Reading McHale reading Pynchon, or, Is Pynchon still a postmodernist?

When Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon was published in 1997, it marked a deep shift in Pynchon's career and in American letters in general. All of Pynchon's novels had been socially and politically aware: V., Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland are all marked by social criticism and a profound questioning of American values. They have carried the labels of satire and black humor; Pynchonesque has come to be associated with erudition, a playful style, anachronisms and puns - and an interest in scientific theories, popular culture, paranoia, and the military-industrial complex, which may or may not, according to Pynchon's wild and widely populated casts of characters, be the definitive feature of America. In short, Pynchon's novels were preeminently postmodern. Mason & Dixon moved beyond postmodernism to use the same style, wit, and erudition to re-create an eighteenth century when America was being formed as both the and the idea we have come to know. Pynchon's focus on the creation of the Mason-Dixon Line and the governmental and scientific entities responsible for it makes a clearer statement than any of his previous novels about the slavery and imperialism at the heart of the Enlightenment, and Mason & Dixon levels a dark and hilarious critique at this America. novel was a New York Times bestseller. ~~ This volume of new essays studies the interface between eighteenth- and twentieth-century culture both in Pynchon's novel and in the historical past. It offers fresh thinking about Pynchon's work, not only because it deals with his most recent novel, but also because the contributors take up the linkages between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries in studies that are as concerned with culture as with the literary text itself. ~~ scope of the volume is indicated by its four sections: The Rounds of History, about historiography and narrative temporality; Consumption Then and Now, which deals with slavery, trade, and consumption; Space and Power, which confronts the connections between place and imperial power in the eighteenth century; and Enlightenment Microhistories, which studies in detail three specific eighteenth-century incidents. ~~~~~~~ ELIZABETH JANE WALL HINDS is Professor of English at College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Fast Learner:The Typescript of Pynchon’s V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Luc Herman and John M. Krafft "Scripts're in the top drawer." But they were all purple, Dittoed—worn, torn, stained with coffee. Nothing else in the drawer. "Hey. . . . Where's the original? What did you make these copies from?" (Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 77–78) In the spring of 2001, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at The University of Texas at Austin announced its "acquisition of the corrected typescript to Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V. [1963]," along with eight letters written by Pynchon to Faith and Kirkpatrick Sale between 1960 and 1964 (Stephen Smith). Until now, critics have not had much apart from Pynchon's novels and stories to work on or with: the occasional letter; Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, his 1984 collection of the short stories he published between 1959 and 1964; some juvenilia (contributions to a high school newspaper, reprinted in the Pynchonbibliography by Clifford Mead); and a little nonfiction, including a New York Times Magazine article on the Watts riots. This lack of materials put Pynchon scholars at a disadvantage when it came to genetic criticism, in which texts are studied with a focus on their development. How did Pynchon's novels come to be what they are? We had almost no way of knowing until now, but the HRC typescript radically changes this situation with regard to V. We were aided in the early stages of our research into the Ransom Center's acquisition by the late Stephen Tomaske, a librarian at California State University at Los Angeles who had been doing biographical research on Pynchon for some twenty years. Since we thought (perhaps erroneously) that Pynchon himself would not like to collaborate on this project, we approached Corlies ("Cork") Smith, Pynchon's editor for V. at the publishing house J. B. Lippincott. Smith was extremely forthcoming. We interviewed him by telephone and face to face, and he even provided us with nearly all his editorial correspondence with Pynchon about V.1 [End Page 1] Those letters proved invaluable, since they provide the key to the connection between the Ransom Center's typescript and the published novel. The correspondence we have between Cork Smith and Pynchon starts in March 1960 with a "'Hello There!'" note from Smith and ends abruptly in June 1962 in the midst of a discussion about the place of a specific chapter in the eventual text. Thanks to the good offices of Pynchon's recently acquired agent, the famous Candida Donadio, Lippincott had bought his story "Low-lands" for inclusion in issue 16 of its New World Writing series, which came out in 1960. Donadio knew that Pynchon was writing a novel, and she managed to sell this unfinished novel to Lippincott as well. The date on the contract (as we learned from Tzofit Butler, the manager of theInformation Center Archives at HarperCollins, which currently holds the rights to V.) is January 29, 1960. Cork Smith told us in this connection that Lippincott also "faked up a delivery date. We put it like a year and a half later or something." Sure enough, on August 2, 1961, Smith wrote to Pynchon that Lippincott had accepted the novel. Smith recalls that, since the decision had to be cleared with his boss, he must have received the novel perhaps three or four weeks before the beginning of August, which means Pynchon delivered almost exactly on the fake date added at the time of the contract. The novel reached Lippincott in a box via Pynchon's agent. Smith is adamant that this box contained a clean typewritten original. Therefore, that document is not what can now be consulted in Austin. The typescript acquired by the HRC is a copy rather than an original. To be more precise, the typescript features two kinds of copies, one black, the other various shades of blue. Sarah Funke, an employee of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York, through whom the HRC bought the typescript, identified the blue pages as carbon copies. But the crispness of the type, evidence of scraping, and exactness of corrections on the...

