Pynchon at the 1992 MLA

[MILLARD at zodiac.rutgers.edu]

Greetings, Pynchonistas and Pynchonologists:
 
At the request of the PYNCHON-LIST organizers, I'd like to blow a
few muted-post-horn notes about the panel "The Pynchon Effect:
Postmodern Intertextualities" at the December 1992 Modern
Language Association conference in New York.  This special
session (organized by Stephen Bernstein of the University of
Michigan at Flint) was based on the premise that while the
sources and influences behind Pynchon's work have been well
documented, the effect of the Pynchon texts on other writers is a
relatively unexplored area, and that now is an appropriate time
for such explorations.
     Nearly twenty years after the publication of _Gravity's
Rainbow_, Pynchon has become as much a transmitter of cultural
messages as a receiver and synthesizer of them.  As the writings
of Rilke or Henry Adams, the timbral and attitudinal innovations
of Monk and Mulligan, the theological disputes of the
Massachusetts Puritans, and the cryptic machinations of IG Farben
have all informed Pynchon, he in turn recognizably informs some
of the most intriguing practitioners of recent and current
fiction.  Discussing new mutations of familiar Pynchonian
themes -- paranoia, conspiracies, structural uncertainty, textual
reconstruction, cybernetics as governing metaphor, the
disappearances of individuality and of the authorial presence --
the panelists generated a lively audience response.  We also
defied my own private prediction that the intersection of the
sets "Persons Interested in Pynchon" and "Persons Awake, Sober,
and Sentient at 8:30 am on the Final Day of the MLA" would be
perilously close to empty.
     The first paper, Dennis Barone's "`No Confusions, Just
Difficulties': Problems of the Baudrillardian Postmodern in _The
Crying of Lot 49_ and Paul Auster's _The Country of Last Things_"
depicts Oedipa's California and the New York of Auster's novel as
landscapes of simulacra, closed systems of signification in which
the endless circulations of cross-reference never close in on
anything of real value.  In Baudrillard's formulation, this state
of hyperreality tends to induce a response more ecstatic than
historically active or critically adversarial; to read through
Baudrillard's pessimistic prism, his Disneyland and _Lot 49_'s
San Narciso are of a piece and are representative of a quite
frightening America.  Barone finds much in these novels that
resonates with Baudrillard's descriptions of centerless
postmodernity, but by focusing on the question of communication
he posits a deeper and more optimistic "adversarial
postmodernism" in Pynchon and Auster.  After hearing from John
Nefastis that "communication is the key" to overcoming entropy,
Oedipa eventually puts this idea (commonplace yet miraculous)
into practice, making human connections with preterite figures
such as the drunken sailor with the DTs in San Francisco.  Anna
Blume of _The Country of Last Things_ likewise learns to
interpret entropic signs and form human communities sufficient
for survival in a fragmented and decaying environment.  Barone
closes on a note of guarded optimism, neither confident in the
possibility of the informative contact between worlds that Jesus
Arrabal terms "an anarchist miracle" nor willing to join
Baudrillard in cynical dismissiveness toward postmodernity; he
quotes Anna to the effect that "[t]here is no hope in this... but
neither is there despair."
     Catherine Nickerson, in "The Idiom of Detection in Thomas
Pynchon and Ishmael Reed," discusses _Lot 49_ and Reed's _Mumbo
Jumbo_ in terms of Tzvetan Todorov's "double plot" theory of
detective-fiction structure (see "The Typology of Detective
Fiction" in _The Poetics of Prose_).  In this schema, a detective
plot must comprise both the story of the crime and the story of
its detection.  Both stories are reflexively concerned with
textuality: the perpetrator of the crime works to obscure,
conceal, or destroy the physical signifiers of his act, while the
investigator works at reassembling the fragmented evidentiary
text.  The resulting struggle between closure and disclosure not
only drives the plot of a detective narrative but implies a
larger argument about the constructed, motivated nature of
historical knowledge.  Parodies of the genre's conventions are
abundant in both _Lot 49_ and _Mumbo Jumbo_, yet Nickerson
follows Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in reading the use of detective
idioms in Reed's novel as not merely playful pyrotechnics but a
purposeful metafictional strategy.  She grounds Pynchon and
Reed's work not only in the detective tradition per se but in a
tradition of writings (including those of Faulkner, Nabokov, and
Garcia Marquez) that use detective fiction "to explore questions
of narrative and epistemological uncertainty.... to articulate
(that is, to show the joints of) the web of paranoia and the
workings of metafiction's self-reflexive interest in the status
and integrity of texts." 
     My own paper, "`You Gotta Jack, I Gotta Tussle':
Microcommunities of Discourse in Thomas Pynchon and William
Gibson," traces the connections between certain posthumanist,
post-individualist speculations in Pynchon's works and in those
of the leading author of the cyberpunk movement.  (I wrote this
unaware that cyberpunk culture would become the subject of a
_Time_ magazine cover story within six weeks of the conference,
thus receiving its official embalming.)  Gibson wears his
