Ian Rankin on Pynchon -

Fri Nov 17 23:10:30 CST 2006

A tad surprising, perhaps, or maybe not at all, that
Ian Rankin is a self-confessed Pynchonhead....

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1950557,00.html

When rumours began to circulate concerning an
impending novel from the reclusive American author
Thomas Pynchon, I was sceptical. There had been
rumours before: they are part and parcel of the
parallel universe encountered in Pynchon's work. But
then a news release appeared, apparently written by
Pynchon himself. The book would be around 1,000 pages
long, appear towards the end of the year, and be
called Against the Day. This was a cause for despair.
It meant that once more I would begin to inhabit the
shadowy, conspiracy-driven theatre of the absurd that
seems to be Pynchon's imagination. It's a place that
constrains and hypnotises the general reader, and
exerts an even greater pull on the true fan. My wife
and children would lose sight of me for as long as it
took to read the book, and afterwards I would be
shell-shocked, wide-eyed, and seeing everywhere around
me the signs of another world, similar to the one I
seem to inhabit, but darker, odder, and altogether
funnier.

Article continues

The press release itself is vintage Pynchon. Set in
the first two decades of the 20th century, the author
says of the book: "With a worldwide disaster looming
... it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed,
false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil
intent in high places. No reference to the present day
is intended or should be inferred." He goes on to
admit that "the author is up to his usual business ...
it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment
or two", and ends with "let the reader beware. Good
luck."
It will be a challenging book - Pynchon's novels are
nothing if not challenging - and I'll be first in the
queue to buy it, because (in an all-too-Pynchonesque
twist) the joint UK and US embargo on reviewing the
book meant I was not able to read it prior to
commencing this appreciation. Nevertheless, let us
begin.

I spent the summer of 1981 cooped up in the library at
the University of Edinburgh, writing a dissertation on
the short stories of Thomas Pynchon. I'd been studying
English Literature for three years, enduring Hardy,
Wordsworth and Pope on my way to the promised land of
"US Literature". The first "serious" novel I'd ever
enjoyed was Catch-22, which had appeared as a set text
in high school. I'd gone on to read Kerouac and Kesey,
and was hooked on the modern American novel. Even so,
Pynchon came as a revelation. I was 20 when I worked
my way through The Crying of Lot 49, V and Gravity's
Rainbow. The workload was punishing: I think a single
week was dedicated to Pynchon (meaning a one-off
lecture followed by a tutorial). But that tutorial was
followed by a longer discussion in the nearby pub,
where our enthusiastically bearded tutor was joined by
a proselytising postgrad and a lecturer who
specialised in the post-war British novel. The three
put up a convincing case for Thomas Pynchon as the
greatest novelist of his generation. Not that they
needed to try too hard.

Pynchon seemed to fit the model I was learning of
literature as an extended code or grail quest.
Moreover, he was like a drug: as you worked out one
layer of meaning, you quickly wanted to move to the
next. He wrote action novels about spies and soldiers
which also happened to be detective stories and bawdy
romps. His books were picaresquely post-modern and his
humour was Marxian (tendance: Groucho). On page six of
The Crying of Lot 49, the name Quackenbush appears,
and you know you are in safely comedic hands.

Some of my fellow students had cheated, opting to read
only Lot 49. It's by far the shortest of Pynchon's
novels, and has (for the most part) a linear structure
with a readily-identifiable central character to lead
the reader through the plot. (Pynchon himself,
retrospectively, seems no great fan of the book.)
However, I preferred those denser, longer books - V
and Gravity's Rainbow. The more they puzzled me, the
more I felt the need to unravel their meaning.

I inhaled the various intoxicating conspiracies and
rumours: that Pynchon was actually J D Salinger; or he
was a computer programme; or a cabal of other authors;
that he had visited his London publisher but wanted
only to talk to the person in charge of children's
books, and then only to snaffle some publicity posters
for his kid's bedroom; that he had stayed at the home
of novelist Ian McEwan in Cambridge; that he was
researching the Mason-Dixon line. (This last turns out
to have been true, even if the rumour started in 1982
and the eventual novel didn't see the light of day
until 1997.) I learned also that there were precious
few photos of the author in existence, and that a
researcher had visited his old high school only to
find that all photos and files relating to Pynchon had
disappeared. (Latterly, Pynchon himself has made fun
of his reticence, appearing in two episodes of The
Simpsons with a brown paper-bag over his head but
voicing his own lines.)

