"It's funny that he didn't win the Nobel Prize and I did. I can't win the Nobel Prize as long as it is Pynchon don't get it! It is against the laws of nature," said the Austrian writer Elfride Jelinek, Nobel laureate and translator of novels Gravity rainbow in German. The Nobel Committee apparently still considers Thomas Pynchon a dead writer, but not literary scholars, critics and readers who have been trying to "crack the codes" in the work of the enigmatic American author since the middle of the 20th century. On the occasion of exactly half a century since its release Long gravity (Gravity's Rainbow, 1973), perhaps Pynchon's most challenging novel, we present here the essay "Reading Pynchon or how to find meaning in a notoriously complicated writer" Hanja Beresem, professor from the University of Cologne and author of the book Pynchon's Poetics.
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Promotional video for A hidden flaw (Inherent Vice, 2009) begins with a screaming guitar solo that catapults the viewer into the 1960s. Pynchon, in a slightly self-ironic voice that he reserves for autobiographical texts, simultaneously presents the book and vouches for it. With his recorded voice, as he imitates and mocks the narration from noir films, the video shows Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles, which in the novel is transformed into the fictitious Gordita Beach.
The video, which followed a number of semi-public, mostly provocative performances, is another indication that Pynchon has mellowed somewhat, become more relaxed and less paranoid. Perhaps in due time he himself will explain to us what it all means.
Flashback to criticism
However, until that happens, we are left to wonder. In fact, even when his first novel was published, V. from 1963, the story of Pynchon as a notoriously difficult writer spread. What exactly does "heavy" mean in this context? First, Pynchon brings an incredible amount of cultural heritage into the novels, often the most hidden. Second, Pynchon constantly modulates narrative voices and stylistic registers, which makes his texts strikingly polyphonic.
His rhetorical modes range from his characteristic bad lines for fictional songs to extremely poetic descriptions, such as the description of a Christmas mass during World War II in Long gravity (Gravity's Rainbow, 1973). The shifts in style are often as fluid as the modulation of the “nocturnal sonar chords” that Oedipa hears as she wanders San Francisco in Post number 49 (1966)
Third, the narratives in the novel are labyrinths, with countless characters and pages full of hopelessly diverging plots and subplots, many of which veer off into something completely different or are simply empty. It doesn't help that the chronological structures in the novels are just as complicated, with flashbacks of flashbacks and jump to the future after jump to the future. Pynchon fans love him precisely for these intricacies and stylistic mannerisms; because of the unrestrained flourishing of his imagination, the terror of the void, the "high magic" of his "down-to-earth witticisms" and the wonderful descriptions of the landscape of paranoia, thanks to which Pynchon became a cult writer.
Critics, in the first reactions to Pynchon's work, sought to overcome these difficulties by clarifying (to themselves as much as to others) some of the key concepts that Pynchon employs to organize the texts. This was difficult, because many of these concepts were taken from mathematics and the natural sciences, and only a few critics managed to bridge the gap between the "two cultures" as easily and gracefully as Pynchon does. In fact, some of the first reviews also functioned as instructions for readers (that role has now been taken over by forums on the Internet).
The expansion of the "Pindustria" also developed centripetal conceptual ideas that functioned as hermeneutic instructions and promised to, somehow, encompass Pynchon's extraordinary work. In particular, Pynchon's references to entropy, information theory, and paranoia, all of which were already key in his early short story, programmatically titled “Entropy” (1960), have come under close critical scrutiny.
At this stage, Pynchon was read as a prophet of breakdown and misunderstanding who encouraged ideas from science, technology, politics, history, philosophy and art to resonate in order to orchestrate the gradual downfall of Western civilization. His complex discursive assemblages were steep slopes to the inanimate. They staggered towards general disorder, deadly heat, noise and, finally, pure static.
U V. is presented a panorama of cultural despair, laziness and the fall from individual to mass culture, from "prince" to "bureaucrat". With the publication of number 49 it is revealed, to Oedipa Mas as much as to the readers, that the counterculture functions in the cracks of official power and information flows, a counterculture made up of the past and losers, the type of people Pynchon is most sympathetic to throughout his work. The historical diagnosis in the novel was a massive, "calculated withdrawal from the life of the Republic", a move that maybe, but just maybe, echoed Pynchon's personal withdrawal.
In addition to his interest in the historical and political, critics also noted Pynchon's interest in the tragic logic of the seemingly unchanging human condition: the universal sadomasochism of master and slave or, in less philosophical terms, "fuckers and the fucked." Despite all the diversity, most critics in their analyzes have tried to find the meaning of the novel by organizing its intricacies and meanderings into meaningful patterns.
In the next phase of interpretation of Pynchon's works, inspired by poststructuralist theories, critics became aggressively centrifugal. Pynchon has suddenly turned into a master of deconstruction whose self-consciously spiraling plots should make readers aware of the aimlessness of the search for any order. The texts were concerned with the endless dissemination of meaning; by huge, ubiquitous allegories of the table of the signifier and its embodiment: complicated metafictional games. The characters were either Lacanian "split subjects" trapped in the house of language searching for their lost objects, or novels became, if critics leaned towards deconstruction, discursive spaces where meaning is endlessly deferred, zones of grammatical difference.
Pynchon toyed with the reader's expectations and delighted in letting them down with texts that resist cognitive compression. During the 1990s, playing the critics became less exciting. As the image of the "prophet of doom" ceased to be attractive, Pynchon as a prophet of pure play and a master of ironic impartiality became less interesting. However, even during the entire deconstructivist phase, some critics did not stop seeing in Pynchon something that exceeded pure play; a certain intensity, a burning question which, among other things, dealt with whether art, such as the songs of the group The Paranoids in Post number 49, they can express the "glow of beauty" of metaphysical truth, or their music expresses nothing more than a "spectrum of power".
Seen politically, the burning issue concerned, as in Vineland (Vineland, 1990), of the fear that the lights of America are no longer the shining lights of democracy, but the dim "pro-fascist twilight" or, even worse, the glow from the inside of the tunnel of already realized and implemented fascism.
(Source: The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon; edited and translated by: Matija Jovandić; continued in the next issue of ART)
Bonus video:
