Rilke, etc. #1, OR, A Strong Leftist Reading of the Maestro

[Derek Barker]

If you don't want to read a long e-mail on Pynchon, click this to your
trash icon right now.  Otherwise...

My problem with Pynchon-as-Rilke or Frenesi-as-art-versus-machine-conflict
readings is not so much their invalidity but rather that they leave me begging
the question: what's the point?  I've only been checking the listserv for a
couple
weeks now, but my early feeling is one of disappointment with the relative
lack
of attention to what I see as Pynchon's fundamentally *political* project.

I want to a) clarify that I don't see Pynchon's criticisms of 60's leftism
as a
neo-conservative position but rather a political project of truly realizing
the untapped potential of a tradition of American radicalism, and b) give
you all a fair shot at tearing apart my reading, as i've been taking the
admittedly snide low-blow approach of late.

BTW, if there is a safe haven for snooty commentary anywhere in this
world, I should think it should be on the Pynchon listserv, but I digress.

So here's the first chapter of my undergrad thesis, "Political Withdrawals:
Pynchon & Political Theory," for anyone interested.  Sorry for the waste
of bandwidth or whatever you call it,

D.B.

Introduction

Thomas Pynchon's story, "Entropy," revolves around Callisto's struggle to
transfer his own heat energy into his dying pet bird.  Meanwhile, he
contemplates entropy, as it relates to thermodynamics and communications
theory, and how society might be following a similar entropic process, a
progression toward sameness, uniformity, and stagnation.  Callisto,
"envisioned a heat-death for his culture in which ideas, like heat-energy,
would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would ultimately
have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would,
accordingly, cease."   The bird dies; motion and communication in the
closed system of Callisto's room have come to a standstill.

Pynchon's images here, the juxtaposition of the dying bird with an equally
sick and  stagnating society, provide a framing for my discussion of
Pynchon's political vision.  On the one hand, Pynchon's works are
dystopian, apocalyptic, and downright sad.  If the laws of thermodynamics
hold true, systems are doomed to progress toward uniformity, until finally
all motion ceases, and it would seem our own political system, according to
Pynchon, is equally doomed.  Yet Pynchon's novels depict a way out of this
seemingly endemic condition of entropy.  His visions are equally filled
with pockets of difference, alternative networks, Trysteros, providing
counter-entropic forces from the margins of a system in crisis.  These are
the locations, those that have withdrawn from the center of society and
politics, which hold the potential to rewrite the ending to "Entropy," to
breathe new life and communicate energy into the dying America.

Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow are novels, works of
literature.  But to the themes, stories, and characters created by Pynchon,
there is what I would call a "politics of withdrawal," a vision of politics
taken out of the mainstream and given alternative, underground, and
subversive forms.  This is a version of politics largely ignored by
political theorists in the academy, even those who have shown an interest
in the political side of Pynchon's work.  The  political spaces explored by
Pynchon occupy an area somewhere between the private realm and the
traditional public sphere.  This "in between" location of Pynchon's
withdrawals may account for why political theorists have had such
difficulty recuperating his work, but for me, it is precisely that
possibility for politics to take place in alternative spaces which makes
Pynchon's political withdrawals all the more appealing.  Pynchon has
received ample attention from literary critics, but political theorists
have yet to make sense of Pynchon in the context of contemporary politics
and political theory.  

In the essay that follows, I will attempt to rescue the political side of
Pynchon's work within the context of contemporary political theory, and to
suggest Pynchon's political withdrawals as a potential model for
alternative political spaces.  How are Pynchon's undergrounds a response to
the political crisis of apathy and voicelessness posited by Hannah Arendt?
Where do they fit in with feminism and postmodernism's blurring of public
and private, personal and political?  How does Pynchon subvert traditional
notions of sexuality in his work?  How might counter-entropic withdrawal's
challenge or respond to "regimes of truth" and "microphysics of power," to
invoke Foucault?   These are the types of questions I will ask in my
attempt to identify intersections between Pynchon's politics of withdrawal
and current political discourse.

If Pynchon is reading America correctly, we are tending toward cultural and
political entropy, a homogenous, motionless state where meaning ceases and
communication becomes impossible.  These are indeed dark times, but
Pynchon's work also presents us with an opportunity, like Callisto and his
dying bird, to reverse the trend, to breathe new life into the Republic.
Pynchon allows us to imagine alternative political spaces which explode the
binaries of personal and political, public and private.  The critiques
offered by Arendt, feminism, postmodernism, and Foucault are all valid ways
of reading the crisis in American politics, but do they yield practical
solutions?  Pynchon, I will argue, integrates these critiques and offers a
politics of withdrawal as a practical answer to the closure of the
political sphere, the political marginalization, and the cultural
stagnation that currently define the American political system. Pynchon's
withdrawals may require some imagination and theorizing, but I hope that
the reader will take this time to revisit Pynchon from a fresh perspective,
to reconsider politics as usual, and to imagine alternative ways of doing
politics in pockets of freedom that may even be practicable here and now.