Pynchon and postmodernism

[jbor]

Pynchon and the Sixties
David Cowart. Critique. Washington: Fall 1999.
Vol.41, Iss. 1;  pg. 3, 10 pgs

Abstract
Operating from the premise that very few post-modernists divorce themselves
from moral and social issues, Cowart illustrates Thomas Pynchon's bare
vocalization of a moral stance on issues such as racism and genocide.

Excerpt

Discussions of the literature that began to emerge in the period just after
World War II tend to emphasize the element of post-Joycean reflexivity. With
Beckett as one kind of pathfinder and Nabokov as another, writers became
increasingly committed to the interrogation of their medium -- a probing,
that is, of language and its epistemological credentials. These credentials
had gone largely unchecked by modernist writers, even those who, like Eliot
in "Burnt Norton," recognized and worried over the tendency of words to
betray: 

                                    Words strain,
        Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
        Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
        Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
        Will not stay still.

The modernists strove to explore consciousness, time, and history -- the
very realities most resistant to representation in words. Language remained
for them, nonetheless, an instrument of knowing, and thus Brian McHale has
characterized the modernist project as epistemological in its premises,
means, and goals. The postmodernists, by contrast, seem to have begun with a
recognition of the mimetic and referential shortcomings of language -- a
perception that led, McHale argues, to a literary art more interested in
ontology than in epistemology. As John Hawkes once remarked in an interview,
"I want to try to create a world, not represent it" (Enck 154).

But things are never, of course, that neat. The real shift, as Lyotard
argues in The Postmodern Condition, is toward representation of the less and
less representable. The moderns, he says, sought to represent the
unrepresentable; the postmoderns seek to represent the unrepresentable in
representation itself. That is not ontology but a more subtle epistemology
-- a grappling with the problematics of representation. [...]

It did not take long for complaints to set in, often calling down -- as John
Gardner does in On Moral Fiction (1978) -- a plague on the houses of both
modernism and postmodernism. Gardner laments what he calls, in a typically
pungent phrase, the smart-mouth cynicism of the new writing. Another critic
was Charles Newman, who, in The Post-Modern Aura (1985), deplored its
alleged nihilism. Battle lines were drawn: on one side artists willing to
engage real-world exigencies; on the other side artists committed only to
endless, self-indulgent, textual play.

I do not propose in this short essay to argue some kind of large-scale
critical méconnaissance of contemporary literature, but I would like to
point out a basic misconception among those who see a division of the kind
sketched above. The simple fact is that relatively few of the American
postmodernists actually divorce themselves from moral and social issues.
However accomplished they might be as practitioners of the emergent
aesthetic, they remain curiously moral -- even moralistic -- in their
outlook. However committed to the free play of the signifier, they
constantly critique the very simulacrum they supposedly exploit. Thus
Heller, in Catch-22 (1961), has some perfectly serious things to say about
war. Neither Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) nor Coover in The Public
Burning (1977) is indifferent to the real-life anguish of the Rosenbergs.
Abish, in How German Is It (1980), declines to allow the Nazi evil to
disappear into some kind of moral relativism. Vonnegut, in novel after
novel, quite passionately deplores violence, racism, and economic
exploitation. Even Nabokov, whose hermetic work admits of so little by way
of social reality (however many motels he describes in Lolita), never misses
an opportunity to revile totalitarianism and brutality in both their
imaginary and real-life forms.

Nowhere is that paradoxical subversion of the postmodern gospel more evident
than in the work of Thomas Pynchon. The author of Gravity's Rainbow leaves
his readers in no doubt about his attitude toward racism, oppressive
economic practices, genocidal violence, skullduggery in high places, and
policestate repression. He expresses, in numerous ways, a profound empathy
with what he calls the preterite, the left out, the passed over in every
form of election (spiritual, economic, racial, cultural). These are the
American Dream's insomniacs, "the poor, the defeated, the criminal, the
desperate" (35), as he calls them in his report on Watts in the aftermath of
the 1965 riots. Readers can trace the author's sympathy for this element
(and, for that matter, his contempt for the complacently elect) to the
decade that redefined American political idealism. For a kind of moral
touchstone within the Pynchon oeuvre one need only consider his 1964 story
"The Secret Integration," in which some children deal with the racial
prejudice of their elders by adopting an imaginary black playmate. In a
typical piece of what used to be called "black humor," Pynchon makes one of
the children a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, but when the local chapter of
that organization responds to a call from an alcoholic musician by sending
this youthful member to sit with him, the boy and his companions find
themselves the unwitting instruments of a cruel joke-black humor of a more
radical sort. The anger, frustration, and chagrin of the musician, a
"Negro," reveal to the children racism's emotional and moral toll. Worse,
they discover the power of racism to include them unawares.

Pynchon's novels and other short stories revolve in planetary orbits around
the sunlike moral intensity of the sixties.
[...]

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Cowart is one of the foremost critics of Pynchon's work. His readings are
always insightful, clearly-expressed and engage directly with the texts.
This article is typically astute and provides a good overview of the
concerns of Pynchon's major works. I can forward a pdf if anyone is
interested in reading it. Contact me offlist.

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