review: Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

[pynchonoid]

 David Kipen may still lurk on Pynchon-L.....

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/03/DD302378.DTL>
 
Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen
Eighty-Four'

David Kipen, Chronicle Book Critic 	 	Saturday, May 3,
2003 
 
Nineteen Eighty-Four 

By George Orwell; foreword by Thomas Pynchon 

PLUME; 339 PAGES; $14 PAPERBACK 


Superlatives may get people's attention, but they
don't do much to reward it. So if one were to hazard,
for example, that novelist Thomas Pynchon's foreword
to the new Plume edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
just happens to be the finest, deepest, sanest new 20
pages around, the case might yet remain something shy
of closed. In the wake of such praise, good questions
for a skeptic to ask might include "Compared to what?"
"Says who?" and, hardest of all to nail down, "Why?" 

Answers to the first two boil down to "You name it"
and "Who do you think?" But trying to explain why a
piece of writing wipes the floor with just about
anything else published this year is, necessarily,
trickier. Pynchon's foreword expertly re-creates the
atmosphere surrounding the composition and reception
of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," but any gifted literary
historian might have managed that. He articulates an
unsentimental humanism relevant to developing events,
but an uncommonly perceptive political essayist might
have done the same. Where Pynchon doesn't just outpace
but laps the rest of the field is in his incomparably
supple style. 

Modulating down the ages from the 18th century baroque
of "Mason & Dixon" to the 1940s bebop of "Gravity's
Rainbow" to "Vineland's" breathless Deadhead riffs,
Pynchon's underlying verbal music stays ever
recognizable, unique as a great reed player's
embouchure. For the "Nineteen Eighty-Four" intro,
Pynchon returns to his signature nonfiction voice:
postdoctoral yet cheerfully sophomoric, sad yet
undespairing, as expressive in its alternation of long
notes with short as an SOS. It's an instrument tuned
and retuned in more than 40 years of occasional
essays, reviews and liner notes -- forming,
incidentally, one of the great uncollected anthologies
in American letters. Here's a snatch of the "Nineteen
Eighty-Four" introduction, picked less for its
considerable power than for the way Pynchon, four of
whose six books are historical novels, relates
Orwell's anxious age to our own: 


'THE WILL TO FASCISM'

"Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis
defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that
far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet
even come into its own -- the corruption of spirit,
the irresistible human addiction to power, were
already long in place, all well-known aspects of the
Third Reich and Stalin's U.S.S.R., even the British
Labour party -- like first drafts of a terrible
future. What could prevent the same thing from
happening to Britain and the United States? Moral
superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?" 

This isn't quite Pynchon at his best. In a sentence
that begins in 1948, does Hitler really belong on a
list of fascist regimes "long in place"? And do those
two dashes signal interruption and resumption, or
merely consecutive interruptions? Always a question.
But the passage swings like crazy, and it introduces
the familiar Pynchon theme that may, together with his
love of individual liberty and his wariness of
transnational corporations, speak most urgently to our
time. It's what he calls here "the will to fascism,"
the eternal willingness of Orwell's proles and
Pynchon's beloved, sheepish schlemihls to scoot over
and leave the driving to Daddy. 

Fascism's hypnotic fascination also crops up in
Pynchon's great California novel "Vineland," whose
heroine Frenesi's social conscience is forever at war
with her weakness for men in uniform -- her literal
love for Big Brother. Some bushy-tailed editor at
Plume must have known "Vineland" awfully well to hope
they could solicit Pynchon's intro and get a yes, as
that novel represents about the only place in
Pynchon's entire back catalog where he even hints at
his debt to Orwell. 

Pynchon set "Vineland" in the year 1984, but that
isn't the half of it. He also used such Orwellian
imagery as a nightmare television that announces,
"From now on, I'm watching you," and a series of
regular roadside busts whose eyes follow anyone
driving by -- recalling the Big Brother posters in the
stairwell on the first page of "Nineteen Eighty-Four."
More than any incidental and possibly unconscious
allusions, though, what links Pynchon with Orwell is
the quality of being what Orwell called, in his 1939
essay on Dickens, "generously angry." (By the way,
Michael Krasny's "Forum" book club 'takes up
"Vineland" at 10 a.m. May 26 on KQED.) 

But the idea behind the Plume introduction was
presumably for Pynchon to illuminate Orwell, not the
other way around. Luckily, it works both ways. Pynchon
has taken a book few Americans get out of high school
without at least pretending to have understood and
found something genuinely fresh in it. For instance,
maybe most importantly, Pynchon's essay uses "Nineteen
Eighty- Four's" almost always skipped Appendix, "The
Principles of Newspeak," to reverse-engineer a crack
of daylight into Orwell's hitherto unforgiving
midnight of an ending. 


A THING OF THE PAST?

Pynchon maintains that, "from its first sentence, 'The
Principles of Newspeak' is written consistently in the
past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of
history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become
literally a thing of the past. . . . In its hints of
restoration and redemption, perhaps 'The Principles of
Newspeak' serves as a way to brighten an otherwise
bleakly pessimistic ending -- sending us back out into
the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly
happier tune than the end of the story by itself would
have warranted." According to Pynchon's secondary
research, Orwell risked 40, 000 British pounds to keep
this supposedly vestigial appendix, which the Book-
of-the-Month Club found anti-climactic, right where it
was -- and is. 

Thanks to Pynchon's close reading of other Orwelliana,
and of Michael Shelden's 1991 authorized biography --
an interesting if unsurprising choice, considering the
famously private Pynchon's dubiousness about
unauthorized digging -- this new introduction to
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" ultimately lets readers
eavesdrop on some glorious, death-defying shoptalk
between two of the 20th century's greatest writers.
Once in a great while, only superlatives will do. 



 


 
	 	

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