Pynchon's Novels Research Articles

From Puritanism to Paranoia: Trajectories of History in Weber and Pynchon

Pynchon's novels are well known for making wide-ranging allusions to other works. The sociology of Max Weber, like other material that informs Pynchon's writings, is a pervasive influence and yet difficult to pin down. This is especially true of <em>Gravity's Rainbow. </em>Pynchon's interest in Weber is not surprising since his central concerns include the nature of historical interpretation and the impact of science on the modern world. Both the novelist and the sociologist explore, in their different ways, the fate of humanity in a disenchanted and increasingly bureaucratized world. In light of this affinity, we must ask whether Weber's social thought can shed any light on the central themes in Pynchon's novels, and, more specifically, how it influences Pynchon's ideas about history and about the role of science in the modern world. We may also put the question the other way around, asking whether the themes in Weber's work gain an additional dimension by being dealt with in fictional form.

The Clock as Metaphor in "Mondaugen's Story"

To Tony Tanner, Pynchon's novels suggest "that the fantasies we build to help us live represent, in fact, an infiltration of that death we think we are so eager to postpone." Tanner refers here to a propensity of many to "avoid confronting the human reality of other people, and of themselves, by all manner of depersonalizing strategies" (23). To avoid the specter of death, men either exchange their humanity for "inanimate objects and abstract theories" or reduce their fellows--those reminders of age, decay, ineluctable mortality--to inconsequential, dehumanized object status. The novel V. offers manifold examples of both tendencies. Rachel's fondness for her M.G., Eigen-value's attachment to his precious dentures, Mantissa's obsession with Botticelli's Birth of Venus, and, obviously, V.'s desire for "a foot of amber and gold" (459) illustrate how far people will go in seeking some comforting thing, some object "to pray to," to quote Henry Adams. The reduction of people to "thing-status" (Tanner 23) is no less apparent in V.'s manipulation of Melanie and the linear-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers, bellhops, guides" (384) populating the tourist's Baedeker world.

Pynchon's Endings

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.

Pynchon's Anti-Quests

The quest pattern is one of the most venerable literary paradigms of human development, both psychological and social. All three of Pynchon's novels make overt use of the quest pattern, generally depicting the inadequacy of the traditional pattern to abet or develop a consciousness capable of restoring the individual and his world to productive harmony. In effect, Pynchon has played a major role in establishing a fictional pattern I will call the Anti-Quest.

The Quest for Pynchon

Shortly after the publication of V., a friend of mine noticed a copy of the novel in a Manhattan apartment she was thinking of renting. She asked the current occupant whether he liked the book. Yes, he replied, you know--Pynchon's a very strange man. He doesn't allow any photographs of him to appear. There's none on the book jacket and none in the advertising. Why, that's true, said my friend, how did you happen to notice that? It never would have occurred to me. Oh, I work for the FBI, he responded. It's my business to notice that sort of thing. The paranoia that dominates Pynchon's fictions may be justified in more ways than one. But, fortunately, I found myself more involved with another central motif of Pynchon's novels: the quest. In 1974 I spent a summer at Cornell University, where Pynchon had been an undergraduate. I had been reading and teaching his novels for several years, and I was curious about their author. The memory of my friend's story, Pynchon's continued secretiveness and my access to people who had known the writer tempted me to satisfy that curiosity and to begin a quest for Pynchon. I assumed that the process of looking for information about the mysterious Thomas Pynchon should be almost as intricate and fascinating as following the metamorphoses of V., the legacy of Pierce Inverarity, the history of Rocket 00000. The assumption has proved valid. Like the movement of the crowd at the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow, and like that of any Pynchon novel, my investigation has been not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into. Since direct communication with the sequestered Pynchon was impossible, I started by consulting official documents, and I immediately encountered difficulties. Some records, such as his Cornell transcript, are confidential by