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ARCHIVE / 2013 / OCTOBER
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REVIEW — From the October 2013 issue
First Family, Second Life
Thomas Pynchon goes online
By Joshua Cohen





Single Page
Printing Page
Discussed in this essay:
Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press. 496 pages. $28.95.
P
inco de Normandie sailed to England with William the Conqueror. His
son, Hugh, held seven “knights’ fees in Lincolnshire” and four
“bovates in Friskney.” Four centuries later, his descendant Edward
Pynchon was ennobled and granted a coat of arms “per bend argent and
sable, three roundles with a bordure engrailed, counterchanged.” By
then the Pincheuns had settled snugly into gentry life in Essex.
Nicholas Pinchon became High Sheriff of London in 1533, and his son,
or nephew, John married Jane Empson, daughter of Sir Richard Empson, a
minister to, and casualty of, the doomed regime of Henry VII. John’s
son was also John, and his son was William Pynchon, who in 1630 sailed
with John Winthrop to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of which he
was elected treasurer. He established the towns of Roxbury and, while
pursuing the fur trade, Springfield, where he deposed the accused
witches in the trial preceding Salem. He served as model for Colonel
Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, and in 1650
wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, whose critique of
Puritan Calvinism caused it to be burned in Boston and to become the
New World’s first banned book, though only nine copies survived the
pyre. (Among those who voted against the censure was William
Hauthorne, Hawthorne’s first colonist ancestor.) This was the
proto-American literary debut of a family that later included the
Reverend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (1823–1904), president of Trinity
College, Hartford, and author of The Chemical Forces:
Heat–Light–Electricity . . . An Introduction to Chemical Physics; Dr.
Edwin Pynchon (1856–1914), author of “Surgical Correction of
Deformities of the Nasal Septum”; and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., born
in 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, author of V., The Crying of Lot
49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Slow Learner, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against
the Day, Inherent Vice, and now Bleeding Edge.

Anyone who’s written at the end of so long and distinguished a line
has been faced with a choice: either embrace the legacy or attempt to
disassociate from it. (Hawthorne added the w to distance himself from
John Hathorne, cruelest of the Salem magistrates.) This, of course, is
merely a more public version of the decision of whether, and how, to
transmute individual experience into prose. Thomas Pynchon — the most
private, or publicly private, of American novelists — has been
considering such disclosures for half a century now, in the way he’s
handled both his famous family in his work and his own fame in life.
The single overtly autobiographical statement he has provided to date
appears in the introduction to a collection of his early and only
short fiction, Slow Learner:
Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had
nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is
nearly the direct opposite. . . . [F]or in fact the fiction both
published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was
precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by
having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more
shared levels of the life we all really live.
I
’ve read that introduction a dozen times, and most of Pynchon’s novels
at least twice, yet I’m still not sure what to make of this assertion.
I’m still not sure whether V. (1963) — which takes as its premise the
search for a mysterious, free-floating signifier that might be a woman
named Victoria, and/or Veronica, and/or an incarnation of the goddess
Venus, and/or the city of Valletta, and/or victory in WWI and/or WWII
— becomes any clearer with the knowledge that Pynchon wrote it after
serving in the Navy and attending Cornell, where he audited lectures
by that shape-shifter Nabokov. Nor am I sure whether The Crying of Lot
49 (1966) — which concerns the machinations of a certain Yoyodyne,
“one of the giants of the aerospace industry” — is enriched by the
information that between 1960 and 1962 Pynchon lived in Seattle and
worked for Boeing as a technical writer for the Bomarc
interceptor-missile project. Then again, it strikes me that Pynchon’s
defense-contracting stint finds direct expression in Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973), that treatment of the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. But
I’m still confused as to whether I should read the hero of that novel
— Tyrone Slothrop, an American G.I. whose erections foretell the
ground-zero impacts of V-2s in London — as an embodiment of John
Winthrop or, because Slothrop’s ancestor William Slothrop is portrayed
as having published a controversial theological treatise called On
Preterition, as a surrogate for the author himself.
