VLVL2 (9): Porush and the Puncutron Machine (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

from David Porush's "'Purring into Transcendence': Pynchon's Puncutron Machine"  The Vineland Papers, pp. 31 - 45.


"[...] Pynchon slyly and self-referentially alludes to his own transcendental narrative tactics in a maneuver we have learned is typical of Pynchon: using a technological metaphor for his own technique, in this case the 'Puncutron Machine.'

"The numerous collisions of the transcendent with the mundane in Vineland, whether through direct allusion to the transcendental or through metaphorical machinery, further signify (or model) a more macrocosmic posture that Pynchon seems committed to: that the only hope for redemption from pedestrian, but ubiquitous, evil is to allow epistemological and ontological commitments to collapse into the transcendental -- to suspend the quest for certainty (as Prairie learns to do) and to give up simply surviving and immersing (as Zoyd is forced to do) in favor of recognizing deeper and unutterable truths. [...]

"The two allusions in the title and subtitle of this article collide in a scene in Vineland when Takeshi, Japanese agent and schlemiel, victim of other people's plots, cannot quite accept that DL, the consummate Ninjette, has indeed laid on him the Ninja Death Touch [...] The Sisters try to heal Takeshi and correct DL's error by an application of spiritual and mechanical technologies: they bond DL to him as a sort of karmic bodyguard and at the same time use on him the 'Puncutron Machine,' a mysterious therapeutic technology designed to correct the imbalance in a subject's karma.

"Like many other Pynchon characters who find themselves caught in the toils of plots that go beyond their ken or capacity for accepting incontrovertible data, Takeshi finds himself entering that peculiar state of paranoid rapture that seizes many Pynchon characters [quoted from VL, 180.2 thru 180.12].

"This passage is revealing, for it describes Pynchon's own play with the reader throughout his works -- his penchant for posing paradoxes and unsolvable puzzles.  To many of us literary critics, immersed in a rationalizing profession that is itself the expression of a rationalizing culture, these Pynchonesque koans tend to launch us on flights of scholarly and interpretive acrobatics that have served most to expose the limitations of the very rationality on which we depended.  Clues in Vineland hint that Pynchon's purpose all along was to send us 'purring into transcendence.'

"The passage above becomes emblematic of a series of other passages that surround it.  Indeed, in virtually every scene from the time when DL enters the Kunoichi retreat with Prairie, who is officially beginning her search for her mother (p. 109), to the time that the narrative returns to the 'present' of 1984 (p. 294) the reader is treated to a long, complex, and varied system of gestures at transcendent or magical realms. [...]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20031116/710d803c/attachment.html>