Since its publication in 1960, Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy" has been situated within critical attempts to read Pynchon's novels as literary articulations of the thermodynamic principle of entropy. Indeed, entropy and related issues are so thoroughly embedded in Pynchon criticism that an exhaustive index of "entropic" readings might closely approximate a list of some of the most frequently cited responses to his fiction. Typical of such approaches is William M. Plater's comment that Pynchon "examines the philosophical world as if it were a closed system in which facts, rather than molecules, are distributed according to the laws of thermodynamics" (1). Similarly, Tony Tanner states that "Thomas Pynchon made his intentions clear from the outset. The title of his first important short story is I Entropy I and … his work is certainly about a world succumbing to entropy … 11(153). Peter Bischoff generalizes: "When Thomas Pynchon gave the title I Entropy' to his second published short story, he furnished … the key for the interpretation of this story which is programmatic for his entire work." Anne Mangel agrees in regarding entropy as the basic principle informing Pynchon's narrative technique: "Pynchon's use of scientific concepts and disorder in his fiction holds a dual excitement, for not only does it sever him from a previous, more rigid and static kind of writing, but it also links him with contemporary artists working in other media who incorporate scientific ideas and seek randomness in their art"(207-08). Such statements assert rather than demonstrate randomness, and ultimately lend support to Gore Vidal's dismissive comment that "The imaginative writer can never be serious unless, like Mr. Thomas Pynchon, he makes it clear that he is writing about Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a number of other subjects that he picked up in his freshman year at Cornell."

Eunjung Park's <em>Study on Thomas Pynchon: Empire and the Postmodern, </em>the first critical book on Pynchon published in Korean, is remarkable for its systematic and comprehensive approach to Pynchon's postmodernist critique of imperialism. According to the author, Pynchon's concern with imperialism consistently pervades his novels. <em>A Study on Thomas Pynchon </em>begins with the paradoxical premise that America both denies and inherits European imperialism. With her keen criticism, Park explores how Pynchon's novels suggest that America reproduces and reinforces an ideology of imperialism in various forms rather than continuing to carry out what the founding fathers and their nineteenth-century heirs proclaimed against the evil force of British empire. What Pynchon points out through this paradox is relatively self-conscious: America itself has become an empire that increases entropy more and more.

Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason &amp; Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s.

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. …

The Kairotic View of History in Thomas Pynchon's NovelsThe rhetorical concept of kairos (right timing, right proportion, time viewed qualitatively) can expand the understanding of the "points" or decisive moments in Pynchon's historical novels. In addition to timeliness, kairos for theologians represents the intersection of the sacred with the profane. Kairos also provides insight into the novels' affect, lending rhetorical force to the concept from Marx that "the point is to change [history]." Following the hiatus preceding&amp;nbsp;Vineland,&amp;nbsp;Pynchon's global view of history becomes more restricted, with emphasis instead on smaller social enclaves and human connections.

The novels of Pynchon are often discussed amongst literary experts as a prime example of so-called postmodernism. If Thomas Pynchon didn't already exist in secrecy, he would simply have to be invented, in order to verify postmodernism, just as Georg Cantor demonstrates Bacon's authorship of the works of Shakespeare. In any case, a vast cartel of quoters seem more than eager to ever increase a supposedly fresh complexity. Niklas Luhmann, when he was still smiling, occasionally joked that he knew not of any postmodernism, only of a modern post. Seeing themselves confronted with the facts and circumstances of Pynchon's novels, where the well-rehearsed tools of the humanities miserably fail, these prophets might find that the easiest way to escape their dilemma is simply to tag it as postmodern.