Gravity’s Rainbow was written by hand on quadrille engineering paper,
and on Kool cigarettes, coffee, and cheeseburgers (to name just the
legal substances), in Mexico City and in a whitewashed bungalow on
33rd Street in Manhattan Beach, California. The 1974 Pulitzer Prize
committee refused to honor the novel, despite the jurors’ unanimous
recommendation (the committee called it “turgid” and “overwritten,”
“obscene” and “unreadable”). But it went on to win the National Book
Award in 1974, for which ceremony Pynchon dispatched a comedian,
“Professor” Irwin Corey, to deliver a nonsensical improvised speech.
In the Eighties, Pynchon left his agent, Candida Donadio, to be
represented by Melanie Jackson, great-granddaughter of Theodore
Roosevelt and granddaughter of Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court
justice and Nuremberg prosecutor. The two married in the Nineties and
had a son, Jackson, who was such a fan of The Simpsons that Pynchon
made a cameo (his animation was drawn with a paper bag instead of a
head). Only ten images of Pynchon are publicly available, including a
video captured by CNN in 1997 that occasioned this rebuke: “ ‘Recluse’
is a code word generated by journalists . . . meaning ‘doesn’t like to
talk to reporters.’ ” Then there’s the photo published by the Times of
London in 1997, which provoked legal threats from Henry Holt,
Pynchon’s publisher at the time.
What else? Pynchon was raised Catholic and attended Mass. He was the
best friend of Richard Fariña (author of Been Down So Long It Looks
Like Up to Me) and the best man at Fariña’s wedding to Mimi Baez
(Joan’s sister). He was reportedly so ashamed of his Bugs Bunny teeth
that he underwent extensive cosmetic dental surgery . . .
All this information came to me via the Internet, which has
established Pynchon as its literary divinity. Not Philip K. Dick, not
William Gibson — it’s Pynchon who commands the largest and loudest
community online. It’s a congregation of fanboys, academics,
techno-anarchists, wannabe fictioneers, parents’ basement–dwellers,
and burnouts — some using real names, some using fake names, many
anonymous — who analyze and squabble over every scrap of the Shroud
and sliver of the Cross, in search of the Message.
In the early days of home-use Internet, back when the first major
e-marketer appeared under the sobriquet Yoyodyne (sold to Yahoo in
1998 for $30 million in stock), users of Yahoo and AOL message boards
and chat rooms asserted that Pynchon was J. D. Salinger or the
Unabomber, a Branch Davidian or “Wanda Tinasky,” who in witty
mock-Pynchonian letters to the editors of the Anderson Valley
Advertiser identified “herself” as a bag lady living under a bridge in
northern California. With the gradual uploading of scholarship in the
form of journal PDFs and dissertation .docs, the Internet got its act
together, and by the mid-Nineties the digital Pynchonverse had become
a disciplined research collective of amateurs and professionals,
though one that took a break every toke or two to speculate wildly.
Hey, get a load of this — Pynchon’s working on a novel about Lewis &
Clark (rather, Mason & Dixon); Michael Naumann, past publisher of
Henry Holt and former German minister of culture, helped Pynchon
gather materials concerning the David Hilbert circle in Göttingen, and
said the author’s next book would trace the amours of the Russian
mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (material appearing in Against the
Day). Pynchon himself never participated in any of this, of course,
though there were at least a dozen contributors I can remember who
claimed to be him, or were suspected of being him. My favorite posted
under the webonym Martin Scribler, and if you’re bored already:
waste.org.
