review BE

[David Morris]

I don't need nor like psychoanalists of folks they've never met.

On Thursday, September 12, 2013, Phil Burnside wrote:

> SEPTEMBER 12, 2013: [Vladimir Putin][North Korea][David Foster
> Wallace][Organic farming]
>
>
> ARCHIVE / 2013 / OCTOBER
> < Previous Article | Next Article >
> 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
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