Heidegger-Pynchon connection

[Jeff Severs]

Don't know if I'm doing this right, but here goes...

Does anyone know if any significant work has been done on the influence of
Martin Heidegger on Pynchon? I've been fascinated with this topic of late,
but have only come across a few bits in Judith Chambers' _Thomas Pynchon_.
There's certainly a wealth of recent work connecting Pynchon with theorists
heavily influenced by Heidegger (Lacan and Derrida in Berressem's [sic]
_Pynchon's Poetics_; Derrida in McHoul and Wills' _Writing Pynchon_), but
Pynchon critics don't seem to acknowledge this debt. Though I'm not ready
to present a complete list of Pynchon's influences, it would seem that
Pynchon, prior to the publication of GR, was more likely to have read
_Being and Time_ than Derrida's late 60's work (which is not to say that an
author has to have read a philosophical work for it to be applicable to her
writing; but it seems silly to me for critics to persist with a monolithic
"dead author" fixation and express naive amazement that Pynchon's work is
so susceptible to interpretation by post-structuralist theory.... There,
now I'll climb down off my soapbox.)

Specifically: Pynchon seems to have lifted the "They" straight from Being
and Time, though pushed this structure to its paranoid limits. In
Heidegger, each individual (Da-Sein) is part of the They as a condition of
being "thrown" into language. The They is a language club which we all
participate in through the forms of idle talk, curiosity, gossip --
anything other than poetry, essentially. No one in GR is innocent, no one
can distance themselves from the They -- but, with Heidegger in mind, we
can see all the evil doings in GR as connected to language, the biggest
conspiracy there is.

Put simply, the They tell me to forget my individuality and accept Their
possibilities as my own; the worst of this, sez Heidegger, is that I start
believing that I'm going to live forever, rather than facing up to my own
death. I cannot experience my own death, but I can develop what Heidegger
calls authentic Being-Towards-Death. This bears some relevance to a debate
on who dies in GR that I got a look at via the pynchon-list archives (new
subscriber, I am). For Heidegger, the so-called deaths that the They report
-- no matter how many there seem to be, in the newspapers, at Hiroshima --
are never "real" deaths for me, because in no case do I say, "I died."
Perhaps that's why we're given no deaths to "important" characters in GR,
and why Slothrop can't really die. Death is anonymous, belongs to no one.

I've left out an important caveat, which is this: Pynchon bears the
Heideggerian influence in what I read as a very argumentative way -- what I
would call a paranoid reading of Heidegger. There are any number of
characters one can read as caricatures of Heidegger (Blicero, bald and
bespectacled German deconstructor of literature, comes to mind), and
Pynchon takes many jabs at German youths lying in grassy fields
masturbating to thoughts of their "Destiny." Also, the They are very much
to blame in GR, even if we're all in it. And all of what I've laid out here
comes out of Heidegger's first work, Being and Time, paying no attention to
later stuff like the Question Concerning Technology, also relevant to
Pynchon.

Sorry for verbosity. Just want to try to start a conversation with any
interested folks. Thanks to all who have read this far.

Jeff