The New Pynchon Studies 1108474462, 9781108474467

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Introduction: Pynchon Studies in the Twenty-First Century Joanna Freer

The twenty-first century has been a time of renewed energy within Pynchon studies. Among other factors this is due to the publication of three novels, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013), which have each brought something distinctively new to the table. Against the Day’s vast scope and range makes it Pynchon’s most fully realized example of what has come to be conceived of as the “systems novel”; Inherent Vice’s revisiting of the counterculture era first examined by Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) offers a concrete point of comparison on which to base assessments of his maturation as a writer amid changing sociopolitical contexts; and Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s (quasi-) 9/11 novel, provides a thorough and long-anticipated thematic engagement with computer technology and digital culture. Mason & Dixon, published a little before the turn of the millennium in 1997 and one of Pynchon most critically acclaimed works, has also provided fertile ground for twenty-firstcentury criticism. While some of this work is understood to represent the final fruition of projects that have had a long gestation period (projects that Pynchon interestingly anticipated in 1964 could constitute “the literary event of the millennium”), the publication of these novels in fairly rapid succession means that this current period of productivity easily rivals that of Pynchon’s initial entry onto the scene of American letters.1 In this rich context the academic field of Pynchon studies has grown exponentially, spawning a successful biannual international conference that has run consistently since 1998. There have also been significant online innovations such as the collaborative Pynchon wiki that collates detailed notes on each of the novels as well as discussion forums, such as pynchon-l. While some contemporary Pynchon criticism has remained beholden to the understandings of his writing consolidated between the 1970s and the early 1990s, the distinctive qualities of his recent work have invited many new readings. The post-hiatus wave of Pynchon novels in general, and, I suggest, his twenty-first-century fiction in particular, has not just 1

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reinvigorated the field but has enabled and provoked significant critical developments within it. The majority of the contributions to this volume are focused around his twenty-first-century novels, asserting their significance and helping to correct the lack of critical attention they have received, but Pynchon’s newer work also provides a basis to both delineate trends of development in his writing over a much longer historical arc and to rethink our interpretations of the earlier work. The publication of novels such as Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge can enable a fuller appreciation than was previously possible of Pynchon’s oeuvre as a complex interlinked whole, with numerous echoes between texts operating via overt parallels, such as the recurrence of settings or characters, or via subtler stylistic, structural, or thematic features. This recognition impels both retrospective approaches to Pynchon’s first novels informed by his later fiction and the thorough investigation of continuities and innovations across his career. Indeed these approaches often operate in tandem, as in Ali Chetwynd’s chapter in this collection, which reassesses Pynchon’s careerlong association with the paranoid register via analysis of Bleeding Edge’s “post-paranoid” stance; or my own contribution to the volume, which rethinks Pynchon’s engagement with gender dynamics in V. (1963) via a reading of Against the Day; or in Hanjo Berressem’s chapter, in which the contemporary state of “permanent crisis” in the West, as well as the specific crisis of 9/11, inspires a reading that tracks the changing implications of “disorder” throughout Pynchon’s fiction. Beyond its engagements with new novels, the “newness” of Pynchon studies in the twenty-first century derives from its engagement with advances in critical and political theory, with developments in political activism, and also with the new analytical opportunities and material afforded by the advent of the digital age. The New Pynchon Studies brings together examples of each of these approaches that are only disparately available elsewhere, and if read collectively the chapters in this volume offer a cohesive view not just of where Pynchon criticism is directed but also of twenty-first-century directions in literary criticism more broadly. Indeed, American literary criticism has witnessed myriad exciting innovations in the postmillennial period, the so-called postcritical age being paradoxically a time characterized by the “intense forging of new frameworks for critical thought within which to make sense of literature.”2 The contributions collected in the first part of this volume, titled “Theory,” deal specifically with some of the more recent critical advances of most relevance to Pynchon’s work, namely post-postmodernism, the “post-paranoid,” new materialisms, and posthumanism. Discussion of

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theory is, however, not limited to the chapters in this part; the collection as a whole evinces a common engagement with the contemporary criticaltheoretical landscape. Centrally, The New Pynchon Studies concerns itself with the shift beyond the post-structuralist emphasis on the epistemological limits of language and the practice of deconstruction that was prevalent in literary analyses produced in the 1970s and 80s. The first wave of Pynchon criticism which emerged in these years and based itself on the author’s first three novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), was very much invested in this critical trend – which is, of course, unsurprising, given that Pynchon’s early fiction was considered to define a literary postmodernism that shared many of the concerns of poststructuralist thought. To take just a few examples, seminal works of Pynchon criticism such as William M. Plater’s The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (1978), Thomas Schaub’s Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (1981), Molly Hite’s Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (1983), and Peter L. Cooper’s Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World (1983) are all primarily concerned with how Pynchon deals with issues of truth and meaning – with the way his writing calls into question the cultural, linguistic, and literary structures that produce and legitimize particular notions of truth, stranding the reader paranoically between the binary alternatives of the excess or absence of meaning. As Schaub put it, Pynchon’s writing involves “a conscious narrative strategy on his part to engage readers in the activity and condition of meaning.”3 The deconstructive approach works, of course, to collapse these binaries, and these early texts thus recognize how Pynchon’s novels challenge a structuralist “either/or” logic and replace it with “a plurality of limited, contingent, overlapping systems that coexist and form relations with one another without achieving abstract intellectual closure.”4 However, in focusing on Pynchon’s treatment of the rather abstract ideas of order and disorder, meaning and its lack, such works were limited in the extent to which they could think through the real-world implications of such plural systems. The second wave of Pynchon criticism, which has run from the early 2000s to the present (following a relative waning of critical interest in Pynchon in the 1990s), has been informed by developments in literary criticism and critical theory generally that set out to do just this. The establishment of deconstruction as something that can be taken for granted, along with the advent of globalization, the “network society” (and the internet in particular), and increased ecological awareness have collectively led to the rise of the plurally constituted interconnected web or

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network as a dominant conceptual paradigm in fields such as decolonial theory, transnational theory, eco-criticism, and feminism, as well as in more general theorizations of the contemporary. This is part of an even more general intensification of interest in the relational dynamics that were already implicit in the deconstructive approach. Christian Moraru’s Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011), is just one of the works that understands the contemporary world according to this network model. As Moraru points out, a network can take different forms. As a horizontal structure it “gestures to lateral, even bottom-up moves, implies challenges to extant stratifications of power, and is otherwise suggestive of democracy, fairness, [and] increased participation.”5 Alternatively, a vertical network operates on “a hierarchy with its command nodes, oneway channels, preferred circuits, and profit schemes”; problematically, such networks may present themselves as horizontally oriented while their “actual effects” consolidate vertical power.6 The essays in this collection engage with this network model in various ways, collectively demonstrating its significance to understanding Pynchon’s entire oeuvre, but especially his more recent fiction, and highlighting his anxiety around the potential for vertical effects to be channeled through apparently horizontal systems. To give just a few examples, Christopher K. Coffman’s chapter on digital ecologies underscores the relevance of environmentalist notions of nature as “a complex web of systems existing in a careful balance” to Pynchon’s representation of interlinked human, natural, and digital networks; Michael O’Bryan’s discussion of Pynchon’s anarchism draws on David Graeber’s definition of anarchism as “about creating and enacting horizontal networks [. . .] based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy”7; and Ralph Clare analyses the social-media/video-gaming landscape depicted in Bleeding Edge as “a decentralized network of isolated individuals interacting with and through various devices that privilege virtual ways of being over the material.”8 Moreover, Katie Muth’s digital analysis of Gravity’s Rainbow employs this figure as an analytical tool, drawing critical conclusions by visualizing the novel in network form. Another consequence of the impetus to think beyond postmodernist and post-structuralist understandings – or, indeed, to rethink the implications of these – has been a turn toward more rigorously politically informed literary criticism. Both postmodernist literature and post-structuralist theory have had a fraught relationship with politics in which, despite being clearly motivated by a critique of authoritative power, they were seen by many as disconnected from or even as undermining the ethical basis for

