GRGR(10) - Plasticman

[rj]

Jonathan:
>  But, TP understands quite
> well the meta-rules of the game he is playing.  Literature cannot, of it's
> own creation, transcend itself, but it can instill in it's readers the
> inspiration to assume that it has. 

While I agree with what you write -- that Pynchon (or the Bible) can
only present "images of transcendence" -- I also think Pynchon is
aspiring to change the rules of the game, or else to redefine literary
fiction as something possessing slightly more political and
philosophical potency for society than baseball, for example. 

Although there are specific literary allusions (as well as parodies of
literary intertextuality: eg 'The Ghastly Fop') going on in P's fiction,
I think he is getting "outside the frame" by allowing his characters to
make pop cultural connections (i.e. Slothrop imagining himself as
Plasticman) as well. It is in this sense that Pynchon moves literary
fiction into alignment with the dominant cultural experience of the
post-Modernist world. Where jilted fiancees once reinvented themselves
as consumptive James' heroines, now it is Madonna (Ciccione) and the
Spicettes who have become the archetypes, and it is this cultural
transformation Pynchon records and ironises. 

Also, where the epiphanies and apotheoses of Modernist and realist
fiction were wrought within the narrative context of the novel, as
characterised experience, in Pynchon these *images* of transcendence
occur reflexively, and, as Cjhurtt6 asserts, the apparent transcendence
is one which is experienced by the reader in his or her apperception of
the text. This is what makes Pynchon's fiction postmodern.

Further, Pynchon is breaking with literary tradition (and avant-gardist
elitism) by according *King Kong* or Sundial a place of equal (if not
greater) prominence as Dante or Dostoevsky in his allusive schema. In
postulating a cartoon super-being about which the authorial or narrating
persona speaks directly and offhandedly to the current reader, we are
thus also characterised as being prone to the same postwar Western
cultural consumerist phantasmagoria -- which is being manipulated, in
part at least, by the political collusions of the hierarchies within the
various Estates -- as Slothrop. This intersection between history and
contemporary cultural and personal experience means that the figurative
connections and significances within the fiction are simply duplications
of those being made daily, beyond the narrative carapace, in the 'real'
world. Thus, what Pynchon is aspiring to is a transcendence of the
perceived limitations or lack of relevance of literary art to
post-nuclear society, a restoration of its popular culture/carnivalesque
appeal. His is a reinvigoration of fiction -- an eleventh-hour revival
from its Modernist (and postmodernist) pretentiousness and moribundity
-- as well as a revelation of the crassness and insidiousness of
commercialism and contemporary disposible culture.

best