S
erious literary discussion on the Internet began with Pynchon fans —
which is just the type of generalization to spark a flame war with the
science-fiction freaks, who’d claim that the Pynchonites showed up
late to the party. I certainly did. It was 1994, and I was thirteen or
fourteen when I found the Playboys in the basement and the Pynchon
novels on a shelf in my father’s office. On the floor between was the
new computer, a Gateway. Internet porn was difficult to find and slow
to load, but the Pynchon guides, being text-based, were instantly
gratifying. I read the threads — the rumor and gossip arbitrage,
conspiracy swaps and paranoia — as if they were stray strands of
Pynchon’s own narratology. I had a 28.8k dial-up modem and, despite
all Pynchon’s warnings about technocracy’s incursions, no notion of
what surveillance and social control lay ahead.
It was the Web that educated me about contemporary literature, not
through any primary or even secondary texts that were published there,
but through its use. To go online was to experience in life what
Pynchon — and his heirs closer to my own generation, like William T.
Vollmann and David Foster Wallace — were working toward in fiction: a
plot that proceeded not by the relationships developed by the
characters (“people”) but by the relationships to be discerned among
institutions (businesses, governments), objects (missiles, erections),
and concepts (hippie-dippie Free Love and the German Liebestod). I
read about Modernism — big M — and postmodernism — small p — thanks to
links sent to me by strange anagrammatic screen names, and if I
couldn’t get through Fredric Jameson yet, I could get through a
GeoCities site that summarized his work. Modernism was something made
by and intended for a small but discerning audience; postmodernism, by
contrast, had popular or populist aspirations — it wanted to be
famous, and complex! It wanted money, and respect! The two movements
connected in the “systems novel,” a phrase minted by the critic Tom
LeClair to describe the methods of John Barth, Robert Coover, Don
DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Ursula LeGuin, Joseph McElroy
— and Pynchon.
Before these writers, books deployed closed systems of symbols that,
if untangled, provided a substrate of meaning separate from, but
communicating with, the action and dialogue (think of Fitzgerald’s ad
for Dr. T. J. Eckleburg or Hemingway’s bullfighting). But these new
writers favored books that operated on open systems, that treated the
entire world symbolically, and that were inextricably enmeshed with
the literary whole (think of the contrast between twentieth-century
sensibility and eighteenth-century language in Mason & Dixon, or the
palimpsest of genres — scientific, spy thriller, teen adventure,
western — in Against the Day). Perhaps the paragon of the systems
novel’s associative processes is the Byron the Bulb episode of
Gravity’s Rainbow. An ostensibly immortal lightbulb named Byron
illuminates, among other places, “an all-girl opium den” and “the home
of a glass-blower who is afraid of the night” in Weimar Berlin, the
brothel of a Hamburg prostitute whose “customer tonight is a
cost-accountant who likes to have bulbs screwed into his asshole,” and
the bunk of a Nazi scientist in a subterranean rocket factory in
Nordhausen. It’s a section whose fifteen-year time frame also
accommodates examinations of “ ‘Phoebus,’ the international light-bulb
cartel, headquartered in Switzerland”; the mutual business interests
of General Electric and Krupp; the production of filaments; and the
synthesis of tungsten carbide.
Fiction has long been described in the terms of a coeval technology,
at least since the fade of the vacuum tube, but it was the genius of
the systems novelists to produce fiction expressly along the same
schematics. In the Seventies their novels could be said to function
like transistors, while in the Eighties they could be said to function
like integrated circuits. By the Nineties, however, systems technique
had been usurped online: the Internet replicated its protocols, while
the Web replicated its surface-shifting — the rapidly changing scenes,
the characters introduced, developed, then dropped.
Back when I frequented Amazon — before my favorite independent
bookstores began closing and I quit the site, cold turkey, in 2006 — I
was fascinated by how much it resembled the novels I was buying on it:
I’d click on a book by Pynchon, and then lower down or on a sidebar of
the page I’d find other titles to add to my cart, suggestions
generated by the site’s algorithms, but also supplied by other users.
People who bought Mason & Dixon also bought Vineland; if I clicked, I
found that people who bought Vineland also bought books about the
history of the FBI, the CIA, and the War on Drugs, and from there I’d
be just a click or two away from the people who also bought
fallout-shelter survival kits, pallets of canned meat, bottled water,
and tinfoil. Wikipedia’s debut reinforced this organizational lesson.