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real-world political action. As a postmodernist – and a stereotypically white, male American one at that – Pynchon was not initially considered a writer whose works were particularly legible through the neo-Marxist, postcolonial, or identity-political lenses that predominated in late twentieth-century academia, despite early awareness of his concern with structures of power and “excluded middles” (CL49 181). However, this view has increasingly come under fire in the twenty-first century, in tandem with critical attempts to recuperate a post-structuralist ethics or politics.9 Apart from some important but sporadic essays and articles, the “political turn” in Pynchon criticism did not become a consolidated trend until the 2000s with the publication of works like Niran Abbas’s edited collection Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins (2003), Samuel Thomas’s Pynchon and the Political (2007), and David Witzling’s Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism (2008). This coincided with a parallel trend of increased interest in Pynchon’s writing of history, in such works as Shawn Smith’s Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (2005) and Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds’s The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon: Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations (2005). As these titles suggest, political and historical readings of Pynchon did not imply a rejection of his works’ inclusion within the category of the postmodern, but they did provoke a broadening of understandings of what that category could contain. This interest in Pynchon’s politics shows no signs of abating, with further works published in the 2010s including David Cowart’s Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History (2011), Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom (2013), and my own Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (2014). The five essays in the “Politics” section of this collection do further work in giving the lie to the idea that Pynchon’s writing, early or late, was ever unconcerned with politics. Specifically, they are informed by recent advances in feminist and race theory, by new forms of political and environmental engagement (digital ecologies and network anarchisms), and by twenty-first-century political events and discourses (9/11, “permanent crisis,” the “postfactual”). The twenty-first century has also witnessed Pynchon’s writing taking new, and in some cases unexpected, forms, partly in apparent response to revolutionary changes in the ways narrative fiction can be communicated and publicized.10 In the last few years especially, the range of forms in which Pynchon’s fiction can be consumed has expanded significantly. A reported reluctance on Pynchon’s part to embrace digitization was

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overcome in 2012, when e-book versions of his novels were made available to readers, and certain titles have also been released as audiobooks. The challenge of adapting Pynchon’s fiction for the cinema was finally taken up by the acclaimed director Paul Thomas Anderson, whose Inherent Vice came out in 2014. The author himself has become slightly more of a presence, voicing a trailer for the novel Inherent Vice, which was published on the Penguin Press website to promote the title’s release, as well as voicing himself in two episodes of “The Simpsons” that poke fun at his secretive stance by representing him with a question-mark-emblazoned paper bag over his head. This new variety of form and greater quantity of available material, along with developments in computer-assisted reading techniques, offer fascinating new analytical possibilities. Hence “Analysis” is the focal point of the final selection of essays in this collection. Contributions in this part address the potentiality of digital techniques in criticism, the place of Pynchonian narrative in the context of digitally adaptive reading habits, the implications for our understanding of Pynchon’s fiction of Anderson’s Inherent Vice adaptation, and the significance of twenty-first-century digital paratextual material. The digital, as a technology that for many defines the postmillennial age, is thus central to this part and, indeed, makes its presence felt strongly across the collection. The New Pynchon Studies thus captures a cross section of the most important recent developments in criticism on one of the most challenging and inspiring authors of our time. Bringing together essays by a new generation of Pynchon critics alongside more established names still active at the forefront of the field, the volume both builds on and moves beyond major trends within the substantial body of scholarship that accumulated around Pynchon’s fiction in the twentieth century. Although formally divided into parts on “Theory,” “Politics,” and “Analysis,” there are multiple points of mutually enlightening interaction between contributions, some of which I have indicated above. While it has not been possible to represent every “new” approach to Pynchon criticism, the contributions gathered here offer broad coverage of the contemporary critical environment in Pynchon studies, providing perspectives that connect to and inform topics not covered directly or in detail within the collection, and offering multiple jumping-off points for further advances in this rich field. To give further details about the approaches taken in particular chapters, the first part, on “Theory,” kicks off with Sascha Pöhlmann’s head-on confrontation of what has perhaps been the most dominant trope in Pynchon studies: his association with postmodernism. In the light of current theorizations of the end of postmodernism and speculation as to

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what has superseded it, Pöhlmann interrogates the easy equation of Pynchon’s literary career with postmodernism as part of a broader questioning of the usefulness of literary categorization. The chapter recognizes that, in the present day, postmodernist literary aesthetics have “lost their discursive dominance” but that what has replaced them remains unclear, perhaps because periodizing paradigms are no longer either ideologically or practically appropriate to today’s more complex global literary environment. Participating in revisions that have emerged in Pynchon studies over the last two decades to the automatic identification of the author’s work as postmodernist – such as those made by Brian McHale, Simon de Bourcier, and Pöhlmann himself11 – the essay turns to Against the Day and Mason & Dixon to illustrate two critically overlooked “non-postmodernist” aspects of Pynchon’s fiction. The first, “globality,” has only become a focus in recent years with the transnational turn and critical engagements with globalization; the second, Pynchon’s non-postmodernist treatment of the relationship between the fictional and the real, has also been recognized primarily since the publication of Against the Day, but is again a feature of his earlier work. In the collection’s third chapter, “Pynchon after Paranoia,” Ali Chetwynd takes on another of the most dominant themes in Pynchon studies to examine the renewed centrality of paranoia in Pynchon’s most recent novel, Bleeding Edge. Chetwynd argues that the treatment of the phenomenon in Bleeding Edge is distinctly parodic, such that the novel aligns with what he has identified elsewhere as a turn away from serious paranoia toward a focus on moral agency and obligation in Pynchon’s posthiatus fiction.12 While paranoia in the Cold War era had seemed “revelatory” of the pervasiveness of state and corporate power, and thus had functioned as “oppositional,” this chapter points out that in the twentyfirst century the triumph of cynicism robs the paranoid register of its critical force. Drawing out several points of contrast between paranoia in Pynchon’s early and late work, Chetwynd suggests that although Bleeding Edge asserts the objective reality of modes of power operating behind the scenes even more strongly than Pynchon’s famously paranoid The Crying of Lot 49 or Gravity’s Rainbow, it ultimately foregrounds Maxine’s embrace of a “post-paranoid” mode of ethical relation to others, which accords with the theories of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick among others.13 Continuing this focus on relationality, Martin Paul Eve reads Pynchon’s fiction in Chapter 4 against new materialist philosophical paradigms that contest both traditional idealism and materialism, whose anthropocentrism is seen as preventing a move beyond restrictively dualistic thinking. For

