Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009), recently adapted into film by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014), depicts “countercultural California [as] a lost continent of freedom and play, swallowed up by the faceless forces of co-optation and repression”, to use the words of Louis Menand in The New Yorker (2009). While tracking the meandering investigations of Larry “Doc” Sportello, a doped-up private detective, Pynchon composes an elegy for the dwindling late-1960s hippy utopia about to disappear in the wake of a general transformation of the US into an increasingly corporatized, surveyed, and normalised space. This essay explores the role of hazardous and unhealthy food in characterising the anarchic utopia of late-1960s Californian counterculture. Like its often explosive or toxic food, this counterculture suffers from a tendency to deteriorate due to the essential instability of its components, which is, in fact, the very definition of “inherent vice”. Yet, such references, though perhaps unappetising, contribute to an affirmative, if eulogistic portrayal of such a culture. In a contemporary context of increasing food and health regulation, often targeted at traditional and unusual forms of food, this essay aims to discuss the main, and frequently vivid, references to food and drink in Pynchon’s novel as signifiers of a larger tendency to escape restrictive social norms, as well as health inspections.

This article analyzes the development of noir genre in Inherent Vice written by Thomas Pynchon in 2009. In fact, this novel seems to be a time of reflection about all shifts and changes of detective fiction, starting from the Californian hard-boiled school and the postmodern anti-detective fiction to the contemporary noir. In Inherent Vice Pynchon shows his awareness and considerations about the genre tradition – to which some of his novels such as The Crying of Lot 49 belong– playing out a thought-provoking parodic representation of the detective story and its doom. This paper aims to decrypt the meaning of the references that Inherent Vice contains about noir genre and to detect what is the position of the author in writing this novel.

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...

Many sexual encounters in Thomas Pynchon's fiction have occurred beyond the mainstream, generating theatres of perversity which dramatise the death wish and enact power relations from wider arenas. However, in Inherent Vice they change in nature. With the exception of scenes which use Charles Manson to fuel fantasies of domination and submission, they have lost their transgressive bite. Instead, the sheer profusion of variations, and the insouciance with which they are greeted, evinces the influence of a sexualised mainstream colonised by hardcore pornography. Paradoxically, much hardcore catering to the mass market is appreciably less transgressive than Pynchon's fiction has been. The narrative of his seventh novel, with its noir conventions and accompanying sexual motivation, is driven by the commissions his detective protagonist receives from femmes fatales and damsels in distress. The transference of these women from man to man becomes the novel's sexual currency.

Thomas Pynchon’s novels are noted for their postmodernist characteristics. Some of his novels also include certain features of detective fiction. In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the focus of Oedipa –a housewife whose name alludes to Oedipus of Sophocles— shifts to unravelling the mystery of a shadowy underground postal system, and she turns out to be an amateur ‘detective’. The challenge is that the ‘clues’ do not clarify the case, which may or may not be real. A similar pattern is available in Inherent Vice (2009), in which a professional, sandal-wearing, “pothead” detective, Larry “Doc” Sportello, is at work in 1970s California. Inherent Vice does not provide a clear, definitive resolution to the mysteries. Instead, the novel maintains ambiguity and open-endedness, allowing readers to reflect on the intricacies of the narrative and the nature of the quest itself. Thomas Pynchon plays with the detective genre by parodying generic conventions in both works. A parodic work, characterized by its dialogical nature, comically criticizes its target and simultaneously crystallizes its conventions. While utilizing recognizable tropes and characteristics of archetypal private investigators, Pynchon employs unconventional methods for solving the crime, ironic inversions, and absurdities to subvert the stereotypical portrayal of a detective. In this respect, Pynchon, with his examples of postmodern/ metaphysical detective stories, both nurtures and subverts the detective genre. In this paper, The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice are examined regarding how Pynchon both validates and questions the established norms of the traditional detective genre by using parody.

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.

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.

ABSTRACTThe tail end of the 1960s saw the closing of two major sites of utopian potential and imagining: the waning of enthusiasm about deep-sea exploration and the disillusionment of radical social movements with the emerging conservatism of the 1970s. These two sites come together in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, where a drug-addled and waning counterculture finds its hopes and disillusionments bound up in the myth of a sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean. Reading this continent, Lemuria, as a heterotopia, and applying an archetypal, psychological, and spatial reading to a novel normally read as an exemplar of postmodern aesthetics and paranoid epistemologies allows for a rethinking of postmodern allegory as not necessarily disruptive of a historical continuum, but as confused, melancholy, and fundamentally lost.

