Pynchon and the postmodern

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

hag (me) writes on Thursday 12:
> > >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.

On Fri 13, jeff severs writes: 
> > 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

On Sat 14, Peter Trachtenberg writes: 
>   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. 

Will Layman replies on Sunday 15:
> It kinda scares me to hear GRAVITY'S RAINBOW written about as a search for a
> "Grand Unifiying Theory" and therefore "modrenist" rather than "post-modern."
>  I fear this misses one of Pynchon's most important points.
> 
> It seems to me that one of the key thrusts of GR is that GUTs, the search for
> GUTs and the people who start to believe in these singular "system" solutions
> to everybody else's problems are scary and destructive.  Whether it's
> behavioral science, organic chemistry and plastics, rocketry, Beethoven,
> Rossini, corporate profits, alphabets or language systems, . . . whatever,
> the scariest act (and the one that humans can't seem to resist) is to apply
> some single analysis to the world -- a "final solution," if you will -- and
> insist that it encompass all.  All the characters who represent unified and
> imposed processes in GR are seeking to dominate, to exclude and to kill -- to
> define an "elect" (and thus a "preterite") based on their system's point of
> view.
> 
> The novel itself, though, won't comply.  It rejects a single strategy, single
> point of view or single mode of any kind (and rejects dualistic, binary or
> reactionary ones too) and embraces the very un-"modernist" idea that fixed
> standards are suspect.  By trying to call GR "Mindless Pleasures," TRP was,
> of course, asking us not to put the book up on a pedastal as some "modernist"
> monument.  And -- titled as intended or not -- he populates the books with
> "heroes" of the decidedly UNUNIFIED kind -- a man who, in order to find
> peace, disintegrates and ceases his search for the truth as a single
> explanation, for example.  When the GR narrator holds up "Hansel and Gretel,"
> "The Wizard of OZ," Porky Pig cartoons and Mickey Rooney as key literary
> references alongside Rilke and Emily Dickinson and so on, he's telling you
> the same thing -- don't trust those who would have you see the world one
> (their) way and impose stiff definitions of worth; they're only going to wind
> up shoving you inside a rocket (or worse -- shoving a rocket inside your
> movie theater).
> 
> Since I'm not sure I know what "post-modern" means, I won't argue that GR is
> PM.  But I really can't bear the thought that, TS Eliot-like, it aspires to a
> kind of classicism or that it is (or "wants") some Grand Unifying Theory.
>  Those bad boys are Blicero's territory.  I think Pynchon would prefer that
> you searched for your harmonica in the streams of the Zone and learned how to
> bend a few notes before you faded away.

Please excuse the delay in replying. (I tend to spend mosr weekends 
like a bad Pig Bodine imitation.)

1. 'Hard Science'. Postmodern and modern science differ in no
substantial way from one another. Both can be translated into 
technology, and thus  'work' on a mundane level. Pm science works 
actually better, and that is why it exists (simple principles of 
'natural selection' having favoured it) - even reasonably euphoric 
'New Age' thinkers like Fritjof Capra readily admit this. The 
difference between the two exists on an interpretative level only.
Positivist philisophers substituted Science for the dead God as 
ultimate guarantor of reality / certainty / etc., but had to rethink 
this strategy after Goedel, Heisenberg, et al. Simple 'performativity'
quickly replaced notions of certainty, objectivity, absolute 
predictability and control, and the same applies equally to Chaos 
Theory, or Superstring Theory, or whatever. (Lyotard's "Postmodern 
Condition" ultimately fails to recognize this.)

2. Pynchon's fiction uses techniques we have come to classify as 
'postmodern'. Yet he also atempts a literally huge (and 
all-inclusive) 'project' in, for instance, GR. (See Peter's excellent 
post above.) Will quite correctly identifies such undertakings as 
being in "Blicero's territory". It is precisely this tension, I 
think, which makes P such a powerful writer - he recognizes that there 
is "an office of the man's" in all our heads, his included. Such a 
vision ("vision schmision" notwithstanding) is necessarily totalizing 
to a certain degree, and P, once again, is quite aware of this, and 
tries hard to develop some kind of strategy to counter the potential 
for this to take on the characteristics of a 'final solution' (both 
in his own writing and in the activities of his various 'heroes').

3. The postmodern: does it exist? 
3.1. As a powerful postwar meme, it certainly does. 
3.2. As some kind of antithesis to modernism, only on the level of 
technique, and also as a useful moniker to read 'cultural signs' 
_against_. As some ultimate break with a past world view, it only 
exists on a superficial and (contextually) narrowly defined level. 
3.3. As a tool to classify Pynchon, it falls woefully short. On the 
one hand, Pynchon might see the postmodern as merely an extension 
(and a more efficient one at that) of the war between the 'inanimate' 
in us, and the 'animate' in us - with the postmodern quite clearly in 
the camp of the 'inanimate'. 
If I absolutely _had_ to choose, I would call Pynchon a modernist, 
in so far a he has no intentions to be seduced by, or seduce his readers 
via, some simplistic appeal to a less coercive and terroristic, new, 
better 'age'. He has recognized that the postmodern is like the modern 
is like the Victorian is like the entire Enlightenment Project is like 
Socratic philosophy - only more so. Pynchon is aware that "God is 
dead", yet he is also aware that it always was so, and that zombies 
continue to exist and operate.

hg
hag at iafrica.com