Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon Richard Pearce G. K. Hall & Co. • Boston, Massachusetts Cop}'righr s 1961 Richllrd Pellret! b}' Lihrary nf Congres... . Cataloging in Puhlkatinn Data Main l'ntr)' under Util': Critil-al t"ssay~ on ·1110ma.~ Pynchon. (Critical ~Sa)'5 un .'\nwriC311 literatun·) Bihliowaph), : Include" index, I. PrTlchnn. Thomn~-Critici~m and intl'rl)fetation Addresses. ~ssa)'s. lechlres, I. Pearce, Richard. 1932- , II. Series. PS.'1I)66 . ..,SSZ62 813'.54 81-6814 ISB~ O.IU61·1s.120·1 AACR2 TIIi.Y ,JUI,licat;ofl is I,rirated on p~rmane'ltldll,a'}le acid·/re(f paprr MANl'FACTl'UED IN TilE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CRITICAL ESSAYS ON AMERICAN LITERATURE This series seeks to collect the most important previously published criticism on writers and topics in American literature along with, in var ious volumes, original essays, interviews, bibliographies, letters, manu script sections, and other materials brought to public attention for the first time. Richard Pearce's volume on Thomas Pynchon offers fifteen essays on this major contemporary writer, including articles by Josephine J. Hendin, Alan Friedman and Manfred Puetz, and Maureen Quilligan. s In addition, it contains an important original essay on Gravity Rainbow by Marcus Smith and Khaehig Tololyan and a useful annotated bibliography of Pynchon criticism by Beverly Lyon Clark and Caryn Fuoroli. We are confident that this collection will make a permanent and significant contribution to American literary study. JAMES NACEL, GENERAL EDITOR Northeastern University CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Richard Pearce 1 ESSAYS Richard Wasson, UNotes on a New Sensibility" 13 Richard Patteson, "What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude in Pynchon's V. .. 20 J2..,~W,..BUDt·, uComic Escape and Anti-Vision: V. and Tlae Crying of Lot 49" 32 Josephine Hendin, "What is Thomas Pynchon Telling Us? V. and Gravity'S Rainbow" 42 TJ!21m"a's- -S-chaub, 'A Gentle Chill, An Ambiguity': The Crying of U Lot 51 J. Alan Friedman and Manfred Puetz, "Science as Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and Gravity; Rainbow" 69 Speer Morgan, "Gravity's Rainbow: What's The Big Idea?" 82 Lawrence Wolfley, "Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Nover' 99 Scott Simmon, ··Beyond the Theater of War: Graoity's Rainbow as Film" 124 Steven WeLenburger, "The End of History? Thomas Pynchon and the Uses of the Past" 140 Elaine B. Safer, "The Allusive Mode and Black Humor in Pynchon's Graoityi Rainbow" 157 Marcus Smith ah~ lChachig Tololyan, "The New Jeremiad: Gravity, Rainbow'" 169 Maureen Quilligan, ["Thomas Pynchon and the Language of Allegory"] , 187 Richard Pearce, "Where're They At, Where're They Going? Thomas p)PJlchon and the American Novel in ~fotion" 213 Beverly Lyon Clark and Caryn Fuoroli, "A Re,iew of Major Pynchon Criticism" 230 Index 255 INTRODUCTION For Henry Adams at the turn of the century, history "'as like a can non ball coming directly towards him, and he could trace its five thousand year curve. Its momentum increased just before Constantine set up the Cross; it swerved as Gutenberg printed the Bible and Columbus discovered a new world; it was given a new curve by Galileo and Bacon. But in 1900 .. the continuity snapped." And Adams con\reyed the disloca tion not only in his metaphors but by picturing himself in the third person: Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the steUar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and Oung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which \\'as very nearly the exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid si!1gle gentleman in Paris, who never drove down the Champs without EI)'s~ expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself In the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs ,,'ould double in force and number every ten years. l Thomas Pynchon opens Craoity i Rainbow ",ith the experience of a rocket-bomb that goes beyond Adams's prediction. "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." For. Pirate Prentice uit is too late. ... No light any where. ... He's af.raid of the way the glass will fall-soan-it "ill be a spectacle: the f&\w( a crystal palace ..• : But Pirate Prentice Is only dream- ing, and when he wakes up we a nightmare that makes his dream e~ter and Adams' vision nostalgic interludes. For the V- 2 rocket that appears as a brilliant point of light in the pink morning sky does not scream. ult travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the sound of it coming in .... You couldn't adjust to the bastards. No ,vay.":' than the Wfir~.! nightmare experience of an ordinary air raid is anticipating the ne,,' rocket-which travels with unprecedented speed, confuses direction through time and space, and denies the logic of common sense. It not only snaps continuity it explodes virtually before it arrives. It indeed signals t that fall of a crystal palace-the rational, orderl)· world that had been the dream of nineteenth-century science and that, Henry Adams not withstanding, had continued as an Ideal of progress in America into the middle of the twentieth century. 