Fantasy and Dream in Thomas Pynchon's "Low-Lands"

Abstract

Thomas Pynchon's early stories present gestures of disengagement or subversion. In Small Rain (1959) circumstances lead Nathan Levine into a disaster area where he is to participate in rescue work after a hurricane has destroyed a small Louisiana town. He seeks relief from the drudgery in a sexual encounter with a local girl which fails to arouse any pleasure in him and then sinks back into the lethargy of army routine.1 Mortality and in Vienna (also 1959) centres on a party in Washington at which a character called Siegel has to act as proxy host.2 His disenchantment with the party finds unexpected satisfaction when an Ojibwa called Irving Loon runs amock with a hunting rifle. Both stories take disenchantment as their subject-matter; they are about it rather than enacting disengagement in their form. Indeed Mortality and Mercy turns partly on the unlikely coincidence of an Ojibwa's being at a Washington party and Siegel remembering from lectures that the tribe is subject to periodic bouts of paranoia. The coincidence suggests that Pynchon is colluding with his protagonist's dislike of the party by introducing an agency its destruction. Pynchon's third story, however, avoids the need this kind of coincidence by enacting a process of disengagement in its very form. Low-lands, which appeared in the annual anthology New World Writing in 1960, focuses closely on its protagonist Dennis Flange. When the story opens he has been drinking and listening to Vivaldi on his stereo outfit with Rocco Squarcione, his garbageman. Upstairs his wife paces angrily to and fro, waiting them to stop. The last straw comes with the arrival of Pig Bodine (a sailor who is AWOL) which sends Cindy the wife into paroxysms of fury. She drives the three men out of the house, Flange for good, and they go to the local rubbish dump which is presided over by a negro