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Eve, Pynchon’s novels treat the human and the nonhuman, the internal and the external, and the bodily and the social in such a way as to suggest a straining beyond dualism toward an “ontological plurality” that in at least one case – the thorough disrespect shown to the principle of noncontradiction – exceeds even the antidualism of the new materialism. The “intraaction” he identifies between internal and external space across Pynchon’s oeuvre leads Eve to posit an “onto-epistemology” in his work, an argument that calls into question Brian McHale’s assertion of a shift to an “ontological dominant” in postmodern fiction.14 However, in assessing the success of Pynchon’s writing beyond the human, Eve concedes that it is limited in scope, concluding that the human/nonhuman binary is not fully transcended. Neither, in his reading of the representation of gender and biological sex in the context of new materialist feminisms, does Eve find the author managing to move entirely beyond binary frameworks. Pieter Vermeulen’s contribution, “Pynchon’s Posthuman Temporalities,” concludes the collection’s first part by going into more depth on the relation between the human and the nonhuman touched on by Eve. Specifically, the chapter reads Against the Day through the concept of the Anthropocene – a concept that has gained considerable critical currency of late as designating the geohistorical period in which the distinctive impact of human life on the planet has been felt. Notions of the Anthropocene require us to view human activity on a much grander scale than is traditionally dealt with in the novel form, and Vermeulen argues that the vast and broad-ranging Against the Day rises to this challenge both formally and thematically. As an example of Anthropocene fiction then, this chapter suggests that Pynchon’s 2006 novel provides an “update” to the historiographic approach of the author’s earlier work and confirms his technopessimism. Vermeulen structures his argument around three forms of temporality that he identifies as central to Against the Day’s narrative, each of which are informed by posthuman insights: firstly, a planetary temporality that privileges the geological over the human; secondly, a disaster temporality that destabilizes the present via a sense of impending apocalypse; and thirdly, time as untranscendable, in the sense that the planet’s intractable materiality resists human attempts at technological control. The second part of this collection, which groups essays on “Politics,” begins with my own contribution in which I seek to advance the longrunning critical debate around Pynchon’s gender thinking and association with feminism by focusing on gender as a relational dynamic that is deeply bound up with questions of responsibility to others and possibilities for ethical action in Pynchon’s work. Outlining Judith Butler’s notion of the

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recognition of the social construction of the self and “our fundamental dependency on the other” as “an indispensable resource for ethics,” I argue that such a recognition increasingly structures Pynchon’s writing of gender but is already present in germinal form in V.15 While V. points to an antiethical, divisive gender binary [that I term “operational relationality” after Foppl’s notion of “operational sympathy” (V. 261)] as socially formed, and emphasizes male responsibility to challenge this, I suggest that Against the Day goes further in imagining concrete alternatives based on connection and mutual care. This aligns Pynchon’s work with the developing awareness in feminist discourses of the important role of male as well as female responsibility in achieving gender equality. Chapter 7 takes up another identity-political issue with Sue J. Kim’s discussion of Against the Day’s “post-racial aesthetic,” a concept theorized by Ramón Saldívar. For Saldívar, such an aesthetic is identifiable in literary texts whose form and content work in tandem to demonstrate the systemic nature of racism, positioning themselves against an antiracialism that has in recent years become confused with antiracism. This antiracialism, which Saldívar associates with neoliberalism, is an expression of both the exploitative and individualistic aspects of that ideology, viewing racism as an individual identity issue. By thus ignoring the presence of racism in social structures, this form of antiracialism actually perpetuates racism’s effects while presenting itself as superficially progressive. According to Kim, Against the Day illustrates the pervasive presence of race in every aspect of life via its emphasis on the multiperspectival, revealing the ubiquity of racial discourse and realities through characters’ conversations and internal monologues, through references to secret histories, and also through the foregrounding of experiences of ontological destabilization. Kim suggests that the latter experience mimics the profound shift in our sense of reality that the advent of a truly postracial or antiracist society would necessitate. In the subsequent chapter, titled “Another Apocalypse: Digital Ecologies and Late Pynchon,” Christopher K. Coffman approaches ecology from a different angle from that pursued by Vermeulen, seeking to problematize readings of Pynchon’s work that see it as one-sidedly pessimistic regarding both environmental futures and digital potentialities. This apocalypticism, while present, “is not the whole story,” Coffman asserts. Rather, Pynchon’s fiction also suggests the deep mutual imbrication of the human, the natural, and the digital, and implies that digital environments can foster “ecologization” – a state of nonlinear perceptiveness to nonhuman spatial and temporal dimensions that “allows for awareness of the complex relations between subjects and environments.” Coffman

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demonstrates that aspects of both Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge can be read productively against recent developments in the field of digital ecologies. Through examinations of social and digital networks in the novels – GNASH (“the Global Network of Anecdotal Surfer Horseshit”) and ARPAnet in Inherent Vice, and the Deep Web and DeepArcher in Bleeding Edge – Coffman points to the experience of ecologization in Pynchon’s writing as related to awareness of the networked interconnection of the cultural, technological, and environmental as potentially operating on a cyclical and recuperative rather than a linear and wasteful basis. Another analysis that emphasizes the political significance of images of networked interconnection in Pynchon is provided in the next chapter by Michael O’Bryan’s “Pynchon and New Political Activisms.” This essay builds on the political turn that has taken place in Pynchon studies over the past ten to twenty years to further clarify the significance of anarchism to the author’s work. Via a discussion of the foundational political philosophies of Jacques Rancière (whose ideas have recently been critically recuperated and inform the political theories of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, among others), O’Bryan asserts the political value, for Pynchon, of anarchism’s emphasis on horizontal, decentralized, nonhierarchical and temporary forms of organization against the verticality inherent in a Marxism still considered within academic circles as “the” Leftist political form. The chapter proceeds to track alternating moments of hope and despair in Vineland, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge around the potential for anarchist social movements to make an impact on the American political environment, arguing that the latter two novels, which were respectively published shortly prior to and shortly after a major moment for new anarchist network forms in movements like Occupy or those of the Arab Spring, provide very different perspectives on the new interaction of anarchism with internet technologies. The final contribution to the “Politics” section of The New Pynchon Studies is Hanjo Berressem’s chapter on “Threat and Crisis in Twenty-First-Century Pynchon,” which posits that the author’s fiction counterintuitively embraces crises as “moments of bifurcation” that open up new political potentialities, looking to the positive in even those crises that, like 9/11, are productive of a general desire for stability. While the West is currently experiencing a state of “permanent crisis” viewed negatively, Berressem argues that Pynchon’s novels seem to recognize crisis as defined above as integral to all processes of change, and hence to life more broadly. The question is how we can live with this fact while becoming more aware of who profits from crisis points and how they

