Ali Dehdarirad, “From Faraway Californiaˮ: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy

Reviewed by: Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History by David Cowart Joseph M. Conte Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xix + 250 pp. $24.95. The year 2013 is a propitious time to be reviewing the career of Thomas Pynchon, whom David Cowart, the Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities at the University of South Carolina, calls “America’s greatest historical novelist” (24). It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Pynchon’s first novel V. in 1963, a work that fell like a meteorite onto the steppes of American literature, and the fortieth anniversary of the publication of what remains his greatest achievement, Gravity’s Rainbow. What’s more, it’s 120 years since the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, whose White City burns to the ground near the start of Against the Day (2006); and it’s been 250 years since Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon began the survey of their eponymous Line in 1763. These anniversaries were justly celebrated at the International Pynchon Week conference in Durham, England in August. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History is Cowart’s second book devoted to that author. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (1980) was his first book, and among the earliest of book-length treatments of Pynchon, so Cowart has brought more than thirty years of close attention to Pynchon’s oeuvre to the present volume. He remarks at the start, in “Calibrating Clio,” the muse of History, that Pynchon “stands out as a near-mythic figure of literary virtù” (1) for his equal appeal to popular and academic readers, a fact to which the online denizens of the “Pynchon Wiki” will attest. Perhaps for that reason, Dark Passages provides an inviting and relatively jargon-free introduction to all of Pynchon’s works, from the early short stories such as “Entropy” collected in Slow Learner (1984) to the recent “California novel,” Inherent Vice (2009), for the nonspecialist reader. Cowart reprises and revises some essays, including a 1978 piece on the Third Reich in Gravity’s Rainbow and his recent contribution on literary history in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012). While the editing process occasionally allows for some overlapping commentary (if you’ve been paying attention closely), Dark Passages sustains more elaborated readings for Pynchon scholars that many introductory retrospective studies do not. [End Page 709] As Cowart’s title suggests, he gathers his thoughts on Pynchon through the problematic of history—the subterranean, recondite, and subversive versions that are threaded through the eight volumes included in this study—not the orthodox and often uncontested story that They would have us believe. So we are told near the close of Against the Day that the narrative has borne witness to “the other side of the tapestry—a ragged, practical version of the grander spectacle out there” (1026). It’s the knotting into and the loose threads that we only find when we look behind the arras that reveal the true machinations of power, not the representations in golden brocade of coronations, military campaigns, and royal hunting parties. Because Pynchon is a self-proclaimed Luddite, we should recall that the followers of King Ludd were textile craftsmen who opposed the introduction of the industrial looms that concentrated wealth in the hands of the factory owners and oppressed the working class. These dark passages of history are best approached by circumvention. Cowart’s treatment of the novels calls forth the heterodox historiography that we find, for example, in V., with the procession of its sigil character through the Fashoda crisis in Egypt in 1898, Paris in 1913, southwest Africa in 1922, and Malta during World War II. Cowart appropriately invokes Hayden White’s conceptualization of postmodern historiography in Metahistory (1973), such that all historical events are subjected to narrative interpretation. “Historians shape their material: the writing of history, like the writing of fiction, involves selection, subjectivity, ‘emplotment’” (45). As a postmodern writer, Pynchon not only appreciates the inherent subjectivity of historiography but he also casts a skeptical eye on an historiographer’s selection of facts, which is made to comply with the narrative...

To a certain extent, the four papers presented at the MLA session on "The Impact of Science and Technology on Language, Style, and Structure in the Work of 'Thomas Pynchon" told us what we already knew: Science is not the answer either. More remarkable is the number of very different ways in which science enriches Pynchon's work even as it explodes answers.

