Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis PDF
Preview Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis
WRITING PYNCHON Also by Alec McHoul TELLING HOW TEXTS TALK: Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology WITTGENSTEIN ON CERTAINTY AND THE PROBLEM OF RULE IN SOCIAL SCIENCE Also by David Wills SELF DE(CON)STRUCT: Writing and the Surrealist Text SCREEN/PLAY: Derrida and Film Theory (with Peter Brunette) Writing Pynchon Strategies in Fictional Analysis ALEC McHOUL Senior Lecturer, Communication Studies, Murdoch University, Western Australia and DAVID WILLS Associate Professor, French and Italian, Louisiana State University M MACMILLAN ©Alec McHoul and David Wills 1990 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1990 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wilts British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data McHoul, A. W. Writing Pynchon: strategies in fictional analysis 1. Fiction in English. American writers. Pynchon, Thomas - Critical studies I. Title. II. Wills, David 813'.54 ISBN 978-0-333-51509-9 ISBN 978-1-349-20674-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2 For Michele and Roberta Contents Preface Vlll Introduction 1 Bookmatching, the end(s) of the book 1 Gravity's Rainbow and the post-rhetorical 23 2 PLS RECORD BOOK BID LOT 49 STOP J DERRIDA 67 3 Anti-Oedipa 86 4 Telegrammatology 108 5 Almost but not quite me ... 131 6 v 163 7 AV 186 8 Fall out 211 Bibliography 225 Index 233 vii Preface This work began in 1981 when we found ourselves and each other in new jobs in separate departments at James Cook University in Townsville, North Queensland. Neither of us, it must be said, were happy there all of the time and before long we were working with the slogan 'A new life in a new town'. That did eventuate some years later. In the meantime, we began to put some of our shared interests in Pynchon and literary theory into writing. Before leaving James Cook, in 1985 and 1986, we had published versions of two of the chapters of this book. Special Research Grants from the University were generously provided for this purpose. The two chapters in question were a paper on V. -now revised as Chapter 6- and an early version of 'Gravity's Rainbow and the post-rhetorical', Chapter 1. These appeared in the Adel aide journal Southern Review in 1983 and 1986 respectively. We thank Ken Ruthven and Noel King as well as the present editors of the Review for their suggestions and ideas and for their permission to use material from those versions. The idea for Chapter 2 was suggested by Mark Deitch, to whom we are grateful, as well as to Anne Freadman for her comments on the text. We also owe a debt of gratitude to Lisha Kayrooz at the James Cook Computer Centre for his invaluable help during the process of transferring our wordprocessing files between systems and institutions. The rest of the work has been completed by not-so-cute corres pondence, a sort of telegrammatology in its own right. The difficulties involved have been partly overcome by research fund ing and other assistance from our present institutions, Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge) and Murdoch University (Perth). In particular, we are in the debt of Grant Stone at the Murdoch Library for his search and destroy missions in the Pynchon Zone. It would be a measure of our success if we could, on the basis of this book, persuade him to write his threatened paper on Pynchon' s reception by SF fans. Some earlier workings-out of the ethical-moral questions raised in our Chapter 3, 'Anti-Oedipa', have appeared in Pynchon Notes and Philosophy Today. While those versions have undergone major surgery and revision, we are extremely grateful to the editors of those journals for their support and encouragement then and now. viii Preface ix In particular John Krafft and Khachig Toloyan at Pynchon Notes have shared their unique expertise and insights into Pynchon' s writing and into the industry which has grown up around it. John Krafft lent particular assistance in tracking down copies of TRP' s correspondence, his little-known preface to Richard Farina's Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me, and his journalism. We thank these and other colleagues, both local and distant, for their comments and suggestions along the way, especially Tony Tanner, Frank Kermode, Lesley Stern and John Frow. Extracts used in the text are taken with permission from the following sources: V. by Thomas Pynchon, copyright © 1961, 1963 by Thomas Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson Agency, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, copyright© 1965, 1966 by Thomas Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson Agency, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, copyright© 1973 by Thomas Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson Agency, A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd., Jonathan Cape Ltd., and Viking Penguin Ltd. Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon, copyright© 1984 by Thomas Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson Agency, Little, Brown and Company, Publishers, and Jonathan Cape Ltd. Introduction Bookmatching, the end(s) of the book The idea of a book on Thomas Pynchon ends right here: with a bookend, the first of a pair - with the second, its matching half, coming naturally enough at the (other) end of the book. At least, that's how things ought to fall. But then there is always the risk, the hope even, that the leaves contained between the bookends will, in another sense, fall out, spill beyond their confines, arriving at unforeseeable destinations. More specifically, however, this bookend, this block supporting our book and the books it contains and matches, is also an end in the sense that something is, more or less, over. What is over for us is the idea that we could write a unified, step wise, single-argument book on the texts of Thomas Pynchon. In fact, to come closer to our primary concerns, the numerous attempts by literary critics to do just that are, we think, hopelessly inadequate. Our very real dissatisfaction with the Pynchon in dustry has been its inability to come to grips with Pynchon as, and in terms of, what we shall call a 'writing practice'. Almost any passage from any book by Pynchon ranged against almost any passage from any book or paper by his critics, sympathetic or otherwise, shows a simple lack of matching. At best, or at most, what Pynchon writings have given rise to is a certain informality, something of a modulation in the tone of academic address. Yet even when tone amounts to anti-academicism 1 it remains under scored by some of the most conservatively academic critical appar atuses. While Pynchon delights in the play of writing, the joke, the scholarly rip-off, the spurious derivation and the rest, his critics continue to expend great energy exercising what can only be called their 'exegetical drive'. 2 Into the play, the marked disunity of the perfectly fictional and imaginary Pynchon comes, time after time, the critical policeman, rulemaker and, above all, explainer of the 'actual', 'underlying', rationale for Pynchon' s writing. There is a further irony to this almost polarised but practically unnoticed opposition between Pynchon and the industry named after him. It goes like this. Those literary critics who have written on Pynchon tend to have ignored what may loosely be called 1
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