Thomas Pynchon

fascinating insights throughout. Bloom's essay on Byron the Bulb (page 660 of Gravity's Rainbow) is a must.

удивительно - я ее, оказывается давно прочел, но не впечатлила. а потом неведомый гений из GoodReads поменял ей автора, и я долго не мог вспомнить, что же это такое

Everything I’d been told to believe about Pynchon’s corpus is that there are two main phases. The first three novels and the short stories in the Slow Learner collection are one era – sometimes called his “Germanic” period, due to the obsession with German colonialism, the two World Wars, and also some stylistic conventions, such as capitalizing the primary Nouns in each Sentence, and Vineland and everything after is a sort of A.D., with different styles, approaches, and conclusions. I’d argue that Vineland has more in common with the early books than the latter, but apart from that, it’s a pretty valid take. Whether by influence of marriage and family or age, Pynchon’s worldview becomes noticeably less bleak and pessimistic in the second act, making it seem like the work of two different authors.

This book of criticism, compiled by literary critic and Pynchon uber-fan Harold Bloom, is interesting in that it came out a few years after Slow Learner, but still a few years before Vineland. It’s hard to remember that time now, but when this came out, there was no indication that Pynchon would ever write another book – when this was released, Gravity’s Rainbow was 13 years in the rear-view! That means these essays are all written from the point of view of a writer that may have been finished, that these four books were the entirety of a writer’s life, a conceptually contained triad (plus some short stories) with interlinking characters and moments that tie together over a century of American and European history with a unifying, paranoid vision of the world. As far as anyone knew, Pynchon went on the run in 1973 and never looked back, leaving his publisher to make one last payout by reissuing the earliest stories (which, it should be noted, are an illuminating path into Pynchon’s fiction) before shutting down the factory one and for all.

Bloom himself leads off the anthology not only introducing the other essayists, but with a great breakdown of the story of “Byron the Bulb” from Gravity’s Rainbow, a sentient light bulb who, for some reason, was born with the gift/curse of never burning out. He becomes a sort of illumination unionist for all the bulbs on the network, a mouthless witness to planned obsolescence and war-cartel monstrosity. Bloom ties Byron’s impotent revelations to Gnosticism, a spirituality tinged with negativity which he says Byron (and Pynchon) share: “In it is Pynchon’s despair of his own Gnostic Kabbalah, since Byron the Bulb does achieve the Gnosis, complete knowledge, but purchase that knowledge by impotence, the loss of power. Byron can neither be martyred, nor betray his own prophetic vocation. What remains is madness: limitless rage and frustration, which at last he learns to enjoy.” As good an analysis of the anima driving these first three books as anything I’ve read. (Unlike most of the other essayists in the collection, Bloom seems to have the inside track on the rumors of a forthcoming Mason & Dixon novel, making this less of a hermetically sealed galaxy for him.)

Frank Kermode’s “The Use of Codes in The Crying of Lot 49” is a short piece, just a quick analysis of that book’s frustrating closed system of clues and symbols that offer no solution, another unifying theme of Pynchon’s early work. “That plot is pointed to as the object of some possible annunciation; but the power is in the pointing, not in any guarantee,” says Kermode. This, to me, is one of the great strengths of these early books. There’s just enough telegraphing early on in V., Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow that you’re not going to get a satisfying resolution to any of the key issues to make it not a huge annoyance at the end. The story is the journey, not the reveal. I’m fine with that when it’s deliberately baked into the program, not just an unpainted corner of a room with sticky footprints leading away.

Edward Mendelson’s “Pynchon’s Gravity” is one of the densest and most satisfying full-body reviews of Pynchon’s work in the book, using big, continent-crossing stitches to lace together common themes and approaches across all the works. “Each of Pynchon’s books glosses a single historical theory, a single historical intelligence,” comparing V. to The Education of Henry Adams, Lot 49 to Micrea Eliade’s discussion of “Hierophany, and Gravity’s Rainbow to Max Weber. I’ll have to take his word on this, not having read the comparisons, but I liked this one very much, as it digs at the appeal of his deeply-embedded historical segments, sodden with details and sloggy at times to read, but also immersive and world-expanding. Mendelson provides a detailed plot summary of GR over several pages, before admitting, “This bald summary ignores at least four-fifths of Gravity’s Rainbow.” Despite being written in 1973, it gets the themes mostly right, highlighting the aspects of the book we’re still talking about.