1 2 Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon . The experience culminating in Pynchon's third novel is of more than the terror that pervaded England toward the end of World War II. It is of the acceleration of unprecedented events that followed, especially as they affected the American psyche: the explosion of an atomic bomb that threatened a holocaust, a "cold war" that created worldwide tension and paranoia, a Korean War few people could understand, and then the Viet nam War-which showed us that what Whitman once heralded as "Nature without check," America's "original energy,"4 had been chan neled into forms of exploitation and imperialism giving rise to riots in the t ghettos, factionalism in our major institutions, and a revolution in taste and manners. The acceleration also gathered its impetus from new forms of electronic communication, computerization, space exploration, and growth of multinational industries; it would continue to gain momentum in the experience of Watergate and the energy crisis. On the one hand, we are living with the results of unchecked energy-and Whitman's metaphor has become frighteningly literal. On the other hand, we are living with the results of a gathering rationalism that has sped up communications and made more information available as it has overloaded our circuits and subjected us to the possibility of total if undefinable control. And this paradox Henry Adams had also foreseen: The child born in 1900 would ... be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it. and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man; the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established; the perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of the principles of freedom, and the perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the staggering problem wa... the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. 5 Pynchon gives palpable shape to the "new world" Adams tried to imagine-in his fictional landscapes and the very form of his novels, which are at once multiple and monolithic, anarchic and ominously pat terned. The landscape of V. is vast and inanimate. Called by William Plater "Baedeker Land, "e it is populated by tourists (explorers, agents, hedonists, pursuers, sailors, wanderers, refugees, outcasts) and governed Introduction 3 by an inescapable illusion of reality. If we find it difficult to keep track of the novers characters (of Benny Profane as he aimlessly yo-yos, Herbert Stencil as he ceaselessly searches for V., V. as she continually transforms herself into new guises, and a host of cartoon characters who are always on the move) we also intimate that they are moving in obedience to some universal but unnatural law . In The Crying of Lot 49 the "new world" is a megalopolis, sprawling incoherently but likened to a printed circuit. It is either an accidental conglomeration or a network of freeways, motels, used car lots, suburban lounges, television stations, corporate industries, and communications systems. And the novel develops through a series of similar and intricate plots that may be real or imagined, connected or disconnected, actually or apparently related to a series of events originating in the early days of modem history and involving the official mail service and its revolutionary counterpart. In Grav'ty's Rainbow the "new world" becomes "the Zone" through which Tyrone Slothrop travels trying to escapepursuers of both the allies and axis, who may all be know ing or unknowing agents of the multinational synthetics industry that burgeoned on World War II. Now the very life force of the universe is also the force of death, manifesting itself in the shape of both Slothrop's erec tion and the V-2 rocket. But, though Slothrop draws us into "the Zone," he disappears two-thirds the way through a formless novel that is populated by hundreds of major and minor characters, that shifts its locus from one country to another, leaps from scientific formulas to the comics, from myth to tin pan alley, from terror to slapstick-and yet ends where it began, with the nightmare of an approaching rocket. In the dark Or pheus moviehouse we are addressed in the second person-it is our senseless nightmare and inescapable reality. And we are enjoined to sing along as the rocket ·'reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof .... Now,everybody-(.]"7 History, for both Adams and Pynchon, is accelerating out of control and yet govem~by an impersonal force. And both are obsessed with history at least partly due to their personal stake in it. Like Adams's, Pyn chon's ancestors played a distinguished if not central role in American history. William Pynchon, who becomes William Slothrop in Gravity" Rainbow, was a patent holder and treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, helped found both Roxbury and