The mystique surrounding the author became part and
parcel of the idolatry. After reading The Crying of
Lot 49, I drew a post-horn on the back of my
army-surplus jacket, using a black marker-pen, a ruler
and the circumference of a tea-saucer. A friend
meantime went one better, starting a new wave band
called Thurn and Taxis. (These days, when I see the
word "taxis" anywhere, I don't think of black cabs but
of a secret alternative to the US postal service.)

Pynchon didn't garner mere admirers or allow anything
like fence-sitting: you either hated him or you were a
zealot. It's a mark of his abilities that a quarter of
a century on, I can remember much of the bar-room
conversation about him, and none at all about The
Scarlet Letter, Robert Frost, or Edward Albee.

Pynchon's first book V was also the first I read as a
student. It is a convoluted conspiracy thriller, and
as the narrator himself says: "its particular shape
[is] governed only by the surface accidents of history
at the time". This may go some way towards explaining
why one moment the reader is with "the whole sick
crew" at a drunken modern-day party, and the next is
transported to 1899 and a terrific period-piece about
diplomacy and spycraft prior to the first world war. A
place called Vheissu is mentioned, as is a woman
called Victoria Wren: either one may be the enigmatic
and intangible V of the title.

Pynchon's world of paranoia, conspiracies, and shadowy
government agencies is so persuasive that the fan
begins to see signs and signifiers everywhere - even
mistyping Pynchon's name as Punchon seems indicative
of something. But what? Whatever the answer, he was
manna to us literature students. With his playfulness
(what Barthes would doubtless have called jouissance)
and his codifying tactics, he seemed the writer that
deconstruction and its ilk had been waiting for. An
undergrad could compose a 1,000-word essay on the
ramifications of the title of the law firm in the
opening pages of Lot 49 (Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek
and McMingus, in case you were wondering). A lecturer
could pontificate for half an hour on the multiple
meanings of the character name Pierce Inverarity
(Pierce in verity? In veracity? Inverse rarity? Was
there a town called Inverarity in Scotland and could
Pynchon know of it?)

He even had his own "fanzine" - an academic journal
dedicated to his work and with the absurdly prosaic
title of Pynchon Notes. As far as I was aware, no
other living author had received this accolade - it
was the sort of thing more associated with rock bands
- and I duly submitted a paper (though I forget now if
it was ever accepted, or what its thesis might have
been).

The problem with Pynchon, however, is that people tend
(now as then) to treat him with po-faced reverence,
and this can put off as many readers as it attracts.
The author himself seems to admit that he dug a hole
when he called one of his early short stories
"Entropy". In Lot 49 he makes mention of the Scottish
physicist James Clerk Maxwell and thermodynamics, and
continued his apparent interest in quantum mechanics
in Gravity's Rainbow

All of this appealed immensely to the stoners of the
1970s. It was a time of The Dancing Wu-Li Masters and
Godel, Escher, Bach - books which linked quantum
engineering to eastern religion, to be discussed over
a well-stoked bong with a side of Tangerine Dream
playing in the background. The Illuminatus trilogy was
big at that time, too, with its talk of cabals and
"immanentising the Eschaton" (maybe a young Dan Brown
was taking notes). Literary criticism meantime was
turning towards scientism. The Derrida school of
deconstructionists drooled over Pynchon while
semioticians sharpened their troping-shears.

All of which makes him seem worthy rather than
readable. Yet his books are romps and detective
stories. In Lot 49, the heroine Oedipa Maas begins to
feel like "the private eye in any long-ago radio
drama". Pynchon has also credited the spy novels of
Graham Greene and Le Carre and the thrillers of
another Scot, John Buchan, as inspiration, alongside
likelier suspects such as Jack Kerouac (and Pynchon
does remain the most Beat of contemporary literary
authors).

The names he gives to his characters can make me laugh
out loud or wish I'd thought of them first: the
saxophone player McClintic Sphere; the schlemiel Benny
Profane; the English spy-cum-mechanical doll
Bongo-Shaftsbury. Then there's the US Navy roughneck
Pig Bodine, who began life in an early short story
("Low-Lands") and would reappear in several books. I
liked Bodine so much that I spoonerised his name when
creating a character called Big Podeen, an ex-sailor
who appears in my first crime novel, Knots and Crosses

Interviewers and Inspector Rebus fans often express
surprise when I say I was influenced by Pynchon. I'm a
crime writer after all, a genre writer. I set all my
books in Scotland and use a recurring central
character. But the mass of whodunits is indebted to
the grail myth, something Raymond Chandler made clear
within the first few pages of The Big Sleep and
Pynchon's books often involve innocents on the run, or
hunting some answer to a central mystery. This same
secret knowledge is what I craved as a young student,
believing that there was a meaning to the world beyond
all our everyday transactions. Pynchon seemed to
provide tantalising glimpses of patterns and
route-maps, which is why I fell into his web. And sat
down in the university library to begin a quest of my
own.

