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

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Since the mail arrived in the archives with the title of Cowart's article
cut off in the subject-line, I send it again.
kfl

----------------------------------------
> From: lorentzen at hotmail.de
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Pynchon & Joyce: What's similar and what's not/: Cowart's "Attenuated Postmodernism"
> Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:18:07 +0100
>
>
>
>
> 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+
>
>