Postmodern Exhaustion: Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and the Aesthetic of the Beautiful

Abstract

Since publication of his first novel, V, in 1963, Thomas Pynchon's novels have stood as paradigm of literary, postmodernism. Rife with ontological disturbance, fragmented consciousness, unknowable cabals, disrupted narration, and technological wizardry, Pynchon's work has set standard for postmodern novel. In particular, his distinctive metaphysical cosmos and apocalyptic vision both defines and is defined by category that has emerged in recent years as pivotal term in various debates on postmodern: sublime. Several prominent theorists of postmodernism, most notably Jean-Francois Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, have argued that sublime is definitive postmodern category, marking limits of representation that are transgressed in postmodern art, and also suggesting apocalyptic doom prefigured in that art.(1) Pynchon's work has always been fundamentally concerned with terrain of sublime: his fascination with what one critic terms the Other Kingdom,(2) his efforts to present unrepresentable, and his obsession with mysterious, gnostic realms that constantly threaten and oppress his characters have led Harold Bloom to describe him as the greatest master of negative sublime at least since Faulkner and West.(3) When Pynchon's long-awaited fourth novel, Vineland, appeared in 1989, most prominent Pynchon critics were dismayed with work. Frank Kermode described Vineland as disappointing book, and David Cowart complained that Pynchon had made no effort to surpass Gravity's Rainbow.(4) Indeed, Vineland does not operate under same literary and philosophical assumptions as does Pynchon's earlier work; yet to describe this as a disappointment or decline in Pynchon's powers is to fail to understand importance of novel, and also to fail to see major aesthetic shift announced in its pages. For Vineland quite consciously refuses Pynchon's earlier poetics, and demands new terms and new categories by which it may be interpreted. The differences between Vineland and Pynchon's previous writings are remarkable. The mysterious, always-unknowable cabals and conspiracies so characteristic of Pynchon are largely absent from novel; principal villain is given a name and a face, and his defeat is possible by novel's close; impossible quests of Pynchon's earlier characters give way in Vineland to longings that are more limited and that can be realized; and threat of apocalypse -- perhaps dominant characteristic of Pynchon's earlier novels -- recedes before a conclusion that emphasizes survival and regeneration. In Vineland individual, family, and community are restored and reconciled, offering a dramatic contrast to overwhelming isolation and estrangement depicted in V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. The novel closes in a series of scenes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and regeneration. With Vineland, philosophical terrain of Pynchon's writing shifts dramatically from metaphysical and ontological to social and ethical. That most Pynchon critics seem reluctant to embrace this dramatic shift in his writing reveals a gap in current critical practice, an inability to grapple with very issues that Vineland dramatically depicts. Yet concerns of this novel do suggest a critical vocabulary that could account for work, although a vocabulary that is hardly in fashion today. The aesthetic of beautiful -- long traditional contrary to aesthetic of sublime -- defines very terrain Pynchon explores in Vineland. The integrity of individual, relations between individual and social realm, preservation of community, and emphasis on reconciliation, regeneration, and forgiveness, all fall within domain of beautiful. The dramatic shift in Pynchon's fiction can be understood as a movement from an aesthetic of sublime to an aesthetic of beautiful. …