Many directors and writers struggle with adaptations of novels. However, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation, Inherent Vice, acts as a commentary on the original work by emphasizing characters and images to embody the voice of the original author, Thomas Pynchon. This voice is accomplished through Sortilège, a character who appears briefly in the novel and is expanded to take on Pynchon’s narratorial voice. The paper engages with the use of faded imagery in the adaptation to embody drug-induced scenes and the voice of Sortilège as Pynchon, and explores how Anderson’s adaptation preserves the intoxicating haze and struggles to discover correlation and meaning.

Reviewed by: Pynchon’s California ed. by Scott McClintock, John Miller Casey Shoop Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 228pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $45. As the proverbial “end” of the nation’s manifest destiny, California has long been overdetermined in the historical imagination: from the land of milk and honey to the land of millenarian last hours. No writer is perhaps more attuned to this ambivalent destiny than Thomas Pynchon, whose novels have repeatedly field-tested its prospects and possibilities. To date he has situated three novels in that fertile territory (The Crying of Lot 49 [1966], Vineland [1990], and Inherent Vice [2009]) and brought two others to rest there (Gravity’s Rainbow [1973] and Against the Day [2006]). The publication of Scott McClintock and John Miller’s edited collection of essays is thus an overdue and much-needed critical exploration of this connection between Pynchon and the place where history is so often presumed to end, for better or worse. Taken together, the essays argue for what Margaret Lynd in the volume’s lead essay calls the “situated knowledges” of Pynchon’s California fiction over against what the editors see as the prevalent critical tendency to read “in the microcosm of California any ‘totalizing’ order of domination by postmodern, late ‘Capital’” (9). The essays demonstrate a wide-ranging and vital attention to the specific historical and regional contexts of Pynchon’s engagement with California. Hanjo Berressem, for example, offers a free-spirited reading of the state’s peculiar ecology in the “California trilogy.” Bill Millard insightfully tracks the sordid political history of land use and real estate through Inherent Vice, while Stephen Hock pursues the emblematic modernity of roads and freeways in Pynchon’s novels toward their ultimate expression in the California highway system. And Lynd finds in the smaller, more character-driven plots of the California novels a modicum of “situated hope” and agency against the rectilinear course of historical catastrophe that propels [End Page 260] Pynchon’s larger world-historical novels (22). In a manner that both complements and diverges from the concerns of those contrapuntal epics, Pynchon’s California makes a persuasive case for the intimacy of historical experience in the California trilogy (the 1960s through the 1980s), the felt-sense of an epoch lived through in tones both promissory and elegiac. At the same time, this attention to the “local, regionally specific and ‘situated’ features of Pynchon’s California fictions” has its limits (9). Writing about California is challenging precisely because of the perceived conflict between the regional and historical specificities of place on the one hand, and the allegorical leveraging of that place into national and international meanings that far exceed it on the other. Rather than privileging one side of this opposition, Pynchon’s California would have benefited from a more dialectical account of the connections between the local and the global that California stages in the period Pynchon’s novels traverse. Posing questions about the relationship between periodization and place in his work makes this need clear: how do Pynchon’s novels imagine the growth of the California information economy that so deeply altered the US labor market? What is the link between Pynchon’s fascination with Hollywood image-culture and the dream-life of capitalism more generally? How does the California rise of Reaganism that so preoccupies Pynchon augur a crisis of faith for the legacy of sixties radicalism not only at Berkeley but also around the world? How do Pynchon’s California novels help us reconceptualize the global phenomenon of postmodernism, a concept that seems so indelibly Californian in its articulation? On this last question, the editors are loath to rehearse the “by now all-too-familiar portrayal of California as a postmodern space of superficiality” and eager to “offer an alternative to the construction of Pynchon as postmodern ironist” (8, 9). I see this reduction of postmodernism to an aesthetic category as something of a lost opportunity for Pynchon’s California: when postmodernism is conceptualized as a periodizing term for the postwar economic and cultural transformations in the capitalist world-system, as in the influential accounts of Fredric...

If we are to judge by the amount of critical work devoted to it, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is his least interesting work. But the lack of critical consideration has less to do with the quality of the novel, than with the challenge it puts to readers of contemporary fiction. Throughout Inherent Vice, Pynchon attempts to alter how we approach the task of reading maximalist novels in the age of the Internet. Pynchon’s citation of his own references, gaming with ontological clarity, and celebration of cloudy intellectual powers, are strategies he employs in Inherent Vice to reevaluate what novels can offer us in the twenty-first century.