As of the date of this writing, the voluminous Thomas Pynchon wiki —
which if printed out would surely eclipse the oeuvre of its subject —
links to a list of American tax resisters (Pynchon refused to pay any
war-designated tax increase in 1968); the American tax resisters wiki
links to the Redemption Movement (a group maintaining that when
America abandoned the gold standard, in 1933, it continued to back its
debts by pledging its citizens’ lives to foreign governments as
collateral); which in turn links to the wiki for The Matrix (1999);
linking to Laurence Fishburne; linking, no doubt, to Kevin Bacon.
W
hen news of the publication of Bleeding Edge went around Twitter this
spring, it set off a surge of chatter on the usual sites, but not for
the usual reasons. This wasn’t just another Pynchon book; this wasn’t
even just another Pynchon book with the Internet in the margins
(ARPANET, which was developed in the Sixties and Seventies by an arm
of the American military, had a cameo in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice).
Rather, this would be a book dramatizing it all front and center, “a
historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet,”
according to the P.R. copy. I was excited, but also wary. As a reader
I was hoping for Pynchon’s ultimate reckoning with the surveillance
state he’d been railing against since the reign of J. Edgar Hoover — a
culminant tilt at an institution of spying and mass mind-manipulation
more powerful, and more voluntarily submitted to, than anything ever
dreamed up by Reagan, Nixon, the KGB, the Stasi, or the Nazi SS. But
as a novelist I also worried about how Pynchon would write about the
very technology that has plagiarized his methods, and that has made
the sporadic lapses of fact in his meticulous research — indeed, that
has made his face — a matter of public record.[*]Ahem, ahem: the novel
was also about 9/11.
[*] The day after the book’s galley was delivered to me — this was
just after the Prism scandal broke — I took it along to a dermatology
appointment and started reading it on the subway. Immediately a man
stomped across the car and without saying anything stuck out his
iPhone and snapped a shot of the cover. He was white, stocky, about
5'6", and jumped out at West 4th Street — in other words,
demographically representative. Later that evening I found the pic
posted online. It had already received a few hundred likes. In the
weeks that followed, Bleeding Edge galleys appeared on eBay, being
auctioned — being purchased — for upwards of $1,500.
“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting
edge” — so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the
novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers
such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor
scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a
presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the
towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall
Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron,
lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or
that was actually hyped to have existed — a real estate figment like
NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (most of that area was
originally just the Village).
Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of
generic deracinated White People who went out West like the
prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Zen
gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for grit
— or at least for the yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The
other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying — or not
yet postidentity — strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color:
the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the
social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the
“authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.
Meanwhile, “on the Yupper West Side” — Pynchon’s own neighborhood —
Maxine Tarnow is just trying to get her life back together. She’s a
gun-toting fraud investigator who’s recently had her certification
revoked for unwittingly abetting an embezzlement, and a doting single
mother of two precocious young boys, Ziggy and Otis, whose
stock-trader father, Horst Loeffler, keeps offices in the World Trade
Center and casual mistresses throughout the boroughs. Filmmaker Reg
Despard, hired by a computer-security firm called hashslingrz to make
an in-house documentary, retains Maxine to background-check his
employer’s finances once his access is curtailed by CEO Gabriel Ice,
“One of the boy billionaires who walked away in one piece when the
dotcom fever broke.” This would be the same Ice who’s after the source
code for a clandestine second-life website called DeepArcher
(pronounced “departure”), developed by Maxine’s acquaintances Lucas
and Justin, two Valley vets out to raise a ruckus, and capital, in the
Alley.