This essay demonstrates the ways in which The Crying of Lot 49 is invested in recreating the televisual experience through stylistic means. Its central point is that the assertion advanced by some critics that the novel's relationship with television comprises part of Thomas Pynchon's critique of mass media, a critique aimed at distancing the literary novel from more popular forms, must be rethought in light of the fact that The Crying of Lot 49 is more deeply indebted to and interpenetrated by the strategies and formal features of early broadcast television than previous readings have been able to show.

As a scholar working on literature, I am often asked to describe my work in potted form. This necessarily involves an introduction to the work of Thomas Pynchon, an extremely difficult task. Pynchon's novels cannot be considered normal literature; they are vast, sprawling pieces that encompass hundreds of characters, vast historical scope and dense prose.

From thermodynamics and rocket technology to the deep web, Thomas Pynchon's novels and stories have often juxtaposed science and technology with unusual, not to say downright implausible happenings. This is perhaps the result of a fascination with contorting scientific knowledge into strange applications, whether as metaphors for social mores or to see how far its logics can be pushed toward the breaking point, but it is assuredly grounded in the relationship between the human and the technological and how American society deals with its contemporary technological environment. For example, Bleeding Edge explores the growth of the internet and the dot-com boom, Vineland focuses on television and film, and Gravity's Rainbow deals with the V2 rocket program. Obviously, such reductive statements omit the complexities of Pynchon's inclusions of and allusions to competing paradigms and conspiracy theories, but in each case what is foregrounded is how individuals understand and relate to the world. As such, it is possible to assert that Pynchon's fictions have always been involved in representing and articulating of mind. Such states might differ across his fictions in terms of their setting and context, but whether concerned with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair (Against the Day), the 9/11 attacks (Bleeding Edge), California at various points (The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice), World War Two and its aftermath (V, Gravity's Rainbow), or even colonial America (Mason & Dixon), Pynchon's works are invariably concerned with seeing things differently than established histories might otherwise imply and, moreover, foregrounding the relativism and partiality of any individual perspective or overly simplified way of perceiving the world. His protagonists search for answers to make sense of their experiences as they are cast adrift from meaning; in the case of Slothrop from Gravity's Rainbow, he is literally lost as he disappears from the narrative part way through. Within this framework, a recurrent trope of Pynchon's fictions is negative psychological responses to the environment (paranoia, uncertainty, emotional and epistemological insecurity) as a result of a failure to reconcile individual experiences with something defined as normal or normative. Pynchon's characters neither grow nor find answers, but this is precisely the point: they accumulate data, clues, and/or experiences, but no single answer suffices to define everything, and no individual's answer corresponds to any other's. As a result of this, one of the disciplines/discourses most often referenced in his fictions is psychiatry, for even when not directly connected to the narrative arc, psychological and psychiatric terminology and characters are nonetheless present and serve to lead the reader to the perception that reality is contested, not a given, and that perception is not straightforwardly schematic. More specifically, this article examines the ways in which perceptions of hallucinations--as psychiatric symptoms--have been represented in Pynchon's works and, more importantly, how they have augmented and shifted the territory upon which distinctions between hallucination and reality are founded. Within his work is a suspicion of the modes of psychiatric classifications and an attendant concern with the problems of control in the creation of such classifications, and we see this as broadly emblematic of a particular perspective evident within postmodern literature and theory. In this interpretation, Jean-Francois Lyotard's much-vaunted incredulity toward metanarratives is foreshadowed within Pynchon's oeuvre as a suspicion towards those who would describe and define reality at the expense of other worldviews (xxiv). (1) After a brief examination of how theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard have represented postmodern society, this essay moves on to explore the problems of binary-based psychiatric definitions of hallucinations. …

This paper considers literary realism in the novels of Thomas Pynchon as a means to examine the ways in which realism is embedded within a post-modern context. After first considering some of the problems surrounding the concept of realism – its historical lineage, conflation with philosophical realism and the changing nature of reality itself – I discuss Pynchon's novels in terms of his technological construction of reality effects within a context of ontological doubt. I suggest that in Pynchon we arrive at what might be called a ‘baroque realism’, which draws on the Deleuzian metaphor of the fold, and is concerned with questions of illusion and reality, paradox and complexity in tune with the ontological uncertainty that characterises the age.

