Pynchon & Joyce: What's similar and what's not/: Cowart's "Attenuated Postmodernism"

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

The following comes from David Cowart's article which was written in
1990. You can read it in "The Vineland Papers" or, if subscribed, here:

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=Jl4cMGrqmRF1b3ryjbcJ9mJBnGd7PrvCJxGTpfnpH0HTTvpVX4LH!-1129864051!1622002831?docId=95172172


"Joyce's first book, DUBLINERS (1914), is a meticulously structured set of
linked fictions that anatomize a culture. Pynchon's V (1963), a highly episodic
and fragmented novel that at least one early reviewer (Meixner) took to be a
congeries of cobbled together pieces of collegiate creative writing courses,
is also meticulously structured, also a cultural anatomy. DUBLINERS moves towards
a final version of snowy paralysis, V toward the triumph of the inanimate.V was
followed in 1966 by THE CRYING OF LOT 49, in which the failure of American promise
gradually manifests itself to the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, whose age (twenty-eight
in 1964, the novel's present), education (Cornell), and places of travel and
residence (Mexico and California) seem to make her a female Thomas Pynchon. A kind
of oblique spiritual autobiography or conversion narrative, LOT 49 is Pynchon's 
portrait of the artist in youth and, as such, corresponds to Joyce's autobiographical 
novel, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (1916)./ The seven-year period between 
LOT 49 (1966) and GRAVITY's RAINBOW (1973) corresponds to the six-year period between
PORTRAIT (1916) and ULYSSES (1922). GRAVITY's RAINBOW and ULYSSES are quests,'encyclopedic'
fictions that, epic in score, catalog whole cultures with broad attention to the
literary and historical past. Each is, in its own way, a strange amalgam of family
romance and Telemachiad: Stephen Dedalus discovers a father in Leopold Bloom, Tyrone
Slothrop in the evil scientist Dr. Lazslo Jamf. Stephen, of course, is Joyce's
autobiographical character, and perhaps one recognizes a further element of
autobiography in the Pynchon novel too, inasmuch as it concerns a person who, like
the author, simply fades from sight after embarking on a quest that makes him the
'Zone's newest celebrity' (377) and brings him face to face with the possibility that
Western culture "might be in love, in sexual love" (738), with its own death. (...)
But the parallel falters: VINELAND is not the postmodern FINNEGANS WAKE. At most
one can say that Vineland County, California, is as mytic a landscape as 'Howth,
Castle and Environs" and the River Liffey. One can note, too, that Leif Ericson, who
gave America its first name and Pynchon his title, is among the innumerable strands
in the weave of the WAKE: 'lief eurekason and his undishcovery of americle' (326).
But these are frail and exigious crossties for continuing the parallel rails laid
thus far. The breakdown in the parallels suggests that the fate reserved for Pynchon's
aesthetic differs radically from that reserved for Joyce's. Modernism, it seems, was
fated to end with a bang, postmodernism with a whimper. (...) [Pynchon] remains the
only contemporary writer whose grasp of history's mythic dimensions merits comparison
with that of Joyce --- and he may yet present us with a fiction on the scale of that
writer's last book. One doubts that he spent the seventeen years after GRAVITY's RAINBOW
on VINELAND alone. Who knows what post-postmodern extravaganza may follow in its wake?"

(David Cowart: ATTENUATED POSTMODERNISM: Pynchon's Vineland, pp. 4, 5, 12 in:
THE VINELAND PAPERS. Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel, ed. by Geoffrey Green et al.)
 
Remember, this was written in 1990. According to my impression, Cowart, who had 
probably been expecting some kinda Über-GR, can hardly hide his disappointment. Perhaps
he'd put some things more mildly by now. For me, Vineland's uniqueness lies in the fact
that Pynchon here tried to do something new, something everybody can understand, something
with round characters plus a straight ridden plot.The leitmotifs remain the same, but
outlandish history as well as exotic European or African places have been taken away from
the board. With M&D and AtD this (and not only this) changed once more. So, are AtD and M&D
the "post-postmodern extravaganza" Cowart was dreaming of? And how would these books fit 
into the Pynchon/Joyce-comparison?
 
 
KFL+