After Tragedy: The Thomas Pynchon Scratchpad

[Dave Monroe]

Saturday, December 23, 2006
After Tragedy: The Thomas Pynchon Scratchpad
Posted by Joseph Kugelmass on 12/23/06 at 05:50 AM

In this post, I grapple with my own search for a successor to a rather
embarrassing interest in Tom Robbins, Jack Kerouac, and Henry
Miller—somebody who could complement the problematic works of Hermann
Hesse. I am also trying to describe an alternative to the modernist
tragedians, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger.

I claim to find this alternative, successor, and complement in Thomas
Pynchon, because of The Crying of Lot 49. Included here are some close
readings of The Crying of Lot 49 that may remind you to open it again
at random, or intrigue you into reading it....

[...]


... Enter Pynchon and The Crying of Lot 49, and the word “Tristero.”

Tristero is a reference to the philosopher’s stone, via Hermes
Trismegistus, and the allegory of that stone, capable of turning lead
into gold, is the allegory for Pynchon of the possibilities of
metaphor, “another set of possibilities to replace those that had
conditioned the land to accept any San Narciso among its most tender
flesh without a reflex or a cry.” This is still the dream he’s hunting
down in Against The Day: the task of re-drawing the map of America,
and the whole industrialized world, such that many Americas (by which
Pynchon would mean something like many undergrounds of different
common, intellectual projects) could exist spontaneously, undertaken
in freedom.

These connections between people are necessarily coded, and not
universally visible; the intimacy of the project or of the love affair
demands it (hence the connotation of the secret “tryst” in Tristero).

The symbol of the Tristero is the post-horn, meaning the time after
the sounding of the trumpet: “I heard behind me a loud voice, as of a
trumpet, saying ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’ “ (Rev. 1:11). Pynchon
makes the parallel explicit: “Passerine spread his arms in a gesture
that seemed to belong to the priesthood of some remote culture;
perhaps to a descending angel. The auctioneer cleared his throat.
Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of Lot 49.”

It makes little sense to call Pynchon post-modern. The man is
post-apocalyptic, on the sworn evidence of his own metaphors, and
post-tragic or post-traumatic also. For Pynchon, the apocalypse is the
moment where the mechanism, the mechanical in thought and deed,
becomes totally ascendant:

    Creation was a vast, intricate machine. But one part of it, the
Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest
ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute
automatism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts
into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow
those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the
gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated
horror, and this was to prove fatal.

If we ask ourselves what alternative exists to this triumph of the
mechanical system, in Pynchon’s novel, it turns out to be a curiosity
about alternatives. This is curiosity about what the lethal apocalypse
has remaindered, exactly in the sense of the remaindered books in
Zapf’s Used Books, and in the sense that Oedipa has survived the death
of Inverarity ("invariety") and his San Narciso empire. (Also in the
sense of the remaindered “zero” I discussed in the post on Paul de
Man. “Tristero” of course contains the word zero as a complement to
the triad.) It is the purest of intellectual enterprises: the
suspension of the self in the name of the search, adventure qua
adventure.

In other words, the dead genre-hopping and dead virtuosity of Robbins
has been transformed here into the great narrative of curiosity (as it
probably always was, with Robbins shamelessly ripping Pynchon off, and
both of them stealing from Joyce). What has become of the mystery
plot? It has become a plot about how Oedipa constructs meaning, even
when she knows that the resolution of the mystery is also a moment of
death:

    San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant,
spherical, the sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the
stars and struck lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her;
became a name again, was assumed back into the American continuity and
crust and mantle. Pierce Inverarity was really dead.

    “It’s over,” she said, “They’ve saturated me. From here on I’ll
only close them out. You’re free. Released. You can tell me."

But the man to whom Oedipa tells this is already lost. Like the
victims of forgetting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he has
been unwilling to move past the completed hermetic circle (sphere) of
loss and trauma back the beginning with another love, instead choosing
to isolate himself as a member of Inamorati Anonymous. In Pynchon’s
world, love and curiosity are the same thing.

What happened to the fantasy plot? It became a plot about the function
of metaphor; the catachresis, or original error that brings a metaphor
to life, becomes a miracle:

    “The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor not only
verbally graceful, but also objectively true.”
    “But what,” she felt like some kind of a heretic, “if the Demon
exists only because the two equations look alike? Because of the
metaphor?”

    “You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another
world’s intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist
peacefully, but when we do touch there’s cataclysm. Like the church we
hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions
break out spontaneous and leaderless."

