Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'

[Dave Monroe]

Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'
David Kipen, Chronicle Book Critic
Saturday, May 3, 2003

Nineteen Eighty-Four
By George Orwell; foreword by Thomas Pynchon
PLUME; 339 PAGES; $14 PAPERBACK

Superlatives may get people's attention, but they don't do much to
reward it. So if one were to hazard, for example, that novelist Thomas
Pynchon's foreword to the new Plume edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
just happens to be the finest, deepest, sanest new 20 pages around,
the case might yet remain something shy of closed. In the wake of such
praise, good questions for a skeptic to ask might include "Compared to
what?" "Says who?" and, hardest of all to nail down, "Why?"

Answers to the first two boil down to "You name it" and "Who do you
think?" But trying to explain why a piece of writing wipes the floor
with just about anything else published this year is, necessarily,
trickier. Pynchon's foreword expertly re-creates the atmosphere
surrounding the composition and reception of "Nineteen Eighty-Four,"
but any gifted literary historian might have managed that. He
articulates an unsentimental humanism relevant to developing events,
but an uncommonly perceptive political essayist might have done the
same. Where Pynchon doesn't just outpace but laps the rest of the
field is in his incomparably supple style.

Modulating down the ages from the 18th century baroque of "Mason &
Dixon" to the 1940s bebop of "Gravity's Rainbow" to "Vineland's"
breathless Deadhead riffs, Pynchon's underlying verbal music stays
ever recognizable, unique as a great reed player's embouchure. For the
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" intro, Pynchon returns to his signature
nonfiction voice: postdoctoral yet cheerfully sophomoric, sad yet
undespairing, as expressive in its alternation of long notes with
short as an SOS. It's an instrument tuned and retuned in more than 40
years of occasional essays, reviews and liner notes -- forming,
incidentally, one of the great uncollected anthologies in American
letters. Here's a snatch of the "Nineteen Eighty-Four" introduction,
picked less for its considerable power than for the way Pynchon, four
of whose six books are historical novels, relates Orwell's anxious age
to our own:

'THE WILL TO FASCISM'

"Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to
fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had
perhaps not yet even come into its own -- the corruption of spirit,
the irresistible human addiction to power, were already long in place,
all well-known aspects of the Third Reich and Stalin's U.S.S.R., even
the British Labour party -- like first drafts of a terrible future.
What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the
United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?"

This isn't quite Pynchon at his best. In a sentence that begins in
1948, does Hitler really belong on a list of fascist regimes "long in
place"? And do those two dashes signal interruption and resumption, or
merely consecutive interruptions? Always a question. But the passage
swings like crazy, and it introduces the familiar Pynchon theme that
may, together with his love of individual liberty and his wariness of
transnational corporations, speak most urgently to our time. It's what
he calls here "the will to fascism," the eternal willingness of
Orwell's proles and Pynchon's beloved, sheepish schlemihls to scoot
over and leave the driving to Daddy.

Fascism's hypnotic fascination also crops up in Pynchon's great
California novel "Vineland," whose heroine Frenesi's social conscience
is forever at war with her weakness for men in uniform -- her literal
love for Big Brother. Some bushy-tailed editor at Plume must have
known "Vineland" awfully well to hope they could solicit Pynchon's
intro and get a yes, as that novel represents about the only place in
Pynchon's entire back catalog where he even hints at his debt to
Orwell.

Pynchon set "Vineland" in the year 1984, but that isn't the half of
it. He also used such Orwellian imagery as a nightmare television that
announces, "From now on, I'm watching you," and a series of regular
roadside busts whose eyes follow anyone driving by -- recalling the
Big Brother posters in the stairwell on the first page of "Nineteen
Eighty-Four." More than any incidental and possibly unconscious
allusions, though, what links Pynchon with Orwell is the quality of
being what Orwell called, in his 1939 essay on Dickens, "generously
angry." (By the way, Michael Krasny's "Forum" book club 'takes up
"Vineland" at 10 a.m. May 26 on KQED.)

But the idea behind the Plume introduction was presumably for Pynchon
to illuminate Orwell, not the other way around. Luckily, it works both
ways. Pynchon has taken a book few Americans get out of high school
without at least pretending to have understood and found something
genuinely fresh in it. For instance, maybe most importantly, Pynchon's
essay uses "Nineteen Eighty- Four's" almost always skipped Appendix,
"The Principles of Newspeak," to reverse-engineer a crack of daylight
into Orwell's hitherto unforgiving midnight of an ending.

A THING OF THE PAST?

Pynchon maintains that, "from its first sentence, 'The Principles of
Newspeak' is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest
some later piece of history, post-1984, in which Newspeak has become
literally a thing of the past. . . . In its hints of restoration and
redemption, perhaps 'The Principles of Newspeak' serves as a way to
brighten an otherwise bleakly pessimistic ending -- sending us back
out into the streets of our own dystopia whistling a slightly happier
tune than the end of the story by itself would have warranted."
According to Pynchon's secondary research, Orwell risked 40,000
British pounds to keep this supposedly vestigial appendix, which the
Book-of-the-Month Club found anti-climactic, right where it was -- and
is.

Thanks to Pynchon's close reading of other Orwelliana, and of Michael
Shelden's 1991 authorized biography -- an interesting if unsurprising
choice, considering the famously private Pynchon's dubiousness about
unauthorized digging -- this new introduction to "Nineteen
Eighty-Four" ultimately lets readers eavesdrop on some glorious,
death-defying shoptalk between two of the 20th century's greatest
writers. Once in a great while, only superlatives will do.

E-mail David Kipen at dkipen at sfchronicle.com.

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