This paper seeks to consider games — and more particularly card games and gambling — as an American form of resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s novels. As opposed to agôn, a category of games that Roger Caillois delineates in Man, Play and Games (1958) as “a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that the adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions,” alea encompasses games of chance which are “a strict negation of controlled effort, […] efficacious resort to skill, power, and calculation, and self-control; respect for the rules; the desire to test oneself under conditions of equality.” It will be my contention that alea, in Pynchon’s novels, offers the possibility of an alternative world and becomes a necessary mode of resistance in the face of a plenty-flushed adversity which threatens to hold sway over the American continent. For Pynchon’s players, more often than not cheaters and fraudsters, use such games of chance to fulfil their longing for emancipation and flight, at a time in history when the American continent is about to be mapped by the abstractions of colonial companies and Enlightenment science. Gaming clubs — ranging from taverns in Mason & Dixon to casinos and gambling dens in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Against the Day (2006), and Inherent Vice (2009) — can be recognized as heterotopian sites where otherwise dispersed groups of people momentarily gather in order to gain freedom from the ruling few. Although the moralism of Puritan ministers sternly reminded their flocks to refrain from wasting their earnings on rash bets, gambling can thus be envisioned as a way to escape from the hyper-productivity expounded by modernity, intersecting with Walter Benjamin’s discourse on the materialist form of gambling within industrial capitalism. Following Gerda Reith’s and Susan Strange’s arguments in The Age of Chance (1999) and Casino Capitalism (1986), I will further argue that, in the new capitalist economy, Pynchon anticipates in his novels the attention of late capitalism to new areas for capitalization, overseeing both the commodification of idleness and the insinuation into the fabric of existence of the same risk assessment strategy as that applied by capitalism.

Introduction: Embarking on a New Investigation Casey A. Cothran and Mercy Cannon Part 1: Disturbing Expectations 1. Troubling Bodies of Evidence: Gender, Detection, and the Problems of Self-Reinvention in Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake and Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods Andrew M. Hakim 2. The Revelations of the Corpse: Interpreting the Body in the Golden Age Detective Novel Brittain Bright and Rebecca Mills 3. Mapping the Mark: Tattoos, Crime Fiction, and Gendered Cartographies Kate Watson Part 2: Implicating Readers 4. The Transtextuality of James M. Cain's Snyder-Gray Novels: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Cocktail Waitress Jennie MacDonald 5. P.D. James's Discontinuous Narrative: A Suitable Job for a Reader Janice Marion Shaw 6. Franz Kafka: Before the Fictional Process David Ben-Merre Part 3: Indicting Cultures 7. J.D. Robb's Police Procedurals and the Critique of Modernity Srividhya Swaminathan 8. Cooking the Books: Metafictional Myth and Ecocritical Magic in Cozy Mysteries from Agatha Christie to Contemporary Cooking Sleuths Susan Rowland 9. Romance Narratives, Blackmail, and the Price of Knowledge in the Novels of Raymond Chandler John Scaggs Part 4: Adapting Forms 10. Agatha Christie's Mousetrap and Tom Stoppard's Real Inspector Hound: Playing Cat and Mouse with Farce, Parody, and Meta-Theatricality Caroline Marie 11. Beyond the Fog: Inherent Vice and Thomas Pynchon's Noir Adjustment Eleanor Gold 12. The Mystery of the Missing Formula: Adapting the World's Most Popular Girl Detective to Multimedia Platforms Beth Walker

Living inside shipwreck it's what we're doing, admit it or not. One task of art and criticism is teaching us how best to admit it. Even, perhaps, to love it. Three artistic near-disasters, which are also stories about disaster -- James Cameron's film Titanic (1997), Bob Dylan's song "Tempest" (2012), and Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice (2009) - help the process.

Looking back at the early 1970s socio-cultural upheavals, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) generates a discursive construct of Los Angeles that captures the transition from a Fordist culture to a Post-Fordist one. This essay holds that around this watershed moment, literary heterotopias specific to Southern California are being made. Michel Foucault defines heterotopias as realized utopias, emplacements that simultaneously represent, contest, and invert the normal space. This study reads Inherent Vice, using Foucault’s archaeological method of analysis to develop literary heterotopology. A discursive analysis of Pynchon’s novel reveals heterotopias’ discontinuous nature, which this study proposes as the seventh principle for heterotopology. Furthermore, Pynchon uses a new vehicle, Decompression Heterotopias, to reshape globalization in his retro-production of Los Angeles. Ultimately, the essay shows how the Fordist and Post-Fordist waves of globalization aspire to affect Angeleno’s lives by compressing the time-space spectrum. Pynchon’s decompression heterotopias, however, resist the status quo and propose reconfiguring globalization’s compression forces.