So the metaphor is middle term, the third term, between two things:
between two specific things, like information and thermodynamics in
the case of Maxwell’s Demon, and between the thinking subject (Oedipa)
and the impersonal “power spectra” of discourse (as revealed to Mucho
Maas in his hallucinatory perfect knowledge of corporate music). Hence
Tri-stero, triad. It is the fantasy plot: miracle, alchemy, out of
catachresis.

What becomes of Robbins’s seduction plot? It’s there as the first
adulterous encounter between Metzger and Oedipa, with its wonderfully
comic devolution into Oedipa wearing—supplemented by—every piece of
clothing she can wear:

    So began, for Oedipa, the languid, sinister blooming of The
Tristero. [...] As if the breakaway gowns, net bras, jeweled garters
and G-strings of historical figuration that would wall away were
layered dense as Oedipa’s own street clothes in that game with Metzger
in front of the Baby Igor movie; as if a plunge toward dawn indefinite
black hours long would indeed be necessary before The Tristero could
be revealed in its terrible nakedness.

In other words, the seduction narrative (the striptease game) turns
into the irony of the search for truth, for an unveiling which instead
magnetizes an increasing number of objects (clothes) and events to it
through unforeseen tunnels of historical figuration. The glittering
and uncountable world is the result of the attempt to unveil a truth.

So Pynchon is a Robbins for me, one who is not outgrowable. What he
does is certainly not the only possible function of literature. He has
merely created a story about the way narrative functions—the interplay
of love and curiosity, the irresistible progress forward through
revelations, and backwards through meanings, the re-minting of the
world by metaphor, the symbolic death of final closure. In other
words, he has created a story about the very peculiar and
indispensable reason for prose, for teaching, and writing, and reading
it.

That returns us to the beginning of this post, and to the antipode of
fatalist tragedy. For Fitzgerald, there is nothing after the
cataclysm, except perhaps Nick Carraway’s bitter moralism. I remember
that I was supposed to write something in defense of sad songs but I
never got around to it. I was going to claim that listening to them
wasn’t a sad experience, and that reading tragic books isn’t sad
either. When I think about that music and those novels, I want to call
it the traumatic sublime. The experience of a cul-de-sac, of failure
and loss, is a humanising and perhaps inevitable experience. One ought
to value tragedy, following the apocalyptic doom-feeling (cf. “The Pit
and the Pendulum” or anything else by Poe) to its limit and moment of
transformation. One discovers oneself still alive, conscious, albeit
in an afterlife of sorts. Think of the sympathy and humility of this
cry, recently uttered by Spurious (quoting his odd friend W.):

    I keep a mental list of W.’s favourite questions, which he
constantly asks me so as to ask himself. ‘At what point did you
realise that you would amount to nothing?’; ‘When was it that you
first became aware you would be nothing but a failure?’; ‘When you
look back at your life, what do you see?’; ‘How is it that you know
what greatness is, and that you will never, ever reach it it?’

    ‘What does it mean to you that your life has amounted to
nothing?’, W. asks me with great seriousness.

But there must be an end to such narratives of failure. I would like
to undertake a study of the picaresque novel as an alternative to
tragedy, leading from Cervantes and Tristram Shandy all the way to
Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow. What is so miraculous about the
characters in Pynchon is that they live phoenix lives, as people
renewed by words and the loves that are circuits of words:

    The voices before and after the dead man’s that had phoned at
random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among
the dial’s ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would
reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult,
filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into
being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.

As I implied in the recent post on Nabokov and the symptom, every
cul-de-sac is presumably necessary at the moment Oedipa describes, the
moment of saturation. However, it is also the Scurvhamite definition
of evil, because at the dead-end thought becomes mechanism, fatalistic
and helpless.  At the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, the failure
of the father in Cashiered is followed by the words “The End,” and the
beginning of Oedipa’s adventure.

For Pynchon, part of oneself must be capable of dying, of returning to
dumb materiality: “Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either
be a transcendental meaning, or only the earth.” The other part of
oneself, still alive, contains the seed of a life transfigured. That
is how the Restoration comedy of Thomas Pynchon understands
Invararity’s death, how Joyce understand’s Rudy’s death, how Sterne
and Voltaire comprehend the aftermath of war. As Oedipa guesses,
indefinite long black hours are necessary before the past can receive
its burial and become “only the earth,” material but out of reckoning,
its lacerations eclipsed by other metaphors.

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/after_tragedy_the_thomas_pynchon_scratchpad/