Maxine’s inquiries into DeepArcher and hashslingrz serve as the book’s
basic binary. The former gets her caught up in an insomniac second
life in which she wanders through an unregulated cyberniche, a “framed
lucid dream,” that morphs in appearance and purpose according to user
input — mediascapes of ghetto squalor one moment and pristine desert
the next, all “in shadow-modulated 256-color daylight, no titles, no
music,” untainted by advertising. The latter entangles her in the
physical world, what Pynchon calls “meatspace,” investigating a host
of sketchy (in every sense) personalities: Nicholas Windust, a federal
agent whose first job was “spotting for the planes that bombed the
presidential palace and killed Salvador Allende” on 9/11/73, and who
went on to run “interrogation enhancement” and “noncompliant-subject
relocation” squads in South and Central America; Avi, Maxine’s
brother-in-law, a recovering Mossad agent; Rocky, a fugazi Cosa Nostra
venture capitalist; Igor and his stooges Misha and Grisha, Russian
gangsters who’ve invested with Bernie Madoff. All or some of these
characters point to the idea that the U.S. government, or rogue
elements within it, was aware of and maybe even plotted — perhaps in
league with Ice — the 9/11 attacks (for which readers will have to
wait until page 316).
Obviously, the opposite might also be the truth. Ice, through his
partners in the Middle East and shell companies in the Emirates, might
be a hero, if not of America then of the right — laundering money for
the undisclosed locations of the “war on terror,” coming soon to a
screen near you.
But wait, there’s more — if you enjoyed 9/11, you might also enjoy red
herring, which aren’t native to the coast of Long Island, unlike the
Montauk Project. This actual paranormal conspiracy theory — regarded
as the successor to the Philadelphia Experiment — is, in Pynchon’s
telling, “a kind of boot camp for military time travelers” that
kidnaps, starves, beats, and sodomizes American preadolescents. They —
“Boys, typically” — are trained to become the agents of tomorrow, or
yesterday, “Assigned to secret cadres to be sent on government
missions back and forth in Time, under orders to create alternative
histories which will benefit higher levels of command who have sent
them out.” Now, keep in mind that this explanation of the Montauk
Project, which is supposedly accessible by a tunnel under Ice’s
vacation property, comes to Maxine not in meatspace but in DeepArcher,
from an Adderall-addled “IT samurai” named Eric Outfield, or rather
from his avatar, whose “soul patch pulses incandescent green.”
P
age 316:
Maxine heads for work, puts her head in a local smoke shop to grab a
newspaper, and finds everybody freaking out and depressed at the same
time. Something bad is going on downtown. “A plane just crashed into
the World Trade Center,” according to the Indian guy behind the
counter.
“What, like a private plane?”
“A commercial jet.”
Uh-oh.
Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to
worse. All day long. At around noon the school calls and says they’re
shutting down for the day, could she please come and collect her kids.
Everybody’s on edge. Nods, headshakes, not a lot of social
conversation.
“Mom, was Dad down there at his office today?”
“He was
staying over at Jake’s last night, but I think he’s mostly been
working from his computer. So chances are he didn’t even go in.”
“But
you haven’t heard from him?”
“Everybody’s been trying to get through
to everybody, lines are swamped, he’ll call, I’m not worrying, don’t
you guys, OK?”
Maxine — part JAP, part MILF — consoles her guys, as does Pynchon’s
flattest style in what’s inevitably the book’s roughest stretch
(roughest to read and to write, I’d imagine). The novel’s zany
tangents and waves of punning fall away for a spell. We’re left with a
possibly husbandless woman on the couch alongside her possibly
fatherless children, who’ve temporarily forgotten their game
cartridges because the on-screen carnage is so compellingly
uncontrollable. That excerpt’s last quoted line and its implications
are key to every family’s sense of frustrated codependence. Sometimes
the phones work and sometimes they don’t, leaving Dad — Horst — in
limbo incommunicado, his fate in the hands of God, or Wolf Blitzer.
The attacks of 9/11 gave rise to bad invasions, bad occupations, and
bad laws, but one of their greatest impacts on the home front was how
they encouraged a society of total contact with a furious and mortal
urgency (which Pynchon reinforces by using the present tense).
