The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973

[Dave Monroe]

The Age of the Crisis of Man:
Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973
Mark Greif

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10326.html

O’Connor is followed by Thomas Pynchon. The sequence is
chronologically reasonable enough: Pynchon’s seminal early story,
“Entropy,” was published in the Spring 1960 issue of The Kenyon
Review, a magazine in which O’Connor published often until 1956. Yet
for all his useful examination of O’Connor’s idiosyncratic literary
Catholicism, Greif does not mention Pynchon’s shared religion. Pynchon
was raised Catholic in Glen Cove, Long Island. Former Cornell
classmate Jules Siegel infamously told Playboy that Pynchon “went to
Mass and confessed, though to what would be a mystery.” Like much of
Pynchon’s life, his Catholicism is a puzzle (when Siegel queried the
difficulty of V, Pynchon responded, “Why should things be easy to
understand?”).

Pynchon’s literary Catholicism has received scant discussion. Pynchon
is best understood as a Catholic jester writing in the tradition of
John Kennedy Toole and, of course, O’Connor. That the two writers have
great divergences of geography and content should not negate their
shared interest in the union of the absurd and the mundane. Pynchon
might be considered the synthesis of the Catholicism of Marshall
McLuhan and Andy Warhol, whose communions of saints spanned the
electric and artistic worlds. Whether Pynchon is practicing or lapsed
is irrelevant to this particular discussion. His fiction is saturated
with a Catholic comedic sense.

PYNCHON IS BEST UNDERSTOOD AS A CATHOLIC JESTER WHOSE FICTION IS
SATURATED WITH A CATHOLIC COMEDIC SENSE

Greif examines Pynchon’s novelistic interpretation of technology, the
final area of concern for the midcentury crisis of man. He
contextualizes Pynchon’s rise as occurring when “high technology had
come home from the factory and been domesticated.” Within those
mundane spaces, “‘man’ as a being and a concept is put into jeopardy
for Pynchon … [through] the changing status of the parts of men, and
the insertion of inanimate things into their bodies and daily habits.”
Production and consumption are supplanted with “‘cycling’ and
recirculation.” The rise of communication technology creates
“leftovers and remnants,” and this noise creates a “further denudation
of values. Stories and personal relations mix with leftover or
forgotten objects, and are leveled down to the same neutral status,
out of human control.” Greif finds this occurring within V, but thinks
Pynchon’s best dramatization of the technological transubstantiation
with the crisis of man unfolds in The Crying of Lot 49.

Greif elevates Pynchon more than most, considering him “the major
American author most affected by World War II” other than Norman
Mailer and James Jones. Greif acknowledges that Pynchon criticism is
its own maze, game, and fandom, but thinks his “work exists not
primarily to be deciphered but to be experienced, and, if anything,
situated.” I certainly share Greif’s anxiety that Pynchon criticism
might sometimes be an exercise in remaking the author in one’s own
image. That said, there are certain observations that I need to add to
Greif’s discussion. As a cradle Catholic who practiced well into his
college years (and possibly beyond), Pynchon’s appropriation and
subversion of Catholic iconography, ritual, and symbolism would be
consistent with his engagement of popular culture errata. The Crying
of Lot 49, no matter one’s critical predilections, is a work that
builds toward a unifying system, however parodic. Pynchon even
published excerpts from the novel as “The World (This One), the Flesh
(Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity.”

Pynchon’s jest is different than O’Connor’s, but he is still concerned
with bodies. Oedipa Maas’s search for personal and spiritual meaning
in the novel is muddled by the sheer amount of contemporary
references, from Tupperware to Perry Mason to The Paranoids, a parody
of the Beatles. The information entropy of the text matches the
acronym of W.A.S.T.E., an underground mail-delivery system that
appears connected with Tristero, a multinational postal conspiracy.
Oedipa follows every lead, however absurd, with an almost religious
devotion (she tries to track down the original script of a
pornographic Jacobean revenge play for mention of Tristero, leading
another character to ask, “Why is everybody so interested in texts?”).
Words and signs are delivered outside of accepted channels, and like
her husband Mucho’s used car lot, they result in “residue” and “loss.”
Pynchon is an electronic prophet; Greif calls it “the problem of
recycling … Pynchon’s unusual sensitivity to the survival and
persistence of forgotten materials, to new technologies of ephemeral
production and unmoored signs and simulations.”

That Pynchon places a woman at the center of this crisis of man — a
crisis to communicate and find meaning — is significant. The other
writers presented in this study, however progressive or experimental,
still place men at the center of this crisis. While it is true that
Oedipa appears under the distant pull of a man, her deceased
ex-boyfriend Pierce Inverarity, she is the detective of the text, the
character who makes meaning. Greif comments: “The question Lot 49
investigates but does not answer is whether there are other ways to
use the systems of circulation, for those who have alreadybeen
‘disinherited,’ cut out of the hopes of man — or, for someone like
Oedipa, where to turn when you are overincorporated within society and
feel its unreality, and start to escape it … The problem of answering
has everything to do with the way in which the mood of Lot 49, besides
its sophomoric comedy, is one of unremitting anxiety — and why the
unofficial systems of mere circulation seem malevolent at every turn.”
The Crying of Lot 49’s anti-ending is the only appropriate conclusion
to the wearied discourse of man. Rather than being a thin novel of
nonsense, Pynchon’s book fits in the lineage of this significant
discourse that “gives a picture of the people who are too poor or
ethnic to be ‘recognized’ (as in Bellow), who had to plunge outside of
history when it didn’t include them (as in Ellison), who find
religious revelation (the ‘Word’) in broken-up bodies, artifacts, and
prostheses, and not in any sanctioned church (as in O’Connor).”

The Crying of Lot 49, then, is a book of searching, a book of faith.
Oedipa acts on the faith that not only do words matter, but that there
is a Word, and that texts can lead her there. That she does not find
what she seeks does not devalue the search. Greif explains that the
“lot” of the book’s title extends to the “disposition, or fate, or
humbled fatalistic destiny of persons and things and dreams that once
began with the greatest hopes.” The malleability of Pynchon’s ending,
the passing-off of meaning to the reader, is “as populist as the
crisis of man’s search for universal man was not … It is enmeshed in
the details of mundane technologies, wasted artifacts, daily
communication, as the crisis of man’s grandiose discourse of technics
was not.” Pynchon’s methods and non-meanings are the perfect counters
to midcentury conversations whose collective reach was consistently
rebuked by its own seriousness. Pynchon’s fiction helped evolve the
discourse of the crisis of man from a concern with totalitarianism and
over-mechanization to a lack of humanity, a “multiplicity” of self
that is as worthless as the noise in Pynchon’s southern California.
Pynchon, along with Bellow, Ellison, and O’Connor, took the “abstract
discourse of man into the realm of practicality and discovered its
missing portions.” Their answers “went far beyond its original
exponents’ suppositions.”

http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/fiction-and-the-discourse-of-man/
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