Pynchonian influence on his sleeve, not only by sharing
cybernetic themes and leaving flagrant onomastic clues, but by
adopting a stylistic/informatic device found throughout Pynchon's
works: the withholding of explanatory context when new
information appears.  This technique -- which James Guetti has
described as "the end of the Hammett line," or the ultimate
logical extension of flat, discontinuous hardboiled prose, when
it occurs in _V._ -- leaves the reader grasping just beyond his
or her horizon of recognition, unable to organize the vast array
of unfamiliar information.  The process the reader must undergo
parallels the process to which Pynchon's quasi-detectives such as
Oedipa or Slothrop, or similar characters in Gibson such as
_Neuromancer_'s Case, are subjected: the more one discovers about
the sphere in which one operates, the less one can rely on
individual consciousness, intention, and interpretive
rationality.  The reader is summoned into a post-humanist
discourse community, just as the characters are interpellated
into a dystopian corporate order and a post-humanist ideology. 
In Pynchon's worlds, this process occurs against the memorably
resistant forces of a problematically doomed humanism; in
Gibson's cyberspace, figures such as Case offer alarmingly little
resistance to their own eclipse.  A critical question bearing on
the aesthetic and political implications of Gibson's work is
whether he can credibly describe potentially oppositional
elements, akin to Pynchon's counterforce, and my paper ends with
the hope that a fuller historical sensibility will be the next
Pynchonian quality emulated in Gibson's future work.
     Glen Scott Allen, in "Ratner's Rainbow and Pynchon II:
Spectrum and Specter in the Work of Don DeLillo" (and an expanded
version, "Spectral Authorship: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo,
and the Postmodern Legacy," which he's courteously given me the
chance to examine) posits that Pynchon and DeLillo have radically
redefined the function of authorship for an age in which paranoia
and conspiracy theories have become, to some degree, adaptive
rather than pathological responses.  Linkages between _Gravity's
Rainbow_ and _Ratner's Star_ begin with an examination of the
trope of ownership encoded in the books' titles, a rhetorical
gesture that cannot be taken as literal (can rainbows or stars be
possessed? does Van Allen "own" "his" radiation belts, or Tycho
Brahe "his" crater?).  To generate a plot, the traditional
proprietary function of any author, is also to incur personal
responsibility for its consequences -- and all plots, literary as
well as political, have sinister implications.  (As Win Everett,
"author" of the plot to attack Kennedy without killing him in
DeLillo's _Libra_, realizes, "the idea of death is woven into the
nature of every plot.")  The intersecting narratives,
undecidabilities, vanishing agents (including authors as well as
conspiratorial agencies), and unnavigable territories found in
Pynchon and DeLillo make it increasingly difficult for a reader
to sustain a belief in the viability of that sense of plotting. 
In these fictive worlds -- which, in DeLillo's works, are
characterized more by "tropic spectrality" than by the
referentiality of denotative language, and are more aptly
described as cultural sites, quanta, or fields than as
intertextual networks comprising discrete texts, as is more
common in Pynchon -- it is a less useful strategy to posit an
authorial presence as an identifiable source of textual plots
than to accept the necessity of merging into the field of
signification.  The paranoid, the "literal reader" who tries to
trace ambiguous signifiers to a central source as if they were
unambiguous signals, is unable to manage the divergent energies
of tropic postmodern language in either Pynchon or DeLillo. 
Allen argues, however, that Pynchon's solution to the problem of
the dispersal of agency, the erasure of individual characters
such as Jamf or Slothrop, and even of the author himself (within
his texts and as a public figure) -- while an effective
alternative to the apocalypse that relentless plotting and
synthesizing seems to make necessary -- is not the only
imaginable solution.  DeLillo's alternative is to accept the
erasure of a comforting myth, the author as source of cultural
authority and responsibility, and to place characters and readers
in positions where they must participate in the construction of
their own status as "a postmodern subject... a coherent site of
subjectivity, the demystified and moth-eaten individual, 
complete with all of his or her consequent vulnerabilities."
     The conversation that followed these readings was as
boisterously multivocal as the texts we discussed.  In addressing
topics such as the elements in Baudrillard's thought that resist
a description as fatalist (as pointed out by one of Baudrillard's
American translators), or the tensions between an apparently
resurgent sense of communitarian humanism and state-sanctioned
sadomasochism in _Vineland_, the scholars present directed much
attention to the question of the forms of subjectivity still
available in a postmodern, post-humanist culture.  Pynchon's
abiding affinity for the human and the damned continues to appeal
to readers and critics who work with the problems of such a
culture.  I hope some of the ideas raised at this panel will
attract continuing debate within the community linked by the
PYNCHON-LIST.
 
Bill Millard
Rutgers University
millard at zodiac.rutgers.edu