Pynchon's Poetry

Abstract

From the first paragraph of his first novel to the last paragraph of his latest one, poems, and particularly songs, make up a characteristic part of Pynchon's work: without them a reader's experience would not be at all the same. Even disallowing translations and quotations, his books average over a line of verse for every printed page. Yet since Pynchon's artistic manner as a whole defines itself more through dislocations of style than through consistencies, any analysis of any part, however characteristic it might be, risks an emphasis through isolation that the narrator of the passage above avoids. His voice seems to be making urgent distinctions among the kinds of characters who populate Gravity's Rainbow and are concerned with its quest. By extension the distinction applies to V. and The Crying of Lot 49, to his other characters, his other Grails. But what is the distinction? Or, even more simply, what seems to be the narrator's relation to it? It is easier to say what that relation is not. Neither so ignoble as to jeer at terror and suffering, nor so haughty as to disdain security and pleasure, his manner describes and defines hierarchies, but is not at all described or defined by their terms. Neither is it defined by the values and assumptions of balance and reason implied by my rather Augustan summary of its effect, as the contrast between our styles demonstrates. While he sounds extremely sympathetic toward the nobles in the first sentence, then as if triumphing over them in the next two, the narrator seems on the whole to be outside or beyond or separate from the groups of characters he distinguishes. To me the passage is a characteristic enactment of the ways in which Pynchon achieves a relation to his subjects that is at the same time aloof and sympathetic, inclusive and analytic. The passage also, as I will try to show, describes the compositional principle behind his use of poetry.