Reviewed by: Beyond and Beneath the Mantle: On Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49", and: The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey John M. Krafft Georgiana M. M. Colvile . Beyond and Beneath the Mantle: On Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49."Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. 119 pp. pb. $39.95. Elaine B. Safer. The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988. 216 pp. $29.95. These are flush times for admirers of Thomas Pynchon. Vineland, Pynchon's first novel in seventeen years, should have appeared by the time this review appears. Meanwhile, some thirty books and essay collections devoted entirely to Pynchon have been published since 1974. Two of the most recent join Thomas H. Schaub's and Molly Hite's studies as indispensable works of Pynchon criticism: Steven Weisenburger's ambitious, if not yet quite fully realized, "Gravity's Rainbow" Companion; and Alec McHoul and David Wills's ground-breaking Writing Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49 even has a book of its own now—assuming one does not count a Kinko's pamphlet or a York Notes booklet. Georgiana M. M. Colvile's Beyond and Beneath the Mantle: On Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" gets only a little way beyond and beneath the commonplaces of Lot 49 criticism—quest, mystery, plotting, paranoia, self-reflexivity, entropy, the Word, encoding, decrypting, metaphor, and so on. The most noteworthy sections of Colvile's book, the discussion of Remedios Varo's paintings and the feminist reading of Lot 49, elaborate and reiterate the familiar more than they present anything original. Although Colvile does not seem to have a distinct thesis, her references to Varo form a sort of leitmotiv. Thus the "mantle" of her title is el manto terrestre of Varo's triptych, which provides an "iconic mirror" or mise-en-abyme of Lot 49. Building on David Cowart's work, Colvile offers a detailed examination of the whole triptych (the book contains good black-and-white plates). Yet, engaging as the discussion can be, it is not very profound about either Varo or Pynchon and does not provide us with a new way of thinking about Lot 49. And some of the connections, "specular links," Colvile cites between all three panels and Lot 49 are rather contrived and tenuous, not to say glib: "In the middle panel, the flute player provides a musical background, like Mucho's radio, the Paranoids, Fallopian's electronic music and other such sound tracks referred to in Pynchon's novel." Colvile's feminist reading of Lot 49 is not altogether new either: Cathy N. Davidson's more closely-reasoned "Oedipa as Androgyne," which Colvile ignores, made a similar case in the mid-1970s. Still, the case is well worth Colvile's making again. "It is precisely the space of lack, absence and otherness to which woman has been relegated in Western culture that incites Pynchon to create a heroine as a degré zéro protagonist and at the same time make her the main focalizer." Colvile cites the male characters' pervasive virility problems as evidence of "Pynchon's feeling of impotence as a novelist in postmodern times: the traditional male point of view has moved beyond narcissism to a symbolic self-castration drive. Pynchon looks to a female protagonist to give both literature and society new stamina, not through any conscious feminist approach, but because he has [End Page 774] reached a dead end and needs to weave a fresh world by means of a character who has no tradition behind her." For the rest, the book (its early chapters in particular) is a grab bag of intriguing brief comments, other critics' observations, eccentric judgments, and occasional careless errors—with some obviousness and silliness thrown in also. Colvile lavishly draws connections, makes identifications, and speculates about implications; the results, however, are too often mere throwaway lines, sometimes potentially interesting but frequently strained or cute. The book has its higher moments and its lower. What follows is, appropriately, a grab bag of both. "The 'plot/Plot' functions very much like Deleuze and Guattari's machines...

The representation of modern warfare has always been problematic, but depicting nuclear war seems to be an almost impossible task for writers, inasmuch as a real nuclear conflict has never taken place, so that there is no “real” model that writers may refer to. And yet in the Cold War years the threat of WWIII was such an important and urgent issue that fiction writers repeatedly attempted to stage the unreal war, and think the unthinkable. Some of them adopted a mix of the extrapolative strategies of science-fiction and conventional, “realistic” narrative protocols; others, such as Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard, though also using science-fictional extrapolations, opted for more unconventional narrative strategies, drawing from modernism or devising new devices. This article attempts to survey what the consequences of these different approaches have been.

Throughout his works, Thomas Pynchon uses various animal characters to narrate fables that are vital to postmodernism and ecocriticism. Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism examines case studies of animal representation in Pynchon’s texts, such as alligators in the sewer in V.; the alligator purse in Bleeding Edge; dolphins in the Miami Seaquarium in The Crying of Lot 49; dodoes, pigs, and octopuses in Gravity’s Rainbow; Bigfoot and Godzilla in Vineland and Inherent Vice; and preternatural dogs and mythical worms in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Through this exploration, Keita Hatooka illuminates how radically and imaginatively the legendary novelist depicts his empathy for nonhuman beings. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative study of Pynchon’s narratives and his contemporary documentarians and thinkers, Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales leads readers to draw great lessons from the fables, which stimulate our ecocritical thought for tomorrow.

