Pynchon and the postmodern

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

On Sun, 15 Oct 1995, Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt wrote:

> 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').
> exists on a superficial and (contextually) narrowly defined level. 
stuff deleted

> 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.

What you say in the last paragraph about Pynchon has equaled 
postmodernism to many, whereas what you say about postmodernism
equals actually epochalism, which in its "postmodenist" disguise
only hides the quite "modern" idea of favorable progress from stage
to stage.

Admittedly, there are many "postmodernists" who are crypto-modernists
(e.g. Baudrillard, Lyotard) -- they just want to replace modern grand
narratives with newer and cuter grand narratives, Hegelianism with
anti-Hegelianism, canonism with marginalism, continuity with
ruptures, totalities with fragmentations, elitism with carnivalism.

To start learning to talk otherwise is, of course, very hard. What
Derrida says is quite engrossing:
"We must avoid the temptation of supposing that what occurs today somehow 
pre-existed in a latent form merely waiting to be unfolded or explicated. 
Such thinking also conceives history as an evolutionary development and 
excludes crucial notions of rupture and mutation in history. My own 
conviction is that we must maintain two contradictory affirmations at the 
same time. On the one hand, we affirm the existense of ruptures in 
history, and on the other we affirm that these ruptures produce gaps or 
faults in which the most hidden and forgotten archives can emerge and 
recur and work through history."
(In Kearney, Richard (ed.): Dialogues with Contemporary Continental
Thinkers: 113)

I'll probably try to check out in the future if what JD says makes any 
sense re TP. What do you think? - Anyway, when it comes to Bakhtinian 
carnivalism's and Joycean modernism's self-conceptions, and Pynchon's 
relation to them, I tried to put in my two cents, or rather, nine 
Finnish pence, in an  article called "'The  Feathery Rilke Mustaches and 
Porky Pig Tattoo on  Stomach': High and Low  Pressures in _GR_, which was,
as some of you know, kindly included in the Pynchon web page.

(Sadly, the essay is next to unreadable for the present; the WWW version 
is (in many ways) just a torso of my original paper, due to circumstances 
beyond my control. I've got promises since May that it will be replaced
with the proper version as soon as possible, but, after five months, 
nothing has happened so far. (I can imagine just how very hard it is to
make such changes to WWW pages, even though I don't know much about
Internet technology.) But anyway: my advice to those who haven't read my
essay from the page yet but might get an odd urge to read it: ignore it 
-- for the time being. Alternatively, I can snail-mail the much more 
satisfying version to anyone interested. Just tell me.)



Just about to leave for Vancouver via Seattle, and from there to 
Berlin and Poznan in Poland, and coming back to Finland in two weeks
time, and back in touch at the turn of the month, 

Heikki