Alan J. Friedman and Manfred Puetz give us “Gravity’s Rainbow: Science as Metaphor,” which, as you might expect, dips deep into the scientific elements of that book, and all of Pynchon’s work to that point, starting with the formative short story, “Entropy,” a story that highlights a concept and storytelling structure that permeates all three of the following novels. (Check out the Pynchon in Public Podcast’s Crying of Lot 49 close-read for a seriously illuminating discussion of both the scientific concept of Entropy, and all its equivalent definition in Communications Theory.) Friedman and Puetz connect scientific phenomena to the topics of paranoia and anti-paranoia, superstition and empiricism, tying them together as integral parts of a large system, inseparable by any device as yet devised by humans.

Josephine Hendin asks that $50,000 question, “What Is Thomas Pynchon Trying to Tell Us?” with her essay. Of all the essays so far, Hendin’s is the most metaphorically and philosophically dense. It’s a hard read, but one of the most important of the book. Rather than just laying out key moments and pointing them to historical facts, she weaves the story into pure allegory and symbolic analysis: “Pynchon is the devil who went beyond the grave to anatomize the remains of the modern soul. Like Death himself he is the ultimate collector, putting together the emotional, cultural, and historical life of his generation with the brilliance and depth that outstrips in scope what Thomas Mann did for the prewar world in The Magic Mountain, that equals James Joyce’s compendium of his time in Ulysses. He plays Beethoven to Rilke’s Schubert, developing from Rilke’s encapsulated emotional statements operative definitions about the nature of science, though, and civilization…Pynchon is the one man who realized that the moralist of our time would have to be the devil.”

Richard Porier’s “The Importance of Thomas Pynchon” argues, in part, against the idea of megaton novels like GR and Ulysses as accessible to common readers, who might be interested in reading them if only they were put off by those stuffy academics. He picks apart Anthony Burgess’s Re Joyce as an example of this claim: “Burgess makes an obvious, glaring, but nonetheless persistent error: he confuses Joyce’s material (much of which is indeed quite ordinary and common) with what Joyce does to it (which is totally uncommon, unordinary, and elitist). Another way of answering Burgess, or anyone who says that a writer like Joyce or Pynchon is just a “good read,” is to say that nobody in Joyce, and very few in Pynchon, could read the novels that have been written about them.” Later, he says, “As much in Shakespeare as in anything written now there is often some sensed resentment about the way literature is itself exploiting life for literary purposes, and Pynchon offers perhaps the most exhaustive and brilliant repudiation of its exploitation in our language.” How does Pynchon do this? Read the essay, friend!

George Levine’s “Risking the Moment” is a deep dive into storylines and characters across multiple Pynchon books with an emphasis on “offer[ing] us a world we think we recognize” but twisted just slightly. “Invariably,” he says, “as the surreal takes on the immediacy of experience, they make us feel the inadequacy of conventional modes of making sense – of analysis, causal explanation, logic.” He makes sure that we understand that, for all his virtuosic structural fireworks, Pynchon still deals in small events, countering Porier above by emphasizing Pynchon’s humanity in the private moments: “Pynchon can be so intellectualized that we ignore how deeply, viscerally painful, indeed nauseating, he can be; we ignore, too, what I regard as his most astonishing and overwhelming power, to imagine love out of the wastes of a world full of people helpless to love. These qualities live in the moments, not the patterns. For his characters and, I think, for us, the challenge is to penetrate the moments as they come and then find a way to live with them.”