Springfield, and served as a magistrate at the witchcraft trials of Hugh and Mary Parsons. But he also wrote a heretic tract correcting the "common Errors" of the New England Puritans, who condemned the book to be burned in the Boston marketplace. His descendents included Joseph Pynchon, who was in line for the governorship of Connecticut until he supported the British in the Revolution. a judge and physician who corresponded with Hawthorne to protest his characterization of the Pynchon family in The HOlUe of ,he Seven GtJbles, a surgeon who invented the kind of instruments that Dr. Schoenmaker would use in the nose job of V., and a stockbroker who con- 4 Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon tributed to the military-industrial complex prior to the Second World War. But while Pynchon has a personal stake in American history, he does not view the past from a personal, let alone official, perspective-indeed, in "Entropy" and V .• he parodies Adams's speaking of himself in the third person. Quite the contrary, Pynchon strives for anonymity, as if he were trying to become one of the dropouts of The Crying oj Lot 49 or the preterite of Gravity's Rainbow; and searching for clues to his life is like entering one of his novels. Mathew Winston (to whose "Quest for Pyn chon"· I am indebted for the biographical information I have found) discovered that there is no picture of him on his book jackets or on the freshman register at Cornell, that his transcript mysteriously vanished from the University and that his service record was burned after an ex t plosion at the Naval office in St. Louis. Like Adams, Pynchon also studied science. But Adams only grasped the outlines of what he read-admitting that he "greedily devoured" Poincaire "without understanding a single consecutive page, and in It sisting that a student of history has no need to understand the scientific ideas of great men. Moreover if he was stirred by the revolutionary im It t pact of modem science, he could not fully accept the loss of unity or break the hold of mechanistic explanation. The law of acceleration, by which he explained the dynamic of history, is classically mechanistic: it allows for neither discontinuity nor a change in the material properties of the mov ing object. In contrast, Pynchon studied engineering science at Cornell before becoming an English major and worked at Boeing aircraft for two years after college. Moreover, he was born in 1937, well into the century that astonished Adams, and seems to see nothing but discontinuity. That is, he not only understands but has fully assimilated the concepts of modern science-where unity gives way to multiplicity, order to disorder, progress to entropy, continuity to discontinuity, the law of cause-effect to the rule of probabUity, the ideal of certainty to the necessity of uncer tainty. And Pynchon confronts the paradox which Adams only began to glimpse: of a "new world" that is absolutely anarchic and yet totally governed by an impersonal order. But first let me outline some funda mental concepts that underlie Pynchon's imaginative construction of the "new land." According to the classical Newtonian view, the physical universe was like a machine; its movement was continuous, and it could be completely explained in terms of matter and force. That is, through systematic in vestigation, it would be possible to know all of its parts, formulate its laws with certainty, and harness Its power for the benefit of man. At the end of the 18th century Laplace postulated the ideal: "an intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of aU things of which the world consists . . . would embrace in the same for mula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the Introduction 5 sUghtest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. And the novel developed toward the "10 same end-as the omniscient narrator, knowing the situation of all his characters and the laws of human motivation, embraced his world in a formula called the plot. By the end of the nineteenth century, developments in thermo dynamics were beginning to undermine the classical view. Adams was no more ambivalent about the challenge than some of the scientists who con tributed to it. The first challenge arose from changing the model for the J. physical universe from a machine to a cylinder of gas. Alan Friedman, who is both a physicist and an illuminating reader of Pynchon, elucidates the consequences of this change in his useful "Science and Technology in Gravity B Rainbow. He points out that a cylinder no bigger than a can "II of bair spray contains a trillion atoms bouncing off one another trillions of trillions of times a second. And since it would be impossible to apply Newton·s laws directly to all of them, the scientist applies statistical law , computes the typical path of an atom, and predicts the total pressure with extreme accuracy. Sacrificed in this approach, though, is the ability and even the attempt to predict the behavior of any particular atom. Indeed, a