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can be exploited politically. Tracing a trajectory from a pessimistic approach to the potential for antiestablishment profit from crisis in Pynchon’s early work to a more optimistic view in the mid-career – when the author saw technological development as one particularly promising route to the production of new and democratically exploitable points of bifurcation, Berressem goes on to suggest that Bleeding Edge returns to a more pessimistic stance as it seems that cybercapitalism may be capable of severely restricting the incidence of moments of anticapitalist opportunity. The volume’s final part, “Analysis,” opens with a consideration of what the digital might offer us not politically but critically. In “Digital Readings” Katie Muth demonstrates the potential for a hybrid analytical form that combines computational and traditional methods, thus developing the potential for meaningful contributions to Pynchon studies that exploit digital analytical tools. Aligning her approach with Stephen Ramsay’s argument that digital analysis provides us with new ways of seeing literary texts – that computational methods estrange us from texts and liberate us from the constrictive linearity of “reading” in ways productive of new insights – Muth offers just such a fresh perspective on Gravity’s Rainbow.16 Using David McClure’s Textplot software to create network-map visualizations based on word frequency and interconnection within the novel, Muth examines Gravity’s Rainbow’s thematic use of tense, presenting a clearer view than had been established through traditional analysis of how tense coincides with historical density in the novel and functions to underscore its overall insight into the coconstitution of history, identity, and narrative. Chapter 12 provides a contrast to Muth’s approach as Luc Herman examines the making of meaning through conventional reading practices in the digital age, assessing the demands that both Pynchon’s fiction and contemporary media place upon our memories. Proposing that memory is necessary to managing our past and hence to motivating social action, but is a casualty of the “information overload” we might associate with Pynchon’s vast novels as much as with TV and digital media, Herman asks whether there is an essential difference between these forms, before going on to evaluate the “tellability” of Against the Day, weighing up his perception of the novel’s social relevance against what he considers its “lack of measure.” Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles’s identification in 2007 of a generational shift from “deep attention” to “hyper attention” – the former characterized by concentration over long periods and the latter by an unfocused

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search for stimulation17 – Herman also explores how Pynchon engages with this shift via Vineland’s thematization of TV and Bleeding Edge’s treatment of the internet. The theme of new media is picked up again in Chapter 13, Ralph Clare’s “Pynchon on Film,” which offers new insights from this perspective into the significance of film to Pynchon’s engagement with history, a subject that has been a matter of critical commentary since the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow. Moving beyond existing critical observations of Pynchon’s blurring of the “reel/real,” the chapter explores his response to the advent of the “post-celluloid” era via a reading of both Bleeding Edge and Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Inherent Vice. For Clare the proliferative presence of digital “film” – broadly defined – in the twenty-first century is treated skeptically in Bleeding Edge due to its imbrication with virtual network forms that neglect the material world and contribute to the postfactual age. Suggesting that digital film represents a denial of the “precariousness of lived existence” for Pynchon, Clare sees Anderson’s use of celluloid, which is itself subject to deterioration and physically registers the impact of light, as clarifying the importance of “lived time, change, deterioration, and death” in the author’s representation of history. The collection’s final chapter, which brings to a close the section on “Analysis,” also considers the imbrication of the physical and digital worlds, providing a coda to the volume that offers a tempered perspective on the author’s relationship with the digital as described by Clare. In “Pynchon’s Twenty-First-Century Paratexts,” Tore Rye Andersen adds to his already substantial body of scholarship on the paratexts to Pynchon’s novels in considering the author’s practical engagement with digital paratextual possibilities in relation to his most recent work, especially Inherent Vice, which seems to reflect a softening of his previous antidigital stance. In line with its acknowledgment of the limits of digital immateriality in the requirement of physical embodiment, the chapter focuses on how digital paratexts, such as the online Inherent Vice book trailer or Anderson’s film adaptation and associated marketing materials, interact fluidly with both analog paratexts, such as cover images, and with the text itself. Andersen thus analyses some of the overlapping interpretive, commercial, and navigational functions of Pynchon’s paratexts,18 while pointing to the limits of the author’s engagement with the digital in his playful invisibility in the Bleeding Edge trailer.

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Notes 1. The quote is taken from an April 1964 letter from Thomas Pynchon to Candida Donadio in which Pynchon also mentions having four novels in progress. Quoted in Mel Gussow, “Pynchon’s Letters Nudge His Mask,” New York Times, March 4, 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/03/04/books/pync hon-s-letters-nudge-his-mask.html. Tore Rye Andersen identifies these novels as most likely to be The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day in “Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon’s Global Novels,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4.1 (2016), https:// doi.org/10.16995/orbit.178. 2. Danuta Fjellestad and David Watson, “The Futures of American Literature,” Studia Neophilologica, 87 (2015), p. 2. 3. Thomas Schaub, Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (University of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 104. 4. Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 21. 5. Christian Moraru, Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (University of Michigan Press, 2011), p. 46. 6. Ibid. 7. David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review, 13 (January/ February 2002), p. 70. 8. Throughout this book the addition of ellipses to a quotation is indicated using square brackets. Unbracketed ellipses are original to the passage quoted. 9. See, for instance, Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (Penn State University Press, 1994); Saul Newman, Unstable Universalities: Poststructuralism and Radical Politics (Oxford University Press, 2007); and Madeleine Fagan, Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 10. I would also note that this diversification has taken more traditional forms, which are not considered within this collection. In particular, since the millennium a small but precious quantity of new archival material has become accessible for Pynchon scholars in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. 11. Brian McHale, “What Was Postmodernism?” electronic book review, December 20, 2007, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspre sent/tense; Simon De Bourcier, “Reading McHale Reading Pynchon, or, Is Pynchon Still a Postmodernist?” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2.2 (2014), doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.2.68, pp. 1–16; Sascha Pöhlmann, “The Complex Text,” in Sascha Pöhlmann (ed.), Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives (Rodopi, 2010), pp. 9–34. 12. Ali Chetwynd, “Inherent Obligation: The Distinctive Difficulties in and of Recent Pynchon,” English Studies, 95.8 (2014), pp. 923–48.

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13. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003). 14. Brian McHale, “Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing,” in Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (eds.), Approaching Postmodernism: Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism, Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature, 21 (John Benjamins, 1986), pp. 53–79. 15. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 34, 40. 16. Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 2011). 17. N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Profession (2007). 18. These three forms of paratextual functionality are theorized by Dorothee Birke and Birte Christ in “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field,” Narrative, 21.1 (2013), pp. 67–68.

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chapter 2

Pynchon and Post-postmodernism Sascha Pöhlmann

Any consideration of Thomas Pynchon and post-postmodernism is affected from the start by the fact that in Bleeding Edge (2013) Pynchon openly satirizes both the concept and its academic theorization when introducing readers to Reg Despard, a documentary guy who began as a movie pirate back in the nineties, going into matinees with a borrowed camcorder to tape first-run features off the screen, from which he then duped cassettes that he sold on the street for a dollar, two sometimes if he thought he could get it, often turning a profit before the movie was through its opening weekend. Professional quality tended to suffer around the edges, noisy filmgoers bringing their lunch in loud paper bags or getting up in the middle of the movie to block the view, often for minutes of running time. Reg’s grip on the camcorder not always being that steady, the screen would also wander around in the frame, sometimes slow and dreamy though other times with stunning abruptness. When Reg discovered the zoom feature on his camcorder, there was a lot of zooming in and out for what you’d have to call its own sake, details of human anatomy, extras in crowd scenes, hip-looking cars in the background traffic, so forth. One fateful day in Washington Square, Reg happened to sell one of his cassettes to a professor at NYU who taught film, who next day came running down the street after Reg to ask, out of breath, if Reg knew how far ahead of the leading edge of this post-postmodern art form he was working, “with your neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis.” (8–9)