Catharine Stimpson’s “Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon’s Early Fiction” must have made a big impression on me, as it has the most post-it notes stuck in the margins! It’s once again symbolically and structurally dense criticism, much of it concerning the male/female roles in his books: “Yet the pre-apocalyptic fiction of Thomas Pynchon, before the splendid Gravity’s Rainbow, grants a privileged place to women. They are actors and symbols. Their characterization – at once generous and warped, shrewd and regressive – provokes a mixture of contempt for contemporary sexuality and reverence for an atavistic mode.” She analyzes the mysterious V. in all her manifestations as depictions of the feminine, and the ways that male and female characters use sadism and violence, and how these roles change as the characters take on characteristics of reversed genders. She doesn’t let Pynchon off the hook, nothing that “Pynchon is no feminist,” and later, she notes “male characters do more than occupy the bulk of narrative space. Pervasively, they provide point of view, even if points of view within the novel undercut and buffalo each other. So Stencil sees Mondaugen seeing Foppl seeing a black woman,” etc.

There’s plenty of GR analysis in the world, but I’m always happy to see another essay on Pynchon’s first novel. Thus, Melvyn New’s “Profane and Stenciled Texts: In Search of Pynchon’s V.” is a personal favorite. New doesn’t break it down in parts, but describes the impossibility of doing so: “…however much we analyze literature, and however much we analyze ourselves in the act of analyzing literature, we do return at last to Montaigne’s fundamental dilemma: the whole consists of constituent parts, and the parts are organized only by the whole.” One of my favorite images in V. is Sidney Stencil’s view of history as a cascade of fabric, full of folds and gathers that we either live inside or on top of. At some points in history, no amount of lateral viewing will show us the next vista. Other times, history is on view to us panoramically. The book’s variety of historical time periods, each exploring its own retreats from relative calm into war or conflict, still resonate with me, and as New points out, readers (and authors) can’t resist the urge to take these vistas and offer explanations: “This is precisely the paradox Pynchon explores in V.: the human inability to listen to the silence, whether as author or reader; the human need, in the generic terms I have set out, to displace the novel with elements of romance, to seek closure not merely of literature but of the existence imitated by literature.” This hits closest to the center of why I’ve been reading Pynchon nearly every weekend for the last 2.5 years – a persistent hope that a book full of thick, substantive historical fiction, tinged with absurdity, will somehow be the skeleton key that unlocks the thick, perverse, absurdity-based existence we live in now, which will, at long last, spring open and reveal its guts to us.

Maureen Quilligan tackles “Thomas Pynchon and the Language of Allegory.” She quotes Derrida’s Of Grammatology, so you know this is going to be rough sledding. It is fascinating, though, especially her treatment of The Kirghiz Light, noting that “Pynchon chose a people who went through the process of becoming literate at the time of World War II, a process lost in the mists of history for most of western civilization.” She hits the language angle at a deeper impact point than plot or allegorical analysis, poking around in the politics of the “high magic to low puns” that characterize this era of Pynchon’s work. “The sheer silliness of this kind of punning wins for Pynchon’s language a few laughs which dissolve the kind of seriousness bureaucratized by formal good taste.” This is a very long piece, and it does excellent work dealing with the allegorical layer, an integral layers of any and every Pynchon book.

Another layer is Pynchon’s roots in American Puritanism (his descendants were Puritans, and his ancestry goes back to the Mayflower) as documented in Marcus Smith and Khachig Tololyan’s “The New Jeremiad: Gravity’s Rainbow.” The Jeremiad, a literary form defined as “a mournful complaint, an expression of sorrow, a lamentation denouncing evil,” isn’t much referred to in popular use anymore, but Smith and Tololyan make the case for GR as this specific, American-originated Puritan literary form, its excesses and page-by-page atrocities rooted in the tradition of the works of Pynchon’s Protestant ancestors, amplified into newer and deeper depths of despair. “Pynchon goes to great lengths to avoid the embarrassment of preaching and prophecy, which perhaps the Puritan practitioners of the jeremiad had less need to fear, in a less ironic society. Indeed, he has been so successful in masking the rhetoric of hope that most criticism has filed to see the maddeningly complex structure of GR as a working out of the promises and betrayals of nodal points as they occur within a preapocalyptical horological history. No other modern author, to our knowledge, has created a work so thoroughly infused with this sense of recurring but fragile possibility, made more poignant by the fact that it is all enclosed in a narrative shaped by the darker vision of the jeremiad.” (Note to self: gotta check me out some jeremiads….)