THE underlying1 mystery in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 revolves around a corrupted edition of the Jacobean play, The Courier's Tragedy. A good part of Oedipa's quest as heroine is for a published copy of that edition of the play.2 The hypothesis here is that Pynchon's focus on the corrupt edition of the play signifies the corrupt edition of Henry Adams’ Letter to American Teachers of History, that was published after his death.3 The writing of Henry Adams had a major influence on Thomas Pynchon's short stories and novels. In his introduction to Slow Learner,4 in which Pynchon shared some rare confidences about his work, Henry Adams is mentioned twice. David Seed5 attributes Pynchon's fascination with thermodynamic entropy to Adams’ Letter to American Teachers of History,6 which contains the phrase ‘the entire universe, in every variety of active energy, organic and inorganic, human or divine, is to be treated as clockwork that is running down’, that resonates in the allusion to the ‘universe running like clockwork’ in The Crying of Lot 49.7 The central thesis of Adams’ Letter is that human vitality and thought are forms of active energy that are running down as a consequence of the entropy law. Because Adams had privately printed only a small quantity of the Letter, his brother, Brooks Adams, republished it a year after Henry's death as part of a larger volume entitled The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, on whose title page he listed Henry as the principal author and identified himself, modestly but misleadingly, as simply the author of the introduction.

Book review of Review of Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon (Manchester University Press, 2013). Review of Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon (Manchester University Press, 2013) George William Twigg Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor’s book is a welcome addition to Manchester University Press’s ‘Contemporary American and Canadian Writers’ series. Previous entries in the series include such complex, experimental authors as Paul Auster and Mark Z. Danielewski, amongst whom Pynchon is in good company. Indeed, much of the book is devoted to discussing exactly how we may ‘read’ Pynchon’s difficult, allusive style. The series editors’ foreword states that ‘[c]entral to the series is a concern that each book should argue a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey’, and while we may wonder whether any book on Pynchon’s vast, complex fictional world can truly be more than an ‘introduction’, Malpas and Taylor are indeed stimulating. Their study provides a clear, lucid discussion of several key themes in Pynchon’s novels, chief amongst which are paranoia, the emancipatory power of fantasy and alternative modes of perception, and the ‘subjunctive potentiality’ (3) of spaces of resistance. Malpas and Taylor’s analysis is always illuminating, and their analysis of space in particular ensures that their book is a significant contribution to the diffuse field of Pynchon scholarship. Chapter One focuses on three of the stories published in Slow Learner. ‘Low-lands’ is placed in its historical and cultural context, with incisive readings of 1950s cultural critiques by figures such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills, who argued that ‘[t]he success of American capitalism had led[...]to the occlusion of dissenting voices from debates about national identity’ (14). Characteristically of their book, Malpas and Taylor examine space, warning that the apparent promise in ‘Low-lands’ of ‘a renewed privatised space and a reconstituted individuality’ (15) may be illusory, as the story’s ending suggests. ‘The Secret Integration’ is read in conjunction with Pynchon’s article ‘A Journey Into the Mind of Watts’, with the authors sensitively charting the disparities between white and black experiences of Copyright © 2015, George William Twigg License (open-access): This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The citation of this article must include: the name(s) of the authors, the name of the journal, the full URL of the article (in a hyperlinked format if distributed online) and the DOI number of the article. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v1.2.128 2 Review of Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon (Manchester University

This article is a comparative study of two epic works that share a historical setting and a broad political outlook, but diverge significantly in at least one respect. Frequent and heavy alcohol consumption is a feature of both Thomas Pynchon'sAgainst the Dayand John Dos Passos'sUSAtrilogy, but the way in which these authors describe heavy drinking – and hedonistic behaviour in general – indicates fundamental differences between the modernism of Dos Passos and Pynchon's postmodernist strategies. The article contends that this aspect of Pynchon's novel represents a critique of attitudes within the twentieth-century American left towards sensuality, patriarchy and the failure of leftist aspiration within a contemporary context that invokes such subjects as the complicity of consumption, terrorism and the ethics of political assassination.

After the excellent, "What Happens Now" 21st-century fiction conference, I thought it would be worthwhile sharing the Prezi that I created, in case it's of any interest: .prezi-player { width: 750px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center;

My article “‘There Is Money Everywhere’: Representation, Authority, and the Money Form in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day” deals with the role of economic rhetoric and especially money in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. In the article I will show how Pynchon links the legitimation crisis of the gold standard at the beginning of the twentieth century to broader questions of representation, value formation, and centralized power.