This is a cautionary tale against the generalizations and paranoid assumptions academic critics are sometimes making in identifying larger contemporary patterns of aesthetic and cultural development. Furthermore, it indicates that Pynchon, as he is now making fun either of postpostmodernism or those who theorize it (or both), may have moved well beyond the postmodern in his own writing. If the writer of American postmodernism is commenting on post-postmodernism in his latest novel to date, then it is time to reflect on the categorization of his works in relation to those terms. In the following, I argue that Against the Day 17

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(2006) in particular demands a revision of Pynchon’s often canonically assumed postmodernism, and that it sharpens our focus on the neglected non-postmodernist aspects of his works. At the same time, these aspects do not cohere to form a fully fledged aesthetic post-postmodernism, nor do they intensify or differ sufficiently from postmodernism to really merit the temporal marker. Rather, a reassessment of Pynchon as an exemplary postmodernist raises doubts about the heuristic usefulness of any broad periodization for grasping the complexities of aesthetic and cultural interconnections in the global condition that Pynchon’s works deal with so comprehensively. Therefore, I will not simply argue that Pynchon used to be postmodernist but no longer is, and then list thirteen ways of looking at a post-postmodernist. Instead, any inquiry into a potential paradigm shift must always be an inquiry into the paradigmatic itself, and this is where the issue of Pynchon and the post-postmodern becomes most interesting to me. In a way, the question of whether Pynchon is a postmodernist or not is as trite as the question of what may supplant postmodernism; at the same time, the question of how we think in and about such categories, and how we might think outside them, is far from irrelevant.

Postmodernism and Post-postmodernism In any case, it only makes sense to ask about Pynchon and the postpostmodern if the question is posed clearly enough. However, terminological and conceptual precision are notoriously hard to come by in academic definitions of the postmodern, and therefore even less so in attempts to describe or define what might follow it, since it is hard to clearly demarcate the new or the other against something that is unclear to begin with. Much of the debate on the post-postmodern – which has been going on at least since the late 1970s1 – is marred by the very ambiguity that has already made such a mess of different concepts of the postmodern. In the preceding paragraph, I have deliberately only used “the postmodern” in order to avoid the two terms that have been widely used interchangeably, “postmodernity” and “postmodernism.” Insufficiently distinguishing between the two is one of the most profound sources of imprecision in cultural analyses, since they are not merely to be used “according to each commentator’s preference,”2 but designate interrelated but very different concepts that should not be confused with each other or conflated in a single term. Hans Bertens’s study The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995) makes a point of distinguishing the two in its structure of “Part I Postmodernisms” and “Part II . . . and postmodernities,”3 and his use of the plural indicates that neither deals with

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something unified. As Bertens and others understand the terms, postmodernity is the much wider and postmodernism the much narrower concept: the former refers to a broad stage in Western civilization that has had an effect on all of the planet and its different varieties of human culture, while the latter refers to an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon that is defined in relation to that of modernism, as continuity, intensification, and rupture all at once. In this understanding, I think it only makes sense to ask about the postpostmodernism of Pynchon’s novels, but not about their post-postmodernity, and my argument will proceed accordingly. While the qualities of postmodernist aesthetics are just as varied, multiple, and contradictory as those of the modernist aesthetics they both built on and rejected, they may nevertheless be identified and catalogued in terms of family resemblances, dominants, and continuities, but not in terms of a definitive checklist. There is not even a single literary postmodernism, since postmodernism overwhelmingly occurred in prose fiction, and its aesthetics quite necessarily do not correlate with those of postmodernism in drama and poetry. “Postmodernism [. . .] is several things at once”4 rather than a singular aesthetic and cultural phenomenon, to the point where two postmodernist texts may have nothing else in common other than their being postmodernist. To be clear, this does not mean that there are no characteristics of postmodernist fiction, or that the term is vague beyond meaning or use value; it only means that it has no stable core definition but rather designates a flexible yet discernible set of characteristics. Even if the aesthetics of postmodernist fiction may be multiple, the term is often given some stability in its temporal use of designating a literary “era” that is only a little fuzzy as to its beginnings and very fuzzy as to its ending. In fact, the question of this ending has been hotly debated for almost as long as the category has been around, and it is a crucial issue for the theories of post-postmodernism that have been struggling to both pronounce postmodernism over and to constructively describe what has “supplanted” it (to adopt the term of David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris in their critical anthology of texts theorizing remodernism, performatism, hypermodernism, automodernism, renewalism, altermodernism, digimodernism, and metamodernism). The ending is often associated with historical events that seem like ruptures, for example the fall of the Iron Curtain or 9/11, which speaks of a desire to mark the ending of postmodernism with a symbolic, absolute, and fundamental turning point. Yet literary periods, however they are imagined, neither begin nor end with big bangs. They will always gradually blend into each other and have their predecessors and successors, and so postmodernism ended not with a distinct historical or

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literary event, but rather in a slow transitional process that is perhaps concluded best by Linda Hutcheon’s laconic but nevertheless wellfounded declaration: “Let’s just say: it’s over.”5 Yet the temporal perspective on postmodernism, as on any other literary period, is misleading if it is taken too strictly, and like the concept of the literary canon, which is closely related to periodicity, it is only “heuristically useful”6 as a provisional frame of reference that serves a limited purpose in some limited contexts. The evident danger of dating literary postmodernism from, say, 1945 to 1989, is that everything published in these years will be too readily classified as postmodernist, regardless of its actual aesthetic properties and cultural contexts, just like anything published before that will resist that classification even though it might actually merit it (and will be labeled “proto-postmodernist”). The term contains a marker of its own temporality, that infamous and proliferating “post-,” and yet it is most useful to readers and critics if it is not used in a strict temporal but rather in an aesthetic sense (without, of course, neglecting the particular historical contexts of any aesthetics). In other words, a text can be postmodernist regardless of its publication date, based on its aesthetic qualities (in relation to form, style, content, mediality, etc.). The literary era of postmodernism may then be understood as one in which postmodernist texts have assumed a sufficient prevalence in the discourses that construct cultural paradigms as such (academia, the culture industry, schools, the state, and other groups or even individuals). As a consequence, one can justifiably proclaim that period to be over without implying that there is now no more postmodernist fiction. One of the more meaningful ways of understanding the concept of literary postpostmodernism at the moment is that postmodernist aesthetics have lost their discursive dominance, but the term does not positively signify in any way what may have attained dominance instead. The question of literary post-postmodernism really makes most sense if it is posed with regard to aesthetics and their wider cultural concerns and contexts, and if it is liberated from a certain determinism of the temporal that places too much emphasis on the historical moments of production or publication, and which describes aesthetic change too much in a linear, successive framework of overarching eras or periods. Indeed, the heuristic model of the “period” or “era” may have run its course as a way of understanding contemporary aesthetic and cultural phenomena in their potential interrelations, as these have grown so complex in their global interconnectedness that any overarching description of them will seem either abstract to the point of triviality or flawed in its generalizations. In 2018 nobody would

