisor, Tony
Tanner, this project would never have been completed.
The author and publishers wish to thank the following for
permission to quote from the works of Thomas Pynchon: V.
(Copyright© 1961, 1963 by Thomas Pynchon) reprinted by per
mission of the Melanie Jackson agency and Jonathan Cape Ltd.;
The Crying of Lot 49 (Copyright© 1965, 1966 by Thomas Pynchon)
reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson agency and
Jonathan Cape Ltd.; Gravity's Rainbow (Copyright © 1973 by
Thomas Pynchon) reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson
agency and Jonathan Cape Ltd. Slow Learner (Copyright© 1984 by
Thomas Pynchon) reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson
agency and Jonathan Cape Ltd.
viii
Notes on Editions,
Abbreviations and
Conventions
References to Pynchon' s novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 and
Gravity's Rainbow are to the British Picador (Pan Books) editions,
first published in London in 1975, 1979 and 1985 respectively.
These are the only editions currently in print in the UK.
References to the story 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna' are to
Epoch No.9 (Spring 1959), pp. 195-213. References to all the other
short stories are to the collection Slow Learner (London: Cape,
1985).
References to the article'A Journey into the Mind of Watts' are to
New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966, pp. 34-5, 78, 80-2, 84.
The following abbreviations are used:
SR 'The Small Rain'
MMV 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna'
UR 'Under the Rose'
51 'The Secret Integration'
Lot 49 The Crying of Lot 49
Journey 'A Journey into the Mind of Watts'
GR Gravity's Rainbow
SL Slow Learner
When a text is the subject of a particular chapter or sub-chapter,
page references take the form of a simple number in brackets; in
references in the same chapter to other Pynchon texts, the number
is preceded by the title or abbreviation. References to the short
stories may take the form (Entropy, 95) or (SL, 95), as judged
appropriate.
Pynchon' s work is peculiarly resistant to quotation, and as a
result this convention has had to be adopted: dots within quota
tions are inserted unless indicated, reversing the usual practice.
ix
Preface
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., born on Long Island, New York, in
1937, is the author of four novels: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49
(1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990).1 The remainder
of his literary output consists of five short stories which appeared
in various magazines in the years before V., and another which
was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1964.
Critical articles and books on Pynchon did not appear in any
great number until after the publication of GR, which is centrally
concerned with the V-2 rocket, and largely set in London and
Northern Germany towards the end of the Second World War. It
was immediately acclaimed as a Great American Novel, and its
multiplicity of characters, plots, themes and levels provided abun
dant opportunities for scholarly labour; furthermore, it established
a Pynchon oeuvre where previously there had only been an odd
assortment of texts, some of them little known, in which patterns
were hard to discern.
A natural consequence of the bulge in Pynchon criticism after
1973 is that the earlier work is customarily read in the light of GR,
with particular attention to the ways in which it anticipates the
author's masterpiece. Unfavourable comparisons are made, and
words and phrases are used (first sketches, experiments, appren
tice work) which suggest that these 'immature' works do not merit
being considered independently and on their own terms. The most
obvious victim of this approach was the debut novel V., a double
narrative partly concerned with a group of characters in 1950s New
York, and partly with a 'mad time-search' through twentieth
century history for a mysterious woman. Working with manifestly
inadequate descriptions of a complicated and demanding text,
critics who write intelligently on the later Pynchon can be found
dismissing it as 'the overgrown elaboration of a simple idea'.
A second important factor in the critical reception of Pynchon' s
work is that the short stories were not collected until1984, 25 years
after the first of them was published, in Slow Learner. Prior to the
post-1973 proliferation of criticism and accompanying biblio
graphies, few were aware of their existence, and they remained
difficult to obtain in the following decade. Although pamphlet
versions of some of the stories appeared gradually in the UK in the
X