The Great Flattening Mitchum Huehls (bio) Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge. New York: Penguin, 2013. 477 pp. $28.95. Thomas Pynchon is seventy-six years old, and he knows more about Jamiroquai than you do. He also knows more about Japanese Manga, early Web-programming languages, Russian hip-hop, the Knicks, the Washington, D.C., punk scene, the best places to eat in Iowa, 1980s arcade games, the history of early tech start-ups, the Mossad, and Manhattan real estate. It’s Thomas Pynchon’s world; we just live in it. Spanning most of 2001, Bleeding Edge also reserves cameo roles for Britney Spears, Jay-Z, Beanie Babies, Ally McBeal, Zima, Leonardo DiCaprio, Friends, Furbies, Brad Pitt, and Nelly. Also, September 11. It’s weird, even jarring, to read Pynchon writing about these things. Not because his references point to so much mass-market schlock—Pynchon has always been at home in the philistine low-brow; it’s how his novels attach themselves to the world—but because those references are so aggressively contemporary. As a former student of mine put it in an e-mail: “I feel like Pynchon is writing about my life. It’s like, ‘hello childhood.’” Indeed, I’ve also shopped at Zabar’s, partied like it’s 1999, and noted that Kum & Go is a hilarious name. Wasted hours of your life playing Tetris? Remember when 56K was an awesomely fast download speed? Ever live on a street in New York City where Law & Order shot some scenes? Check. Check. Check. The early [End Page 861] days of the Internet, the ballooning and popping of the tech bubble, Y2K, 9–11—remember that decade? I do, and if you’re old enough to want to read Bleeding Edge, odds are that you do, too. The insistent contemporaneity of Bleeding Edge doesn’t stop in 2001. Instead, ramifying beyond the September 11 attacks, Pynchon’s vision expands forward over the ensuing decade until it reaches our immediate present. Here, for example, in one character’s take on the Internet, the novel anticipates not just recent revelations about NSA surveillance but also Samsung’s new smartwatch: Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. (420)1 In the Pynchonian long view, the most advanced technologies of our digital age are just teasing out the comic-strip dreams of the cold war imaginary. It would be easy to give Bleeding Edge short shrift precisely because of its contemporaneity. Its aggressive attachment to the present could backfire, leaving the novel to languish in irrelevance, just another bleeding-edge technology: “no proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with” (78). Of course, Pynchon’s early adopters—those of us who preordered the book from Amazon in mid summer—will probably feel charmed by and comfortable with Pynchon’s foray into the now, but the immediacy of Bleeding Edge’s certainly risks alienating those who pin Pynchon’s “serious author” status to his proven investment in the expansive historical novel. After all, what good are literary representations of events still unfolding in real time? How can a novel cope with the amped-up creative destruction of twenty-first-century technologies, [End Page 862] always threatening to make the present obsolete? Has Pynchon’s encyclopedic novel given way to a merely Wikipedic one?2 I don’t think so, and unless one belongs to that subclass of Pynchonistas who reflexively value the vast and voluminous, who react with Slothropian ardor to confounding arcana, I’m not sure it really matters. There are other, better reasons to read Pynchon’s novels—the connective vision, the hilarity, the tenderness, the prose style, the names—and Bleeding Edge delivers on every front. It’s even replete with the kind of abstract interpretive matrices and geometric scaffoldings (the Wittgensteinian radio frequencies of V., the...

Throughout his works, Thomas Pynchon uses various animal characters to narrate fables that are vital to postmodernism and ecocriticism. Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism examines case studies of animal representation in Pynchon’s texts, such as alligators in the sewer in V.; the alligator purse in Bleeding Edge; dolphins in the Miami Seaquarium in The Crying of Lot 49; dodoes, pigs, and octopuses in Gravity’s Rainbow; Bigfoot and Godzilla in Vineland and Inherent Vice; and preternatural dogs and mythical worms in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Through this exploration, Keita Hatooka illuminates how radically and imaginatively the legendary novelist depicts his empathy for nonhuman beings. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative study of Pynchon’s narratives and his contemporary documentarians and thinkers, Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales leads readers to draw great lessons from the fables, which stimulate our ecocritical thought for tomorrow.