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doubt that the historical moment of postmodernism, whose heyday really was in the 1960s and 1970s, has passed, and that even without positing a singular rupture and without ignoring numerous continuities, the change in the constellations of Western culture is surely sufficient to proclaim that moment over. Perhaps it takes nothing more than remembering that postmodernism was a pre-internet phenomenon to realize just how much its historical moment has changed.7 Yet this confidence in the historical specificity of postmodernism should not necessarily lead to identifying similar specificities with equal certainty, especially as the singular lesson of postmodernism still rings true and is not easily supplanted: it’s complicated, and there are no viable metanarratives to make things simple. In Why Literary Periods Mattered (2013), Ted Underwood makes a convincing argument that “a habit of narrating history as a sequence of contrasted cultural movements has caused [Anglo-American] literary studies to develop in a one-sided way, and produced blind spots that limit the development of the discipline,” while also showing how “the authority of historical contrast has in recent decades been declining,” and the field is gradually moving away from the notion of periodization that has so far “endured in a discipline where almost nothing else does.”8 The provocative implication of Underwood’s title and its use of the past tense is that literary periods used to matter but no longer do, and this makes a strong case against temporal taxonomies such as “post-postmodernism” and the conservative notion of literature that tacitly motivates them. One should be careful to not simply use this as a way of avoiding an answer by claiming that the question misses the point; yet at the same time, Underwood’s argument draws attention to the fact that the question of literary postpostmodernism is not neutral or descriptive, but part of a dominant framework of periodization that has its own ideological rules, and which may only permit answers that conform to them. In playing the game of post-postmodernism and literary periods, then, the rules that govern our moves may turn out to be so restrictive that our options are limited to the point of predictability, and we could ponder what Pynchon calls a “meta-solution” in Gravity’s Rainbow (102). Instead of asking what literary post-postmodernism is in the sense of constructing a unified theory of a complex of aesthetic and cultural family resemblances that sufficiently cohere into a bigger picture, it is more promising “to think of direction or trajectory without being able to anticipate a destination,”9 to systematically contemplate how fiction today might be strictly temporally post-postmodernist without coalescing into a fully fledged period of

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post-postmodernism. For example, I would venture that twenty-firstcentury multimodal literature, as pioneered in the United States by Mark Z. Danielewski, has truly moved beyond the postmodernist focus on text by focusing on the book instead. Yet there is no need to theorize this phenomenon in terms of a wider, coherent aesthetics of postpostmodernism, and indeed one rather risks failing to recognize the historical connections when approaching this aesthetics in terms of yet another “period.” In short, it may be better to write about the weather instead of the climate, and one should certainly not mistake the former for the latter. Without anticipating the destination of the Next Big Thing, the singular label to supplant postmodernism, the concept that ties it all together and gets you tenure or at least fame, an inquiry into contemporary non-postmodernist aesthetics may be liberated from the coherence such taxonomy anticipates and enforces, for better or worse, and even though it may only be of limited and local use – such as asking how the novels of a single author are not postmodernist but something else – they can nevertheless provide insights and results that may (or may not) eventually cohere into a bigger picture with others.

Pynchon’s Postmodernism and Its Critical Reassessment Pynchon is an excellent test case for such an approach to literary postpostmodernism because he is associated with postmodernism like virtually no other author in US-American literature, and therefore the question as to his classification poses itself in a particularly poignant way with wider implications. Whereas one might describe the aesthetics and cultural concerns of a debut novel published in 2017 as “postmodernist” or “realist” without placing that novel within the literary period of postmodernism or realism, a new Pynchon novel still inevitably comes preclassified as postmodernist, and then readers are left with two paradoxical options that lay bare the patterns of periodization and classification in literature as they blend author, text, and oeuvre into a singular fantasy of coherence: either the novel must be postmodernist because Pynchon is a postmodernist and whatever he writes is postmodernist, or the novel is post-postmodernist because it is unlike the postmodernist novels Pynchon has written before and must be already part of a larger aesthetic – especially since “we tend to refract Pynchon’s texts through the latest academic fashions.”10 The excluded middle here is that there are many ways in which Pynchon’s novels could be not postmodernist without being post-postmodernist and that not every difference from postmodernism must be explained in causal relation to it or in

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terms of a coherent aesthetic that supplants it. My line of inquiry in the following will therefore not be asking how Pynchon’s fiction has moved from one paradigm to the next, but rather if Pynchon’s fiction exceeds the conceptual framework of postmodernism at all and how. Simply speaking, I will only try to show how Pynchon’s fiction is not postmodernist, but deliberately not how it is post-postmodernist. Note that I did not write “how Pynchon’s fiction is not postmodernist any more,” since that would imply that it had once been and then somehow stopped at a particular point in time. It would be convenient to construct two Pynchons, the postmodernist and the post-postmodernist, perhaps as one could with the Joyces of modernist Ulysses and postmodernist Finnegans Wake, and yet any such approach in both cases would already rely on the authority of historical contrast that Ted Underwood is cautioning against. In the case of Pynchon, this means questioning the simplified linear narrative of a writer moving into postmodernism and then out of it again: his first novel, V. (1963), is “proto-postmodernist”;11 his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), dramatizes “the pivot between modernism and postmodernism”;12 his third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), defined literary postmodernism and thus cannot be anything but postmodernist; his fourth and fifth novels, Vineland (1990) and Mason & Dixon (1997), still fit the theoretical glove of postmodernism due to their media critique or alignment with the genre of historiographic metafiction, respectively; his sixth novel, Against the Day, marks the stage when postmodernism clearly did not suffice to frame its aesthetics; and since the seventh and eighth novels, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge, were published after that, they can hardly be postmodernist again. Rather than adhere to such simplifying temporal linearity, it is worth asking how postmodernism has become the core perspective on Pynchon’s work before pondering how it could then be called into question as such. Brian McHale draws attention to the peculiar dialectics of theorization and canonization in his concise summary essay on “Pynchon’s Postmodernism”: “We might go so far as to say, not that postmodern theory depends on Pynchon’s fiction for exemplification, but that, without Pynchon’s fiction, there might never have been such a pressing need to develop a theory of literary postmodernism in the first place.”13 Early theories of postmodernism such as Ihab Hassan’s The Postmodern Turn (1971) may not mention Pynchon, and Hassan merely lists his name in the second edition (1982) among those who “may serve to adumbrate postmodernism, or at least suggest its range of assumptions,”14 yet Pynchon’s novels nevertheless seemed to fit virtually any theory of it:

