Henry's secular peturbations (Tony Tanner)

[Eddie Bettano]

>From Patterns and Paranoia or Caries and Cabals
By Tony Tanner
Thomas Pynchon made his intentions clear from the
outset. The title of his first important short story
is 'Entropy' ... and it contains specific references
to Henry Adams. Whereas some novelists would prefer to
cover the philosophic tracks which gave them decisive
shaping hints for their novels, Pynchon puts those
tracks  on the surface of his writing. Indeed his work
is about those tracks and, morelargely, the whole
human instinct and need to make tracks. Adams wanted a
theory
which would act as a `trail' in `the thickset forests
of history' and even if we change that metaphor of the
forest for that of the urban wasteland, thick with the
rubble and dead of our century of total wars, the need
for a trail or a track may still remain. A philosophy,
a theory of history, a law of thermodynamicsany one of
these may be a `trail' and their significance may
reside not so much in their verifiable applicability
as in the human compulsion to formulate them. Pynchon
sees
all this quite clearly, and while his work is
certainly about a world succumbing to entropy, it is
also about the subtler human phenomenonthe need to see
patterns
which may easily turn into the tendency to suspect
plots. (p. 78) 
Norbert Wiener said in The Human Use of Human Beings
that it is always likely to be a problem whether we
interpret whatever it is that makes for
disorganization
in nature as merely a neutral absence of order (the
Augustinian view, he called this), or as a positively
malign force dedicated to the annihilation of order.
He added The Augustinian position has always been
difficult to maintain. It tends under the
slightest perturbation to break down into a covert
Manichaeanism. This is crucial for an understanding of
many contemporary American writers who are either
sufficiently perturbed themselves, or are aware of the
perturbations in the characters they write about, to
have made the tendency to begin to see the world in
Manichaean terms a recurrent motif in recent novels,
Pynchon's above all. The temptation to regard all
signs of entropy in the world as the work of hostile
agents is like the demonism in the work of William
Burroughs. Both represent attempts to `give
destruction a name or face' (to take a phrase from
Pynchon 's short story
'Mercy and Mortality in Venice '), and both those
reactions to the world reveal themselves in the
individual as a continuous leaning towards paranoia.
(pp. 801) 

It would be too glib to say that [V] is an
`Augustinian' novel about `Manichaean'
people; it would also be misleading, since the
novelist is clearly inwardly affected by
the Manichaeanism of his characters, just as he is by
the pessimistic theories of  Henry Adams. But he
manages to preserve his distance, particularly by
locating the  main plotting instinct in one character,
Stencil. He is the man who is trying to make
the connections and links, and put together the story
which might well have been Pynchon's novel. By
standing back from this dedicated pursuer and
collector of
notes towards a supreme fiction, Pynchon is able to
explore the plot-making instinct
itself. To this end his own novel has to appear to be
relatively unplotted leaving
chunks of data around, as it were, for Stencil to try
to inter-relate....

If one theme of the book is the acceleration of
Entropy, another is the avoidance of
human relationships based on reciprocal recognition of
the reality of the partner. Instead of the
recognitions of love, there are only the projected
fantasies of lust.  These two phenomenaentropy and the
dread of lovem ay well be linked in some way, for they
show a parallel movement towards the state of lasting
inanimateness, and share an aspiration to eradicate
consciousness and revert to thing-status. (p.84) 
  In the world depicted by Pynchon there is very
little chance of any genuine communication. Language
has suffered an inevitable decline in the mouths of
these
stencillized and objectified figures. ... One result
of this decline in language is that people scarcely
manage to converse in this book, and if they do they
fail to establish any real contact. 

 But if the characters in the book seldom truly talk
to each other, they often look at
each other. As might be expected, various forms of
voyeurism are part of the normal behaviour patterns of
a world where any attempt at human inter-subjectivity
has been replaced by the disposition to regard people
as objectsinside the field of vision but outside the
range of sympathy, if indeed any such range exists.
...
Voyeurism is another way of evading true selfhood and
denying or avoiding the possibility of love. Most of
the characters `retreat' from the threat of love when
it presents itself, and even the sympathetic Benny
wastes himself in avoiding dependencies, and
disengaging himself from any field of gathering
emotional force.
It might be added that Pynchon finds it difficult to
suggest what genuine love would be like in this world.


Tony Tanner, Patterns and Paranoia or Caries and
Cabals, in Salmagundi, Winter, 1971, pp. 78-99. 

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