Thoroughly postmodern Pynchon

[jbor]

Some excerpts from

'TRESPASSING LIMITS: PYNCHON'S IRONY AND THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE'

by FRANCISCO COLLADO-RODRIGUEZA

     Thomas Pynchon was still a young man when the beat generation tried to
shatter some of the traditional pillars on which American society stood at
the beginning of the postmodernist period. A metaphorical drifter always
on the road, his fictive protagonists from V. to his latest work Mason &
Dixon have always kept on moving, as apparent proof of their creator's
disbelief in the Aristotelian rigidity of substance and in its powerful
consequence, the Law of the Excluded Middle. For some a prophet of the New
Age, his fiction thoroughly represents a sustained critical subversion of
categorical binary thinking and, more specifically, of the traditional
interpretation Western culture has given to the rigid Aristotelian Law.
However, his novels are also a warning against human narrativizing excesses,
and, as I shall also argue below, they offer ironic comments on an idealized
mythic reconciliation of opposites.

snip

     Nowadays many cultural critics and philosophers of science coincide in
pointing out that the twentieth century has brought about a new interpretive
paradigm. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics (and more specifically the
Copenhagen interpretation and Werner Heisenberg's Principle of
Indeterminacy) represented the first attempts of the century to warn humans
that reality could no longer be explained by the mere recourse to "common
sense," Newtonian physics, and sensorial data. Einstein's ideas were soon
used by a number of modernist writers, from T.S. Eliot to William Faulkner,
who saw in relativity theory an important scientific correlate of their own
epistemological relativism. However, quantum mechanics was not so easy to
assimilate by the artificers of the new modernist culture. In effect,
readers would have to wait till the post-war period to find sustained
literary attempts that try to reproduce the important implications brought
about by the study of sub-atomic particles. In a sense, it can be argued
that quantum mechanics entails such a tremendous shift from classical Greek
and Newtonian notions that many people are not yet ready to accept it. The
study of sub-atomic particles and the behavior of the electron thoroughly
undermined the common beliefs in substance and matter: the "wave function"
came to replace the human belief in the existence of compact bodies, and
Niels Bohr had to formulate his famous Principle of Complementarity to avoid
scientific doubts after the formulation of Heisenberg's principle.
     
snip

      It seems clear that people are not ready to get rid of traditional
common-sensical views about the character of a stable reality, but Pynchon's
readers know better: randomness, indeterminacy, fractal cartography,
unstable selves, and early cultural announcements of the coming of chaos
into common-sensical Aristotelian reality are all constantly repeated motifs
in his fiction. In the scientific realm, the basic ideas of chaos theory
were already present in the work of Henri Poincare, a nineteenth-century
French mathematician, but it is only in recent years, as Davies and Gribbin
point out, "especially with the advent of fast electronic computers with
which to carry out the appropriate calculations, that the full significance
of chaos theory has been appreciated." And, we could add, Pynchon was
probably the earliest United States novelist to systematically incorporate
and metaphorize in his work the implications of both quantum mechanics and
chaos theory, and in a moment in which the latter was not yet the
"scientific religion" it has become nowadays.

snip

     It is within similar scientific and metaphorical coordinates that
Pynchon's posterior fiction systematically erases our Western confidence in
clear, categorical limits: his first novel, V. (1963), again presents two
main characters that, we may believe at the beginning of the book, seem to
correspond to the contrasting principles of structured classical order
(Stencil) and the rule of chaos (Profane). However, the story, whose main
aim is the quest for the lady V., finally dissolves in a never-ending chain
of signifiers that always escapes an ultimate categorical meaning.

     The title of Pynchon's first novel already suggests the pictorial image
of a bifurcation point, a concept very popular among believers in chaos
theory and that incorporates in itself the notion of a common link from 
which two elements gradually separate. But the author goes further in his
scientific implications and, in the page that precedes the beginning of the
story, draws a symbolic fractalic "v," thus anticipating the fact that below
his apparent narrative chaos lies hidden a systematic pattern as symbolic
announcement of our human insistence on drawing patterns to interpret
reality.

     V. also marks the beginning of a series of Pynchonian textual devices
that will subsequently appear in his later narratives and that will
effectually bring about the metaphorization of the unstable condition of
both the postmodernist self and the world.

snip

     Since, as poststructuralist criticism has demonstrated, thinking in
terms of binary oppositions frequently implies the subordination of the
second element to the first (of Chaos to Order), to reverse the order of the
pairing would simply reduplicate the initial system. Subtle and ironic,
Pynchon chooses to continuously undermine such oppositions by stressing the
ambiguity of our surrounding universe, neither mythic integration nor
categorical either/or: both options only respond to our necessity to
narrativize, to map a reality whose meaning always escapes us despite the
fact that language, our tool to communicate, cannot easily escape from the
all-pervasive Law of the Excluded Middle.

complete essay at

http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/collado24.htm

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