Derrida and Pynchon

[jbor]

'Emptiness and plentitude in "Bartleby the Scrivener"
and The Crying of Lot 49'
Hans, James S. Essays in Literature. Macomb: Fall 1995.
Vol.22, Iss. 2;  pg. 285, 17 pgs

[...]
In the thematic context, perhaps no modern topic has been given more
consideration than the way in which we are thought to create our own selves,
or to put it another way, the way in which we are ourselves finally
arbitrary signs to be filled up by whatever haunts us at the moment. If the
moderns called language and form into question, if they seriously considered
the degree to which all utterance is devoid of ground, they also pursued the
ways in which the same thing could be said of our conceptions of individual
humans. Indeed, one of the great early modern texts, "Bartleby, the
Scrivener," has as its main character one of the first creations to
represent a sort of nothing, a void of a human who is not just a surd in the
end but highly meaningful precisely because the echoes of his alienation and
meaninglessness in the modern era are to be found in the employer, the
reader, and anyone else who takes up space in the world we presently live
in. The companion text to "Bartleby," I would argue, the one that marks the
end of this modern thematic, is Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a
work in which it is not the void at the center of humans that is at issue
but rather the great plenitude. Both works focus on the same questions-the
problem of identity in the modern world, the question of the reality of our
identity, the related concerns of alienation and despair--but "Bartleby"
marks these problems in terms of lack whereas Lot 49 construes them in terms
of the horrifying plenitude of meaning. Just as Derrida was to demonstrate
that the supplementary character of language meant both that language never
says enough and that it always says too much--that the problem was as much a
plenitude of meanings as a lack of them--so too Pynchon shows that the
problem is not that we are confronted by our own meaninglessness but rather
that we are forced to deal with the fact that we have too many meanings,
that we are far too rich in our plenitude to be contemplated in any bearable
manner.
[...]

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