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“Postmodernism has been characterized a multitude of ways, some compatible with each other, others not. No matter how it is characterized, however, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon appears to be universally regarded as central to its canon”15 – although “the critics involved do not always take much trouble to explain his inclusion.”16 Pynchon thus was “[c]anonized in the 1980s as the foremost American postmodernist mainly on the strength of his two most celebrated novels – The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow,”17 and this classification has strongly determined the reception of every Pynchon novel published since, generalizing from a postmodernist novel to a postmodernist author and oeuvre. It is worth noting that while Pynchon critics certainly strongly contributed to the perpetuation of this categorization and the analytical perspectives it entails, they were nevertheless also critical of it and have repeatedly questioned its paradigmatic status. This is especially true after the publication of Against the Day, which is central to the revision of Pynchon’s postmodernism in the twenty-first century. For example, Brian McHale’s “What Was Postmodernism?” (2007) reads Against the Day as an attempt “to capture what it means, what it feels like, to ‘change tenses,’ as Raymond Federman puts it – for instance, to change tenses from ‘What Is Postmodernism?’ to ‘What Was Postmodernism?’”18 My own “The Complex Text” (2010)19 points out how Against the Day transcends the aesthetics and the cultural concerns of postmodernism with regard to its critique of the national and to its complex attitude toward representation, imagination, and reality. Ali Chetwynd’s brief but poignant review of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012) describes the volume as “a plausible last word on the canonically postmodern version of Pynchon”20 and thereby indicates that it might be time to consider different versions. Finally, Simon de Bourcier’s essay “Reading McHale Reading Pynchon, or, Is Pynchon Still a Postmodernist?” (2014) argues that Pynchon’s readership has changed so that it now comprises “postmodern natives,” meaning that, for example in Inherent Vice or especially Bleeding Edge, the “discourse of postmodernism is just one more part of the vernacular Pynchon shares with his readership.”21 Yet critics were already raising similar questions at the end of the twentieth century to challenge the dominant reading of Pynchon as a postmodernist. The earliest statement to that effect that I could find – and of course I may have missed plenty – is made by Luc Herman in his 1998 introduction to Pynchon Notes 42–43, when he claims that the status of Gravity’s Rainbow “as an icon of postmodernism may have had too much influence on GR criticism – channeling our interests, as it were.”22 In 1999 David Cowart argues in his essay

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“Pynchon and the Sixties” that Pynchon’s works, like those of other American postmodernists, evidence the “paradoxical subversion of the postmodern gospel” of “endless, self-indulgent, textual play” in that they “remain curiously moral – even moralistic – in their outlook.”23 In 2001 Frank Palmeri asks how Pynchon may be “Other than Postmodern?” in an essay of that title, which is a neat way of avoiding the taxonomic totality of “post-postmodernism” and its implications while inquiring into ways of transcending postmodernism nevertheless. Palmeri’s argument is that this other-than-postmodern “moves away from the representation of extreme paranoia, toward a vision of local ethico-political possibilities and a greater acceptance of hybrids that combine human and machine or human and animal traits,”24 of which he finds evidence in Mason & Dixon, the very novel whose mode of historiographic metafiction seems to leave no doubt as to its postmodernist classification. All these are readings against the postmodernist grain, and none of them argues that Pynchon’s fiction is not postmodernist, only that it is not just postmodernist, and they share the assumption that theories of literary postmodernism, while having provided fruitful and illuminating perspectives on Pynchon’s novels, have either been exhausted or fail to describe, analyze, and interpret these novels in sufficient detail. Rereading Pynchon’s novels as non-postmodernist will not reveal that critics have been wrong all along to classify them as aesthetically and culturally postmodernist, but it will simply (but crucially) insist on their also being something else. The list that Brian McHale compiles in outlining Pynchon’s postmodernism still applies to all of his novels: incredulity, decentering, simulation, double-coding, blending high and popular culture, irony and pastiche, the poetics of ontology including a plurality of worlds, strange loops of narrative levels, figurative worlds, and worlds under erasure.25 One might add a few more: the play of signification, historiographic metafiction and its challenge to claims of objectivity and truth, constructivism, paranoia and conspiracy theory as cognitive principles, and a politics and ethics of multiplicity and relativism. All of Pynchon’s novels are fundamentally concerned with these aesthetic and cultural aspects, and this is what makes all of them postmodernist. Therefore, the question is not what gets struck from the list but rather what is added to it that theories of postmodernism did not include, and this is how the authors quoted above have approached the issue of postpostmodernist elements instead of looking for a fundamental paradigm shift.

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Some Elements of Pynchon’s Non-postmodernism Yet what are the elements in Pynchon’s novels that are not postmodernist, besides the ones ventured by the critics I have already mentioned above? More precisely, what aspects have become more prominent in his later novels so that they may become visible to readers in the earlier ones as well? I would maintain that Pynchon’s novels exceed the framework of postmodernism in some of their core concerns and aesthetic strategies that have essentially informed his whole oeuvre, but which have become more prominent in his twenty-first-century novels so as to invite a rereading and a revision of the preceding novels in that light. For example, Pynchon’s relentless globality (combined with his critique of nationality) is certainly an aspect that has not been considered sufficiently within the postmodernist analytical repertoire; this is an issue that Tore Rye Andersen has explored very convincingly in an essay that reads Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day as “Pynchon’s world-historical or global novels.”26 Pynchon’s novels have been global in scope and outlook ever since V., and even his arguably most local text, The Crying of Lot 49, is far more global than most American postmodernist fiction. Yet this globality has only garnered significant critical attention in the twenty-first century after the publication of Against the Day, and it attests to a particular blind spot of many postmodernist theories, which readily attested to the importance of race, gender, and class as analytical categories, and were late in including sexuality as well, but were entirely oblivious to the issue of nationality as a fundamental category of identity that only became evidently problematic as the discourse of globalization developed.27 This is not to say that the age of globalization supplants that of postmodernism and that a recognition of globality and a construction of a global imagination at the cost of national imaginations marks the rupture with postmodernism; rather, globalization is a process whose beginnings already coincide with those of modernity and may even be considered one of its few defining features, intricately tied to another, capitalism. Some theorists of postmodernism have recognized an increasing global interconnectedness, most notably Fredric Jameson, whose Marxist cultural critique builds on a tradition of critiquing global capitalism that started with Marx and Engels. Yet by and large, the aesthetics of literary postmodernism have not been theorized in terms of globality, and most theories tacitly remain within the national, if not nationalist, epistemological framework that would be challenged only at the end of the twentieth century by postnationalist and even postnational critiques within various academic disciplines, including American studies.

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Even more fundamentally, though, Against the Day invites a reconsideration of Pynchon’s poetics as a whole with regard to the core concern of aesthetic representation: the relation between signifier and signified, between word and world, between text and not-text. Pynchon never engaged in self-reflexive metafiction of the kind that John Barth wrote, and this seems to me the one aspect of literary postmodernism that has never applied to any of Pynchon’s works. To be sure, his novels are as playful as they get in terms of signification – just consider the Kenosha Kid chapter in Gravity’s Rainbow in which the permutations of a phrase create all sorts of small story-worlds – and they remind readers of their fictionality and textuality in many ways, most basically perhaps in their use of songs to counter any realist pretension to verisimilitude or immersion. Yet Pynchon’s works never have a narrator or an author figure expose the fiction as fiction, and even at their most self-absorbed playfulness they insist on a complex semiotic relationship between the imaginary and the real and between signifier and signified that goes beyond a simplistic notion of free-floating signifiers, whose instability of meaning pushes the whole text into a realm of abstract play that has no bearing on the world in which it is read.28 Such a perspective on postmodernist textuality may have always been a misreading of post-structuralist semiotics, yet metafiction is precisely the mode that is in greatest danger of being only about itself, fiction only about fiction. Pynchon’s fiction is never self-referential to the point of disconnecting the text from anything but itself, but it rather explores how language, text, and world interact and coconstitute each other (thus retaining its moral and political potential as well as its aesthetic concerns). Yet only the publication of Against the Day and its insistence on the conflation of the real and the imaginary indicated the full extent to which Pynchon’s novels have engaged this issue before, and demanded a reevaluation of what had been perhaps too eagerly understood in postmodernist terms as semiotic and ontological playfulness. Against the Day seems to set out as the most openly metafictional of Pynchon’s novels, with the author/narrator of the Chums of Chance series introducing us to the characters along with references to prior books, and yet the text either abandons that narrative perspective or stops reminding the reader of it, and instead of exposing the fiction as fiction and the text as text, it proceeds to blur the line between fiction and reality – or fiction within a fictional “reality” – to the point where really anything within the novel assumes a dual state of complexity that goes beyond postmodernist ontologies in which reality seems but a function of the fictional. This complexity is to be understood in the mathematical sense of “part real and part imaginary” (AD 634), and it contains, like the panorama in the