Nowadays, to lose touch is to die; if you’re ever buried by rubble,
the first thing you do is call and pray that the signal’s strong
enough to let your last words live at least on voicemail. Before 9/11,
the online world was engaged with at home, in a chair, at a desk.
Having a cell phone — Pynchon prefers “mobile phone” — wasn’t a social
norm, let alone a requirement akin to having a heart, or a brain, or
lungs. In Bleeding Edge, cell phones ring fewer than a dozen times,
and their occasional presence merely accentuates their absence.
If one of the barest necessities of fiction is keeping two characters
apart for enough time for a misunderstanding to ensue — a
misunderstanding that can be resolved only by the protagonists
individually moving toward each other, and toward the book’s
conclusion — cell phones have become the chief antagonists of fiction.
Today, we’re rarely denied the opportunity of contact, and all
contacts — phone numbers and email addresses — can be digitally
exhumed. Pynchon, by setting his novel on the cusp of the attacks,
makes desperate comedy out of this last chance at inaccessibility,
this final dark and silent millennial moment. He does so by
exaggerating all the improbabilities and coincidence tricks of a
previous information revolution — that of the Victorian novel, whose
outlandishness was later called realism.
In the Victorian novel, chance is a mechanism of resolution: two
characters, separated for a bit, “suddenly” meet in a street, or at
the theater. In Pynchon’s books, chance is a religious or spiritual
mechanism. Meetings must have “meanings,” mysteries. In V., graffiti
in a toilet stall spurs an electricity seminar when the image turns
out to be a diagram for a band-pass filter. In Lot 49, the recurring
doodle of a muted postal horn leads to the exposure of an underground
mail network that has been passing correspondence via trash cans since
the French Revolution. Bleeding Edge has a cruder approach, familiar
from Pynchon’s other historical novels (Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason &
Dixon, and Against the Day), in which happenstance provides the
pretext for information exchange: Maxine is lazing by her office
window when she notices Igor’s limousine (its Cyrillic bumper sticker
translates as my other limo is a maybach); she gets in, only to find
March Kelleher, a renegade lefty blogger who just happens to be Ice’s
mother-in-law. March has to courier Igor’s Madoff money (thanks to
Maxine’s tip, Igor cashed out just in time) to Sid, March’s ex-husband
and a drug runner, up at “a dance club near Vermilyea.” Why not,
Maxine goes along; once the deal is done, Sid offers to return them to
the 79th Street Boat Basin in his antique motorboat, but the DEA gives
chase and the trio flee down the Hudson, losing their pursuers by the
Island of Meadows, a wetlands preserve just off the coast of Staten
Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. This boat ride is merely an excuse for
March and Sid to discuss their daughter, Tallis, and their son-in-law,
Ice, which itself is merely an excuse to dump tons of data on Maxine
and the reader both. But the indulgences are justified by Pynchon’s
beautiful way with the trash:
This little island reminds [Maxine] of something, and it takes her a
minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and
prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething
foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be
crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient
estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the
rest of it. Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers
after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in
its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised
by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index
and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless
ends.
All the events described above occur in Pynchon’s shortest sentences
and shortest paragraphs to date, in fewer than a dozen pages. The
result is a breathless major bandwidth rush and a dizzily profound
book about the Internet that accomplishes something of which the
Internet has rarely been capable. It doesn’t quite make the reader
believe that American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 were brought
down by Stinger missiles launched from a rooftop in Hell’s Kitchen,
but it does make the reader believe why and how someone else might
believe this — why and how March Kelleher might believe this — and
that, fellow citizens, is sympathy, or empathy, or literature.