The few short stories Pynchon had published were hard
to find in 1981. A few appeared as individual
pamphlets; others had to be borrowed from Ivy League
libraries in the USA. As the weeks passed, I became so
knowledgeable that I was able to put the esteemed
critic Tony Tanner right - at least in the margins of
my copy of his book City of Words. As I pick that book
up now, it falls open, spine irredeemably cracked, at
the chapter on Entropy in Fiction. Twenty-five years
ago, I corrected Tanner on the identity of Pynchon's
first published story ("The Small Rain" rather than
"Entropy") and also on the title of another short
story ("Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" rather than
"Mercy and Mortality in Venice"). But now I have a
problem, because I do seem to recall reading and
writing about this second story, yet it makes no
appearance in Pynchon's collected early stories. If
time allowed, I'd be off on another quest to seek the
truth. Somewhere out in the garage, in one of 100
cardboard boxes, lies my dissertation, along with the
original source material, including a photocopy of
"Mortality and Mercy in Vienna". Unless, of course, it
has mysteriously vanished.

Three years after I finished working through Pynchon's
short stories, he collected them in a book called Slow
Learner, and provided a generously autobiographical
introduction which rendered much of the theorising in
my dissertation utterly redundant. Four of the five
stories in that volume were written while he was still
at college. Of "Entropy" Pynchon says: "I thought I
was sophisticating the Beat spirit with secondhand
science", which stands as a pretty good description of
some of his novels, too.

The self-deprecating tone of Pynchon's introduction
helps to humanise the author. Suddenly, the notion
that he could have been a computer programme seems
risible. He admits that in his early days he would
consult a thesaurus for "cool" words, without
bothering to check their dictionary meaning. This
reminds me of a short story I wrote in an English
class at high school. The teacher enjoyed it, but had
spent some time trying to work out why I'd called it
"Paradox". The answer was that I'd taken my title from
a Hawkwind song, without bothering to discover its
meaning.

So there I was at university, trying to write my own
stories while studying the college-written stories of
a writer I admired. What I couldn't know at that time
was that Pynchon had taken some writing classes at
Cornell, and had been taught by Nabokov (whose wife
later remembered the student's neat handwriting). But
my enthusiasm for Pynchon led me down some difficult
and futile roads. With Tony Tanner as my guide, I
tried reading William Gaddis and John Barth, Donald
Barthelme and Stanley Elkin and Robert Coover. Kurt
Vonnegut I loved, but Barth's Giles Goat-Boy robbed me
of precious and irretrievable hours for precious
little reward. Richard Brautigan seemed charming but
ethereal and over-whimsied to the point where I just
wanted to punch him in the face. To most of these
writers, I applied half-digested gobbets of
structuralism and semiotics (not taught at Edinburgh,
so studied extra-curricularly; when I could have been
chasing girls, I was chasing Roland Barthes instead).

I remember that my parents - solid working-class - had
struggled with the idea that I would study literature
at university. Their notion was that you went to
college to learn a profession - the law, medicine,
accountancy. What would I do with an English degree?
The only answer I could give was "teach", though
really I knew I wanted to be a writer. But did I want
to be a writer like Thomas Pynchon? I didn't think so,
mainly because I didn't think anyone like him could
exist in the UK. His work was saturated with Americana
and popular culture, with a beat sensibility which was
alien to me.

At the time he had come to prominence (the early
1960s), England was focussing on the austerity
fictions of Alan Sillitoe and John Osborne. The
eventual experimenters would be the likes of BS
Johnson and John Fowles, and I knew I didn't want to
write like either of them. I wanted to live in
Pynchon's mad universe, wrestling a giant octopus,
grappling with a mechanical spy, or shooting albino
crocodiles in the sewers beneath some chaotic American
city.

What strikes me now, re-reading those early novels, is
Pynchon's prescience. In V, he describes a cosmetic
surgery nose-job, something taken for granted now but
surely exotic in 1963. In similar vein, the urban myth
of baby crocodiles flushed down lavatories and growing
to roam the sewer system was unknown to me until the
1970s, yet Pynchon was writing about it a decade
earlier. His research also seems impeccable. A mature
student at Edinburgh got excited by his descriptions
of the curious flavours of sweets in the second world
war London. "He's got it just right!" she gasped, and
we marvelled once again at our hero's erudition. (In
Mason and Dixon he shows that he also knows about the
eccentric English pastime of cheese-rolling.)

