Negative Liberties

[Dave Monroe]

>From Cyrus R.K. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrison,
Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2002), "Preface," pp. ix-xxii ...

   "In the current critical climate, the differences
in their personal genealogies and their approaches to
intellectual life prevent Morrison and Pynchon from
being compared to one another, despite the readily
apparent formal affinities between their bodies of
work.  Their novels are experimental and
self-consciously difficult pieces of prose that revel
in the resources of language and firmly situate
themselves within the horizon of postmodernist
aesthetics, a stance that becomes immediately apparent
as soon as one opens their respective first novels
(published seven years apart).  Sometimes choppy and
harsh, at other times lyrical and mellifluous, their
prose styles frequently combine the beautiful and the
appalling to create striking images that gnaw at the
reader's imagination.  In each case, however, this
aesthetic prowess is part of an outlook that is deeply
political: the novels of Pynchon and Morrison embody a
conviction that great art can be simultaneously
timeless and time bound, that it can break through to
what is transcendent in the human experience by
engaging the specific cultural and political issues of
its time and place.  Their novels and essays bear out
Linda Hutcheon's argument about the nature of
postmodernism: that it is 'engaged in contesting the
modernist (humanist) premises of art's apolitical
autonomy and of theory and criticism as value-free
activities.'  According to Hutcheon, postmodernist
texts teach us 'that representation cannot be avoided,
but it can be studies to show how it legitimates
certain kinds of knowledge and, therefore, certain
kinds of power' (230)." (pp. xvi-ii)

"... Pynchon is, in fact, far more interested in the
subjectivities of the disenfranchised than critics
have generally been willing to recognize.
   "To take Pynchon and Morrison seriously as
political novelists requires us to understand the ways
in which their works engage the official narrative
generated by Emersonian liberalism.  Their texts pull
apart, deconstruct, and reimagine this official
narrative, exploring in palpable detail what it means
to live in a culture of Emersonian individualism .... 
Both novelists portrayt characters who yearn for what
Michael Sandel calls the 'powerful liberating vision'
of a self that is 'free and independent, unencumbered
by aims and attachments it does not chjose for itself'
(196, 12).... Pynchon's novels view freedom as an
endangered value on the verge of extinction in a
complex modern world driven by the exigecies of
economic gain and technological progress.  Both
authors depict cultures in which the institutions that
are supposed to safeguard freedom...." (p. xviii)

Hutcheon, Linda.  A Poetics of Postmodernism:
   History, Theory, Fiction.  NY: Routledge, 1988.

Sandel, Michael.  Democracy's Discontent:
   America in Search of a Public Philosophy.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.

Will report back (cf. the etymology of "theory") ...

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