H
ere’s another intrigue from the Internet, though this one is
verifiable: William Pynchon’s magistrate son, John, was a friend of
the colony’s road surveyor, Miles Morgan, “the hero of Springfield,”
who in 1675 defended the town against the Wampanoag tribe, and was the
forefather of J. P. Morgan (Pynchon was the presiding official at
Miles Morgan’s wedding). The Pynchon and Morgan families would go on
to maintain business ties for the next 300 years, until the stock
market crashed the country into Depression. By that time, Pynchon &
Co. had become one of America’s most prominent brokerages (and the
publisher of pamphlets surveying investment prospects, including
Electric Light and Power: A Survey of World Development). According to
Charles Hollander, writing in the journal Pynchon Notes, Pynchon & Co.
was destroyed by its brief liaison with Chase Bank — the Rockefeller
bank — in what might’ve been a speculation trap aimed at damaging this
close associate of the Morgans. The Pynchon family had to auction off
their property and furniture and, in debt from a reclamatory lawsuit,
senior partner George M. Pynchon Jr. committed suicide. In Hollander’s
reading, much of Pynchon’s fiction plays out as revenge against the
Rockefellers and their dismantling of the Morgan economy of steel,
coal, and railroads in favor of an economy of plastics, oil, and
weaponry.
Bleeding Edge, written during our Depression Redux, deals with the
next economy — the virtual — in which the Rockefellers aren’t the born
elite but the products of meritocracy. Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Bezos,
Jobs, Gates: six sons of American sprawl, three of whom are Jews, one
of whom is also a Soviet émigré; one born to a teenage mother and
adopted by a Cuban immigrant stepfather; another given up for adoption
at birth by his Syrian father and American mother. They are us and we
are them, not just biographically but in that we help create what they
sell us and improve their services — along with their fortunes — all
just by our use.
It follows that the old Pynchonite dichotomy of Us vs. Them doesn’t
apply anymore. In canonical Pynchon, when the military police closed
in, when the federales swooped down, there was always a stained
mattress to crash on in the Village, or a band of pot growers in
Mendocino County who’d stash you. You’d be safe there, in whichever
countercultural cult — the Whole Sick Crew (V.), or the People’s
Republic of Rock and Roll (Vineland); you’d be safe, that is, until
your friends got bought out, or sold themselves, and became agents,
too, or at least collaborating adults who read non-fiction or nothing
at all. If Pynchon’s characters were left behind by America, they
denied that America and terrorized only themselves. They regarded any
America that would reject them as fake, and only their own inner
America as real — a country not of grandly insistent progress and
Horatio Alger success, but of Henry Adams regret, and failure. A
country of the “preterite” — a characterization Pynchon attributed to
William Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow — meaning the passed-over, the
neglected, the abandoned; the Melvilles, not the Hawthornes.
Bleeding Edge, however, offers an indication that Pynchon has finally
given up on seeking the soul of the nation his family helped found.
For Pynchon — the embattled bard of the counterculture, disabused of
all allegiance — the last redoubt has become the family, and the last
war to be waged is between our virtual identities and the bonds of
blood; a war to keep the Virtual from corrupting the Blood, if not
forever, then for time enough to let the lil’ Ziggy and Otis
Tarnow-Loefflers of this world live with the merest pretense of
freedom (childhood). Pynchon understands that in the future there will
be no secrets, no hidden complots — everything will be aired and any
second life, whether in the cloud or in the firmament, will be
despoiled or denied us. Adult sanity, then, must depend not on the
lives we make online, but on the lives we make off it — our kids — on
how we love them, and how we raise them, and the virtues and
good-taste imperatives we pass on to them from our progenitors. Smirk
if you’re a smirker and claim this as the conclusion of an
embourgeoised aging-hippie novelist gone soft (or of the mafia and the
Jews), but I’m not sure whether Pynchon means this emphasis on
consanguinity in the spirit of salvation or of damnation. It is,
regardless, sweetly sad. Sweet and low-down sad. The online moguls
have tried to persuade us that we’re not losing a nation, we’re
gaining a world. Pynchon proposes that both are mere second lives,
fakes. Only family is real.