particular atom may behave unpredictably-subject only to chance or accident. As a result, the scientist no longer thinks in terms of certainty but only probability, which, however high, can never reach 100%. And wbUe statistics are appUed within the framework of Newton·s laws, the framework is threatened by the shift in strategy and the acceptance of chance even as a practical convenience. Pyncbon plays with the image of the unpredictable atom in The Crying of Lot 49 when Oedipa, preparing for a game of Strip BotticelU, accidentally knocks over a can of spray deodorant and cowers on the bathroom Ooor as it caroms off the walls. Still thinking conventional terms, though, she imagines that God or a i~ computer could predict its path. Indeed, her search for order throughout the novel ref1~r refusal to accept the law of the "new world." In CraoltysRafnbow, Pynchon works with the image more seriously: Roger Mexico can predict the striking pattern of the V- 2 rockets with extreme accuracy, but never where a single rocket wUlland; and in this novel the antagonist Dr. Pointsman, rather than the protagonist, refuses to accept the limits of probability. Moreover, as Pynchon develops his singular form-or formlessness-from V. to The Crying oj Lot 49 to Gravity's Rainbow, the paths of his characters become less easy to plot. J. Alan Friedman also points out that the model of thermodynamics does not in itself challenge classical physics; it only leads to the applica tion of statistics and probability. In fact, the first law of thermodynamics is a statement of classical unity, for it asserts the conservation of energy-that energy cannot be created or lost but only transformed. But the second law, as Adams recognized, threatened the ideal of a perfect machine whose power could be harnessed for the benefit of man. It states 6 Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon that systems tend to run down in time, for processes tend toward disorder. "Entropy," the measure of disorder, is the title of an early Pynchon story which schematizes a theme developed imaginatively in aU of his novels. Indeed, he recognizes that entropy is a measure not only of energy but in formation. According to Norbert Weiner, whose ideas were still being hotly discussed when Pynchon was in college, information is order; but, like energy, it is subject to disorganization in transit. Moreover. the very II gathering of information (which, it was thought, enabled Maxwell's hypothetical Demon to maintain order and counter entropy) takes energy out of the system and contributes to the disorder. Anne Mangel argues that this is the ironic consequence of Oedipa's heroic quest: the more meanings and connections she finds, the more she contributes to the disorder of her world. But Pynchon also seems to have recognized that 13 information may be defined as disorder rather than order. In information theory, the more uncertain a message the more information it can convey. And entropy, being a measure of increasing information, becomes a positive tendency. In this light, as Thomas Schaub points out, Oedipa's search offers the possibility of hope-although the more she, and the reader, learn about the Tristero, the more we are overwhelmed by the amount of information and its uncertainty.14 Indeed, in each of his novels, Pynchon draws us into a search for order, where the information and uncertainty become overwhelming, and where the search itself, while necessary and even ennobling, tends toward disorder. But a key word in the second law of thermodynamics is "tends." A system tends to run down. We are back to probability. There is always a small chance of a system not running down-or of a force that counteracts thermodynamic entropy. The possibility of such a force is embodied in p)rnchon's characters who search for order-Herbert Stencil in V., Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, Slothrop in Gravity, Rainbow-as well as in the reader, whom Pynchon compels to join in the search. As I have pointed out, the search may contribute to the disorder. Moreover, the very intimation of order may be a form of paranoia-and in each of his novels Pynchon taps the power of this pervasive modern phenomenon. But he may be discovering a positive as well as a negative source in paranoia, for it leads not only to solipsism but to genuine community. And if it becomes a form of modem religion, it is also shown to be a fun damental religious impulse throughout Western history. While thermodynamiCS threatened the classical view scientists share with historians and artists, quantum mechanics demolished it. The science of elementary particles was just being formulated as Henry Adams wrote The Education; in fact the breakthrough was made by a man who anticipated Adams' mentor, Josiah Gibbs, in recognizing the importance of thermodynamics. In 1900 Max Planck solved what had been an un solvable problem by upsetting a fundamental assumption of classical physics: the continuity of nature. Although he struggled against having to