Pynchon and the postmodern

[Peter Trachtenberg]

On Fri, 13 Oct 1995, jeff severs wrote:

> Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt writes...
> >RE. Pynchon and postmodernity: I would have to agree with you, but 
> >then, I have (like most) my own definition of postmodernity - which 
> >would classify Pynchon as 'modern' rather than postmodern. I am 
> >sometimes tempted to go as far as saying "the postmodern does not 
> >exist", but then I hear the fast-forward squeel of "meme/meme/meme" 
> >in my ear, and think better of it.
> 
> Could you expand? I'm interested in hearing more about yours and others'
> classification schemes for Pynchon: we all know he's the exemplar of
> "postmodern fiction" according to the dominant strains of academic writing;
> what's the case to be made for Pynchon as "modern"? Modernist? His
> postmodern contortions of some modernist tropes -- I'm thinking of his
> number on Eliot (Waste Land as film, with the many death has undone as so
> many extras) and Faulkner (Major Marvy's castration takes me back to Light
> in August) -- are some of my favorite moments in GR. But I obviously don't
> have a scheme figured out. Please respond, and, if possible, avoid the
> polemic that the terms so readily welcome. Jeff
> 
> 
  Okay, I get why one would immediately classify Pynchon as postmodern in 
his cannibalization of both high and popular culture, his use of 
pastiche, his insistence on ultimate uncertainty, etc., etc. But implicit 
is most pomo writing, art and architecture is the idea that grand works 
are no longer possible, that such feats are somehow antiquated, 
irrelevant, retrograde or bombastic. And GR is nothing if not a grand 
work: its only challengers in this country in the last three decades are 
William Gaddis's four existing novels and perhaps Don DeLillo's 
collective oeuvre. It seems to me that GR--and all of Pynchon's books 
considered collectively--articulate a ccoherent theme and that although 
they adumbrate the unknowable, they also remind us that the unknowable 
reverberates in inanimate matter and human lives. In Pynchon, history and 
physics are complementary: one illustrates the operation of hidden forces 
in the human arena; the other deals with the operation of other forces in 
the arena of matter and energy. It's as though Pynchon were expanding the 
search for a Grand Unified Theory into the human realm, with history as 
its "fifth force." And while I know that post-Einsteinian physics is 
supposed to have inspired the whole postmodern condition, I also believe 
that the search for a GUT or GUTS is a modernist endeavor. 

Excuse me for being repetitive, but I'm functioning on four hours' sleep.