The next essay is almost worth the whole book’s admission. David Seed’s “Order in Thomas Pynchon’s Entropy” is one of those essays you dream of, one that tackles a tiny corner of the terra firma and goes down deep. On first reading, the short story “Entropy” (from Slow Learner) is one of Pynchon’s earliest and goofiest. After I finished it, I recognized the zaniness that pervaded Lot 49, but didn’t realize until I got my hands on V. and others that this was one of the central pillars of all of the pre-1990 work. In his 1984 intro to the Slow Learner collection, Pynchon decries the story as too overtly symbolic, as well as being too flowerly with the language (he notes the overuse of the word “tendrils”), berating himself for still not *quite* knowing what Entropy as a concept really is. It’s a story with a lot going on – a rent-breaking party, a sealed room in which temperature stays the same, an attempt to save a dying bird, a group of people pantomiming a string quartet – and Seed breaks down each image and metaphor, almost line by line, in hopes of getting to the center of the obsessions on display in this story. Regardless of your enjoyment of the story, “Entropy” is made up of a series of concepts that have haunted the author for a long time, and if, like me, you originally read it and then simply went “huh” before moving on, this essay will give you the incentive to give it another try.

Despite the problems I have with The Crying of Lot 49, I still thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading it, and despite its counterculture status, a lot of the criticism I’ve read seems to come from the perspective of predicting the ‘60s and paranoia. Tony Tanner’s “The Crying of Lot 49” doesn’t have any one point of view or go into a specific aspect of the book. It plays with naming, with locations, with sacred/profane, and so forth. It’s an enjoyable read, but is more like an extended book review than a piece of writing intending to poke or prod a specific aspect.

Craig Hansen Werner’s “Recognizing Reality, Realizing Responsibility” compares GR to Ulysses with close readings of the few times Joyce is mentioned in GR to extrapolate Pynchon’s opinions of his most obvious literary predecessor. He also attempts to find out whether Pynchon’s complex worldview is descriptive or prescriptive, i.e. what are we to do with all this atrocity in our lives? He works with an aspect of the book I find most interesting and most inscrutable, namely Pynchon’s occasional slips into second person narration, implicating the reader in the actions. “Frequently, Pynchon attempts to make us participate in his vision through the use of traditional devices such as minutely detailed realistic settings or slapstick parody sequences written in third person. Having drawn us into his fictional world, Pynchon abruptly shifts to a direct form of address, reminding us that his world is also ours, demanding that we surrender our own solipsism and interact with the book. What Pynchon wants us to share, what he employs the second person to communicate, is his vision of the world of the preterite, a world in agony, a world in desperate need of love.”

Finally, Charles Berger sends us off with “Merrill and Pynchon: Our Apocalyptic Scribes,” dealing briefly but compellingly about the roles of technology, the Bomb, and the world’s reaction to the possibility of total atomic destruction in GR and Merrill’s The Changing Light At Sandover, specifically the second book, Mirabell. It was a nice reminder that there are other parabolas out there than Pynchon’s rocket covering this terrain. Fortunately, my wife has a copy of Merrill’s magnum opus. Once I’m done with Mason & Dixon, I’ll probably give it a try.

There is enough literature on Pynchon to flatten a ranch-style house (if you dropped it from a high enough altitude), some of it necessary, a lot of repetitive, some a bit out of date. Bloom’s anthology manages to still feel pretty fresh, and as I said before, the appeal of hearing from a bunch of essayists who didn’t know what was coming next was an interesting twist. Anyone studying his “German period” now knows that a second act awaits. But it’s with the spirit of presumed finality that these writers engage, an author whose body of work was, as far as we can tell, done and in the ground. If you’re on the Pynchon train for the long-haul, this is well worth your time.