Hawthorne: 'Pynchon's Early Labyrinths'

[jbor]

'Pynchon's early labyrinths', Mark D Hawthorne, _College Literature_
25.2, Spring 1998, pp. 78-93.

An interesting essay which, I believe, makes a valid point regarding
responses to Pynchon's early writing:

[...] By focusing on Thomas Pynchon's references to and uses of labyrinths,
we can isolate a major, often neglected, problem with his early writing: in
our critical attempts to valorize Pynchon's writings, we frequently read
early works through the filters of later achievements. But this
problematizing of the early works creates a view of Pynchon quite unlike
that which he presents of himself in his introduction to _Slow Learner_
(1984) and consequently fails to read the early works in their own light. In
that introduction, Pynchon, who may well write disingenuously, constructs a
portrait of himself as an apprentice, literally the "slow learner," who has
"stolen" from other writers (we may say, following Kristeva and Bloom, that
he "parodied" others, building his works on misreadings), and that he
sometimes tended to focus too much on theme rather than on character. We
have read some of these works -- especially "Entropy" and "Under the Rose"
-- as if he already had the postmodernism of _V._ and _Gravity's Rainbow_
under his belt. Thus we have given them more weight than they probably
deserve. In contrast, when we read the early stories as Pynchon's
apprenticeship, what we find is a writer facing the complexities of the
1960s and trying to discover his own voice without being absorbed either in
the "postures and props" of the Beats (1984, 9) or the high culture
intertextuality of T.S. Eliot (1984, 15), a writer trying out the forms and
techniques of modernism but finding them inadequate. Looking at his use of
the labyrinth metaphor can help us evaluate these early stories more
accurately as remarkable achievements of a young writer who is still trying
to find his unique voice. [...] (pp. 79-80)

Pdf available. Contact me offlist.

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