Re-reading his books in preparation for this essay,
however, has also caused me a few cringes, due to the
nature of my youthful marginalia. V finishes with a
xebec out at sea, and it is probably acceptable that
I've added a note to say that a xebec is a small
three-masted vessel. Less helpful, perhaps, to have
added that "the ending seems incomplete, the
fragmentation goes on". Earlier marginalia include
"This is very weird indeed" and a youthful summary of
the book ("It doesn't matter who or what V is, just so
long as she/it exists, giving Stencil something to
strive towards").

By the time I reached Gravity's Rainbow, the quality
of critical appraisal had hardly improved: "Nearly
everything one expects in a novel goes out the window
with Pynchon ... a clear logical progression is hardly
evident; things are jumpy, confusing, absurd. Pynchon
dedicated the book to his friend and fellow writer
Richard Farina, and my note on the dedication page
wonders if this is the same Richard Farina who gifted
a dulcimer to the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones (as used
on the Aftermath album).

Once into the novel itself, I note among other things
a cameo by Pig Bodine and that pages 466-7 are
P-O-R-N. I also take the trouble to underline the
sentence "Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled
into any kind of sense" and add the note "Likewise
Pynchon's novels!" But, having read the relevant
paragraphs several times now, I've still no idea why I
added the letters NB in large capitals above page 521,
nor why there is a Captain America bookmark ("This
page protected by Captain America") halfway through
the book (though I feel Pynchon would approve; maybe
he even placed it there).

Having completed my undergraduate degree (receiving
good marks for that dissertation), I eventually
decided to see if I could arrange funding for a PhD.
My subject was to be Pynchon. However, I was informed
that it would be difficult to arrange funding from the
Scottish education system for a PhD on an American
writer when I intended remaining at Edinburgh
University. I knew in my heart I wanted to stay in
Edinburgh, so I opted for Muriel Spark instead (having
cannily asked a lecturer which authors might be most
acceptable to the funding body).

But my time with Pynchon was not over, even though
later books have of necessity been read as "a
civilian". There's no longer a gang for me to join for
a few pints and conspiracy theories. The band Thurn
and Taxis never really got anywhere, and my post-horn
camouflage jacket got lost or thrown out. I now read
Pynchon's work in isolation, baffled by Mason and
Dixon (its time-frame too similar to Barth's The
Sot-Weed Factor for my liking), and seduced by
Vineland

In fact, Vineland is a pretty good place for the
novice to start. It's a likeable book with a linear
narrative and a single, identifiable hero in Zoyd
Wheeler. Zoyd is another of Pynchon's slacker heroes
(reminding me forcefully of "The Dude" in the Coen
Brothers' The Big Lebowski ). He's in trouble with
various government agencies and hangs out with a bunch
of counter-culture survivors. It may turn out to be
the most "normal" novel Pynchon ever writes.

His blurb for the new book hints that it will take
place between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the
aftermath of the first world war, and will move
between Colorado, New York, London, Gottingen, Venice,
Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia, Mexico,
Paris, Hollywood and "one or two places not strictly
speaking on the map at all". Characters will include
"anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons,
drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents,
mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics and
stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses and
hired guns", not to mention Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi
and Groucho Marx. Classic Pynchon territory, in other
words, and sounding like a true successor to his
bonkers masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow

Pynchon has published only six novels (including
Against the Day ) in 43 years, yet his popularity in
the UK seems constant. The latest paperback of
Vineland has gone into 18 printings in six years,
hinting at a readership beyond the groves of academe.
There are plenty of fan sites on the internet, too,
though some seem content to linger on the more outre
aspects of his work. And Pynchon Notes still exists.

Having given up Pynchon to do my PhD thesis on Muriel
Spark, I found her a subtle writer, using a minimum of
words and fuss to engage great universal themes - the
seeming antithesis of Pynchon. But Spark is also a
wonderfully biting satirist, and has said that harsh
Juvenalian satire is the only valid literary reaction
to the absurdity of modern-day life. She was thinking
of her own body of work, no doubt, but could just as
easily have been talking about Thomas Pynchon, the
greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his
generation.

Pynchon himself describes Against the Day as 1,000
pages of "stupid songs, strange sexual practices ...
obscure languages" and "contrary-to-the-fact
occurrences".

To which I say: bring it on.

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