Thomas Pynchon's Intrusion in the Enchanter's Domain

Abstract

In November 1960, not long after Thomas Pynchon left Greenwich Village where he had been working on V., the D'Arcy Galleries opened a show of surrealist art directed by Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. The Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter's Domain, as the show was called, was the culmination of a long and fruitful contact between New York's artistic avant-garde and the French surrealists, leaving a permanent influence in American painting that has often been commented upon and at times debated.l This exchange between New York artistic circles and the French surrealists influenced not only the plastic arts, but the literary ones as well. Despite this, the attention given to the literary traces of the surrealists' intrusion in the enchanter's domain, as they termed the United States, has been scant and largely limited to poetry. Literary critics simply have not given nearly the attention art critics have to the surrealist presence in New York and its effects on our culture. As a consequence, a certain impoverishment exists in our understanding of contemporary literary history, not to mention literary forms. A case in point is Thomas Pynchon. Despite numerous allusions and references in V. to surrealism, for example, no literary analyses among the scores of articles devoted to V. since its publication in 1963 have taken into account the depth of Pynchon's involvement with the surrealist aesthetic. One suspects that the extremely reticent Pynchon may have felt obliged to put his cards on the table recently, when he wrote in the Introduction to Slow Learner, his collection of five early stories, four of them written while he was a student at Cornell, I had