Derrida and Pynchon (Chambers review cont.)

[jbor]

[cont.]

Maltby's readings of the three authors reveal this provisional redemption in
different ways. In Barthelme, Maltby sees the author's narrative experiments
as attempts to "break out of established meaning-systems and enlarge the
bounds" of signification "in a new way" (81). In Coover, "a new space for
subjectivity is opened up as the bonds of a repressive discourse come
unraveled, as words are released from the meanings to which ideology had
enthralled them" (130). Even in Pynchon, where Maltby stresses the
endocolonization of America by its government and of people's minds by
television, Maltby allows (at least by Vineland) that "Prairie--emblematic
of a new generation--has returned, albeit provisionally, from her society's
exile" (184).

Berressem's study divides into two sections. The first three chapters
present his theory, establishing two points where the deconstruction of the
subject by Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Pynchon intersect: the "new
topography" of space erasing the distinction between outside and inside, and
the "logic of the always already" replacing the realm of cause and effect.
The remaining six chapters are application of the theory, emphasizing,
Berressem acknowledges, the Lacanian focus on psychoanalysis and
linguistics--subjectivity and writing--to explore chronologically the
writing strategies of Pynchon's "poetics." What results is how Pynchon
"presents the reader with a subject that is suspended between the two
rhetorical extremes of naturality and simulation" through a textual system
of relationships that remain fundamentally equivocal (243).

Both books make valuable contributions to the current conversation of
critical inquiry. Maltby presents a lucid overview of postmodernist issues,
especially in his insightful reading of Ernest Mandel in his chapter
"Language and Late Capitalism." Berressem's close readings of passages in
Pynchon, especially Gravity's Rainbow, are at times brilliant--witness his
discussions of Slothrop's table in the introduction or the Kirghiz Light
episode in chapter 6. Yet after reading both books one wonders whether any
critical "poetics" with an eye toward totalization can represent works whose
"collective" character is that of Bakhtin's polylogue.

The key to understanding both books appears on page 10 in Maltby. After
acknowledging that dissident texts exploit pastiche for oppositional ends
without a normative discourse which could serve as a foundation, Maltby
says:

they almost read like decentered [that is, introverted] narratives--almost
but not quite. For, as I argue in the case studies, many of these texts
implicitly convey the criteria of something like an "ideal speech
situation," criteria which ultimately redeem them from the neutrality or
blankness of a narrative without a privileged center. Suffice to say here,
the criteria in question serve to evaluate language-use (past and present);
they are derived from ideals of a language which is truly intersubjective,
nonagonistic, vital, free of the distortions of mystification and
mythification.(10)

While Maltby's references to Habermas are marginal and Berressem omits him
from discussion entirely, it seems clear that for both critics the goal of
their inquiry is what Habermas called "emancipatory" knowledge--the
reconciliation of hermeneutics and positivism in such a way that one could
both reach and communicate a rational appraisal of issues undistorted by
ideology.

While this reconciliation is certainly appealing as a construct, problems
persist in seeking the equivalent of the "ideal speech situation" in texts
which intractably resist the tendency to methodize the notion of
indeterminacy inherent in the postmodern scene. Maltby must gloss over
Barthelme the metafictionist versus Pynchon the sentimental surrealist to
subsume both under the crypto-Marxist flag of "a powerful source of
resistance to the force of late capitalism's hegemonic discourses" (187). In
privileging the theories of Lacan (while drawing as much or more from
Baudrillard Berressem does acknowledge the inevitability of his own
"misreading" (49). Given his reliance on rigorously presented theoretical
constructs, however, one is struck by some curious lacunae in his argument.
To make deconstruction adequately "complement" Lacan, Derrida is forced to
speak through other voices--Alec McHoul and David Wills's purported use of
Derrida in Writing Pynchon and Paul de Man's in Allegories of Reading. More
puzzling is the omission of Luce Irigaray, whose discussion of
phallocentrism not only supplements and critiques Lacan but also clearly
relates to Pynchon's thematic concerns.

Finally the issue is one of axiology--which type of value judgment is
permitted to count as knowledge. Certainly both books provide illuminating
recuperative strategies for reading important poststructuralist authors and
concerns. But what does the "creation of a poststructuralist Pynchon" reveal
about a writer who like Pynchon is forever the outsider, a most exemplary
writer of the marginal who contests and demoralizes authority? Are the
insights of fiction listable and computable? Or, to return to Lacan, perhaps
such texts are the father saying "no" to the theorist who seeks complement
with the other, the real register that lies beyond emancipatory knowledge.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's quite clear, then, that the ideas of Derrida, amongst other
poststructuralists, do provide ample ground for intelligent discussion and
interpretation of Pynchon's work. Not so Chomsky's Language Acquisition
Device theory, behaviourist linguistics, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I'm
afraid, which were dead in the water thirty, forty and fifty years ago
respectively.

best