m > m ?s z m D H H D O papers on the desk are a settling of accounts, an indictment against Schepp for his neglect of her. In particular, several years earlier, the nearly blind Schepp had undergone laser surgery; able to see clearly, he joined theworld, became a fre quenter of bars, and became infatu ated with a low-life Polish barmaid on whose neck, moreover, was tat tooed the twenty-ninthI Ching sign "Kan," representing the abyss and also the great divide between life and the other side. (Dingsymbol, anyone?) Schepp spends the entire afternoon, as her body goes through stages of decomposition, reading the philological revenge thatDora has spent the night writing. He learns that Dora, who has been consulting theI Ching her entire life, had known of this infatuation and had been enjoying a friendshipwith the Polish woman. Moreover, she had been planning to leave Schepp when shewas struck down. Sounds complicated and even grotesque? Well, maybe none of the foregoing happened, and it was only Schepp's imagination that sup plied the details of Dora's death and his infatuation.Perhaps Schepp resented the bargain he had struck with Dora, whose fears he had impulsively taken on while they were both, in their younger years, viewing Arnold B?cklin's Island of the Dead? Perhaps, Walter Mitty-like (Politycki refers often to Schepp's comb-over), he yearned for lifeand escape fromthedaily focuson death Dora imposed on him? Politycki, a "promovierter" aca demic before becoming a full-time writer, knows his metafictional con ventions. Besides textswithin texts (Dora's commentary is appended to a fragment of Schepp's attempt at a novel from before theirmar riage), Politycki has also supplied an alternative ending tohis novella. Or rather an alternative beginning. The troubling smell is still in the air when Schepp enters his study in the morning, Dora is in the same posi tion at thedesk, with her head on a pile of papers before her. This time around, however, it is a Hinrich Schepp who is only contemplating laser surgery and who cautiously makes his way into the roomwith out his glasses, and Dora is only sleeping. As for the smell, Dora is offended at the suggestion that she has neglected her domestic duties, Schepp cautions her against becom ingupset, because ofher headaches. Though the two of them do not discover the source of the smell, perhaps it is their rottenmarriage? There ismuch here that leaves one unsatisfied, butMatthias Politycki's ambitious novella shows there is still lifein thisclassic genre. ElizabethPowers New York Thomas Pynchon. Inherent V?ce. New York. Penguin. 2009. 370 pages. $27.95. isbn978-1-59420-224-7 Graduate students across the land are undoubtedly outlining theobvi ous similarities in theme, style, and structure between Thomas Pyn chon's 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, and InherentVice. Both have mysterious, perhaps nonexistent secret organizations conspiring to do something not entirely clear; characterswho disappear or are dis appeared; comic names thatwould embarrass Ben Jonson; a general atmosphere ofmalaise; central char acters on a reluctant quest to find the truth;mazes of speculations, hints, and cryptic revelations that often dead-end forboth characters and readers; and governing prin ciples (entropy in the first,the title . _ _ ^-. _-t syndrome in the second). Both have ?B!? Wiki siteswith indices of characters l^ESi and page-by-page annotations. What graduate students may ^Hral not realize, or admit?and some Hh early reviewers like Louis Menand IH^?I in theNew Yorkerwere reluctant to HB! say?is that while Inherent Vice is BBnl more thantwiceas longas Lot49, I^BB it is exponentially duller,and any ^BBI effortused to compare thenovels is ^HHj wasted.Theenergy ofLot 49'sprose flBBI has settled into a bland uniformity. IBBi UnlikeOedipa Maas in theearIBBI liernovel, who has a vision ofwhat ^BBI America might have become before ^BH it is threatened by themysterious HH Tristero, Vice's detective Doc Spor- ^HB tellois "caughtup in a low-level j^^BI bummer he couldn't find away out IHR of,abouthow thePsychedelic Six- ^^Bi ties, this littleparenthesis of light, iBB might close afterall, and all be lost, ^BB taken back Into darkness...

The critical relation between Vladimir Nabokov’s and Thomas Pynchon’s texts is often vexed: this is especially so because of the apparent contradiction between their similarity (for example, Ada’s ...

This paper aims to examine the main features of the posthuman identity by analyzing vari- ous relations of subjectivity and posthuman reality in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. The the- oretical approaches applied herein involve the poststructuralist perspective and the new post- humanist thought regarding the concept of subjectivity. By examining the connection between September 11 attacks and the commercialization of the Internet in Thomas Pynchon’s novel, the complex historical, social, economic, and technological aspects are discussed. In fact, they set the stage for redefining the modern subject and identity. Further analysis shows that Pynchon’s description of the situation of human beings under a computerized global neoliberalism is in line with critical posthumanism which explains how control societies depersonalize modern subjects and reduce them to programmable objects. The concluding part of the paper demon- strates the implications arising from the cohesion of late capitalism, technology, and social con- trol, as well as their effects on the ontological structure of the posthuman identity.