IVIV (0) Dustjacket

[Tore Rye Andersen]

David Payne: 

> 4. Are there meaningful constellations in the stars on the back 
> of the dustjacket?
 
If you smoke enough dope, I'm sure there is. But I thought of exactly
the same thing (and even spent a fruitless minute trying to identify 
meaningful patterns in the stars). The back of the jacket reminds me 
of this bit from Lot 49:
 
"Under the symbol she'd copied off the latrine wall of The Scope into
her memo book, she wrote *Shall I project a world?* If not project
then at least flash some arrow on the dome to skitter among constellations
and trace out your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross. Anything might help." (82)

> 5. What's with the way that some covers say "a novel" and others do not?
 
That's a very interesting question, and it seems that Penguin Press had
a hard time deciding whether to label IV a novel or not. The design has
shifted back and forth a number of times, and even though the published
version says "a novel" on the front cover, the image displayed on Penguin's
website doesn't:

http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781594202247,00.html?Inherent_Vice_Thomas_Pynchon
 
- and neither does the cover of the Advance Uncorrected Proof, as shown here:
 
http://www.thomaspynchon.com/inherent-vice.html
 
On the one hand, the genre label on the cover of IV does seem rather 
innocent. Many American books are identified on the cover as “a novel,” 
and in most cases this label should just be considered a piece of helpful 
consumer guidance. On the other hand, I would say that this seemingly 
innocent label does have a say in how we approach the work in question. 
Of course, the vast majority of long, fictional prose works are novels, 
so the label would seem to state the obvious. I do think, however, that 
the explicit categorization of the text as a novel already in advance 
guides the reception along certain paths while cutting it off from other 
paths. 
 
Take GR, for instance, which didn't classify itself as a novel in 1973. 
Even though most critics predictably enough considered the work a novel 
anyway, the lack of a publisher- and/or author-sanctioned genre label 
allowed a few critics to take other, more unconventional approaches to 
the text. In 1976 Edward Mendelson began his essay on Gravity’s Rainbow 
with the following observation:
 
"In both its range and, one may predict, its cultural position, Gravity’s 
Rainbow recalls only a few books in the Western tradition. To refer to it 
as a novel is convenient, but to read it as a novel – as a narrative of 
individuals and their social and psychological relations – is to misconstrue 
it. Although the genre that now includes Gravity’s Rainbow is demonstrably 
the most important single genre in Western literature of the Renaissance 
and after, it has never previously been identified. Gravity’s Rainbow is 
an encyclopedic narrative [...]." 
 
And in his review of AtD Luc Sante writes of Pynchon’s “impatience with 
the limits of the novel form,” argues that “Pynchon thinks on a different 
scale from most novelists, to the point where you’d almost want to find 
another word for the sort of thing he does,” and characterizes his previous 
works as “extended prose poems.”
 
Of course Mendelson and Sante could have made the same arguments even if 
GR HAD labeled itself "a novel," but their attempts to consider Pynchon’s 
works outside the bounds of the novel genre would have been much less 
obvious if Pynchon or Viking from the beginning had categorized GR as a 
novel. The absent genre label on GR simply expands the limits of what can 
be said of the text and enables alternative contextualizations, across usual 
genre divisions. 
 
Case in point: David Foster Wallace's wonderful Infinite Jest does share a 
number of formal and thematic similarities with GR, and it exhibits a
similar desire to experiment with the limits of the novel form. Still, on
the front cover of IJ, in a metallic, shiny and very visible oval, IJ
proudly proclaims itself "a novel," and despite its formal innovations it
has had to settle for being considered just that by the critics.
 
http://booksellercrow.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/01/20/infinite_jest_cover.jpg

 
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