Dugdale, Allusive Parables of Power

[Dave Monroe]

... selected selections from John Dugdale, Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables 
of Power (London: Macmillan, 1990) ...

To produce a work of fiction in which everything was obvious, a text without 
a subtext, would be merely to mimic this hollow public world.  As some of 
his titles suggest, Pynchon chooses instead to construct his fictions so 
that they have a 'secret integration', another meaning 'under the rose'.  
[...] a 'second story' [...].  The figure should not of copuyrse be taken to 
indicate that there is only one extra level of meaning.  Other images 
intimate instead something multiple, of several planes, criss-crossed 
threads, secret passageways and tunnels [...]. (2-3)

Other factors are involved in the adoption of a style of ritual reluctance 
and the construction of texts with second stories.  One, clearly, is the 
desire to produce a sophisticated literature [...] (3)

[...] tehre is an evident sense from the outset in Pynchon that art about 
art is decadent [...] (3)

Another explanation is that the texts contain political messages which he is 
unwilling to communicate directly. (3)

The Pynchon of GR is a political dissident writing his novel while his 
copuntry is at war.  But the earlier works, produced in the interval bewteen 
korea and full-scale American involvement in Vietnam, already employ codes 
and subterfuges appropriate to such a situation, to an author of dangerous 
views faced with censorship and repression.  They are equivocal as to 
whether the repression is real ('The Duke does not, perhaps may not, 
enlighten us ...'), but are in any case written as if Pynchon were compelled 
to repress certain political senses, to confine them to the subtext. (4-5)

All the stories and novels [...] have both an artistic subtext, which is the 
result of allusions to other works, and a political subtext, which is the 
result of coded references to events, personalities, ideas, parallels or 
dangers which they are reluctant to mnetion of describe openly.  [....]  The 
consequence in each case is a multi-levelled structure, which is frequently 
belied by a surface which may seem lacking in complexity.  (5)

There is the use of what Freud calls 'nodal points' or 'switch-words' [...]. 
  The overdetermination which characterises the dream in Freud is apparent 
at every level: the word or name with several senses, the character with 
various real or fictional models, the passage with many   thematic lines, 
the scene with many sources or meanings. (7)


... I believe many of you are familiar with the exceptional, exceptionally 
productive, exceptionally suggestive, exceptionally useful work of Charles 
Hollander in tracking the pathways to/from which Pynchon's "nodal points," 
"switch-words" lead, but, if you aren't, it's well worth following up on his 
following up on Dugdale.  My only quibble, perhaps, with Hollander, is his 
tendency to settle at particular (though, certainly, pertinent) 
determinations of Pynchon's--or, at any rate, of Pynchon's 
texts'--overdeterminations, but that, I suppose, is my latent deconstructive 
predilection for that dissemination, that play of menaing, manifesting 
itself, so ...
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