The topic of this thesis is pastoral representation in fiction of late twentieth century. The thesis explores ideological and ethical implications of ambiguous imperative grow (one of root meanings of our word nature) as evidenced by a select corpus of works that includes novels by Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, Gilbert Sorrentino, Don DeLillo, and, especially, Thomas Pynchon. The argument is that Pynchon's novels afford evidence of an extensive reworking, troping, or of pastoral tradition in America. In particular, Pynchon's writing connects discourses of postmodernism and (among others) in ways that draw critical attention to America's pastoral and other inheritances. The novels explored in thesis illuminate Frederick Karl's observation of post-WWII fiction generally, that the awareness of loss of Eden, or wasting of it, and compulsive need to regain even sense of it lead to terrible conflicts in thinking and particular narrative (7). The turning over of idea of America as nature's nation yields strange fruit: bittersweet ambiguities, environmental tocsins and self-reflexive jeremiads, fables of subversion (Weisenburger) and cautionary tales of co-optation. Gravity's Rainbow, for example, is at once both an experimental and a traditional fiction, and as such serves as a brilliant metonym for scripted performance of a national culture marked by internal contradictions. The writing of America, Geoff Ward observes, is massively inclusive, but dissident and adversarial; obsessive, full of violence, yet pearled with nostalgia and sentiment; addicted to new, but condemned to repetition; a mirror for its own culture of self-replication, but hybrid by nature; Paradise, but Paradise™”(9). Many of novels explored during course of this thesis crisscross this spectrum of possibilities. In virtually every case, it would seem that no matter how intense or insightful novelist's gaze, and for all their satire, paradoxes of pastoral-worship generate a fiction and forms of narrative subjectivity which remain both schizophrenic and, to a surprising extent, loyally American (Karl48). Both suburban lawn and wilderness preserve attest to sociological and ecological ramifications of Arcadian fantasy in America. Other examples, pivotal to present study, include US space program and tangential Biosphere 2 experiment. The thesis offers readings of such extra-literary pastorals in order to demonstrate that discourses of “postmodernism and ecology are not intrinsically antithetical (as partisans from either camp are wont to suggest), but that on contrary, postmodernism and converge in an emergent discourse of the new garden''-with unsettling social and ecological implications. Pastoral, this thesis maintains, is not of merely academic interest; neither can extent of its significations be restricted to a carefully circumscribed literary audience. Nevertheless, an extant discourse of garden returns us, properly, to domain of language, with a view to its inherent polysemy; and to fictional writing of America, with its panoply of voices attesting to immanent complexity, ambiguity and indeterminacy. The thesis aims to demonstrate how, in face of existential dangers posed by a late-modern risk society, pastoral form continues to thrive, mutate and adapt.

We don't know much about Thomas Pynchon. We don't know how he writes. We don't know what he has in mind. We do know that he studied science as well as English at Cornell, that he worked for Boeing before starting to write full time, that physicists and mathematicians have verified the accuracy of his complex scientific allusions, and that he has written three novels. more we learn about modern physics, the better we understand Pynchon's novels-not only thematically but structurally as well. I would like to focus on the structures. I will not attempt to explain them or reduce them by application of scientific theory. I will simply start with the assumption that Pynchon has a thorough understanding of and feel for both physics and literature. And with this assumption in mind, I will examine, as empirically as possible, the endings of his three novels. My conclusions, I hope, will lead beyond Pynchon's novels to a broader understanding of modern and post-modern fiction. Where we going? asks Benny Profane in the beginning of V. The way we're heading, says Pig Bodine. Move your ass (8).1 And we never know where we're heading except that it's the way we're going. We follow the capricious string of Benny's yo-yo as he shuttles back and forth from Times Square to Grand Central Station, from Rachel Owlglass to Paola Maijstral, as he hunts blind albino alligators in the New York sewers and finally travels to Malta. We follow the wild trajectories of Benny's many acquaintances among the whole sick crew. And we follow Herbert Stencil as he searches after Victoria Wren, Vera Meroving, Veronica Manganese-or V., a woman whose name and shape are continually transformed. But in the end the pattern becomes clear. For we discover that the novel has been governed by an omniscient narrator through a series of simple flashbacks, complex rear projections, and-principally-the intercutting of intricate plot lines. And he ties up all the loose ends in the epilogue, where he tells us what Stencil started out to search for but would never find-the secret of his father's death.

As a scholar working on literature, I am often asked to describe my work in potted form. This necessarily involves an introduction to the work of Thomas Pynchon, an extremely difficult task. Pynchon's novels cannot be considered normal literature; they are vast, sprawling pieces that encompass hundreds of characters, vast historical scope and dense prose.