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Museum der Monstrositäten, “‘real objects’ appropriate to the setting – chairs and desks, Doric columns whole and damaged – though these could not strictly be termed entirely real, rather part ‘real’ and part ‘pictorial,’ or let us say ‘fictional,’ this assortment of hybrid objects being designed to ‘gradually blend in’ with distance until the curving wall and a final condition of pure image” (633–34). As similar hybrids, the Chums interact with the world in which they are literary characters, with Lindsay Noseworth asking Lew Basnight “What could you’ve been reading, as a youth?” (36) when he fails to recognize them, but also admitting that their status is rather unclear: “Although the longer a fellow’s name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction” (37). Yet the Chums later go “through some mutation into imperfect replicas of who they once were” (422) as they join the Harmonica Marching Band Training Academy while “the ‘real’ Chums fl[y] away” (423), and at the end of the novel end up “on the Counter-Earth, on it and of it, yet at the same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left” (1021). The Chums are merely the most obvious example of the hybrid objects that populate Against the Day, and its relentless insistence on the irreducible duality of the real and the fictional – like the duality of light that is both particle and wave – moves it beyond the postmodernist ontological play that puts the emphasis on fiction. It thereby invites a reconsideration of earlier examples of similar hybrids outside of the established framework of postmodernist theory to see if such complexity has been understood not wrongly but incompletely, and it provides one of numerous new perspectives on Pynchon’s novels. This reconsideration is perhaps most fruitful with regard to Mason & Dixon, since that novel conflates the real and the imaginary most extensively. This fusion has been read most often in terms of historiographic metafiction29 so that it pertains largely to the relation between fact and fiction, and yet it also exceeds these parameters to a considerable extent. Most obviously, the Chums of Chance find their parallel in Eliza Fields and Captain Zhang, who cross over from the fictional Ghastly Fop episode into Cherrycoke’s main narrative, making their ontological status as uncertain as that of the Chums. One might interpret their transgressive presence as an embellishment Cherrycoke is making to cater to the tastes of his audience, and thus as an aspect of historiographic metafiction that highlights the importance of aesthetics instead of veracity; however, this interpretation cannot fully explain the complex blending of ontological levels that occurs here, as it seeks to neatly separate levels of “reality” instead of analyzing how the narrative mixes them beyond separation

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without giving up on the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Notably, Fields and Zhang join the group as “Apparitions” (MD 535), an appropriately ambiguous term to describe their dual nature. Neither their nor the Chums’ existence is merely a function of textual and narrative play. Instead, their uncanny presence insists on the reality of fiction and on the fictionality of reality, and thus the novels move beyond a postmodernist ontology that privileges the imaginary over the real. The most prominent hybrid entity in the novel is Mason and Dixon’s Visto itself. It is both real and imaginary in that it is not just “marking out this tiny bit of a Lesser Circle” (545) but a violent intervention that has material (ecological) as well as immaterial (sociopolitical) effects. Dixon notes this duality when the line is about to cut across the Warrior Path: “Haven’t we been saying, with an hundred Blades all the day long,— This is how far into your land we may strike, this is what we claim to westward” (678–79). This dark presence is part of the dialectics of openness that characterizes the American West in the novel, a space that is generally prone to such complexity: Wade LeSpark rightly remarks that there is “too much, out here, failing to mark the Boundaries between Reality and Representation” (429). This very failure may be considered a central aspect of the aesthetics of the novel as a whole, and yet it would be too reductive a reading to understand this as an eradication of the real by the imaginary. These two aspects I have briefly outlined above are surely not the only possible approaches to a non-postmodernist reading of Pynchon’s fiction, and other such alternative (re)readings seem very promising to me if they avoid the pitfalls either of an extreme revisionism that seeks to disassociate Pynchon entirely from postmodernism and therefore his historical and cultural moment and his aesthetic innovation, or of a desire to supplant postmodernism with yet another paradigmatic concept. Pynchon’s novels, even the ones that are paradigmatic for theorizations of postmodernism, are always more than postmodernist as well, and his twenty-first-century novels especially invite and enforce readings beyond that framework even as they are recognizably rooted in a postmodernist aesthetics. These later novels, I believe, best merit for classification the playful brevity of one of Pynchon’s favorite phrases: like postmodernism, only different.

Notes 1. Alan Kirby, “Successor States to an Empire in Free Fall,” Times Higher Education, May 27, 2010, www.timeshighereducation.com/features/successorstates-to-an-empire-in-free-fall/411731.article.

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2. David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris, “Introduction,” in David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris (eds.), Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2015), p. xi. 3. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (Routledge, 1995), p. vii. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 5. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2002), p. 166. 6. Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 159. 7. This argument about digitization is at the heart of conceptualizations of automodernity and digimodernism, by Robert Samuels and Alan Kirby, respectively, which makes them more pertinent to Pynchon’s works than other cultural theories of post-postmodernism, given how technology is of such crucial importance to any Pynchon novel. Of course, it is worth remembering that part of this importance is their warning against a simplistic technological determinism that marginalizes the human element in historical developments even as they are “driven” by technology. At the same time, these theories make a convincing materialist argument as to the changes in the historical conditions that spell the end of postmodernism and the beginning of something else, whereas other theories of postpostmodernism either seem reactionary in wanting to restore something postmodernism has allegedly destroyed or derivative in offering yet another version of modernism’s “make it new.” See Robert Samuels, New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory after Postmodernism: Automodernity from Žižek to Laclau (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture (Bloomsbury, 2009). 8. Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered, pp. 159, 3, 2. 9. Elizabeth Grosz, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 19. 10. Hanjo Berressem, “How to Read Pynchon,” in Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 171. 11. Daniel Grassian, Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X (McFarland, 2003), p. 140. 12. Thomas H. Schaub, “Preface,” in Thomas H. Schaub (ed.), Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works (The Modern Language Association of America, 2008), p. x. 13. Brian McHale, “Pynchon’s Postmodernism,” in Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 97. 14. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Ohio State University Press, 1987), p. 85. 15. McHale, “Pynchon’s Postmodernism,” p. 97.

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16. Geoffrey Lord, Postmodernism and Notions of National Difference: A Comparison of Postmodern Fiction in Britain and America (Rodopi, 1996), p. 48. 17. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale, “Introduction,” in Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 1. 18. Brian McHale, “What Was Postmodernism?” electronic book review, December 20, 2007, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspre sent/tense. 19. Sascha Pöhlmann, “The Complex Text,” in Sascha Pöhlmann (ed.), Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives (Rodopi, 2010), pp. 9–34. 20. Ali Chetwynd, review of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, eds. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale, College Literature, 39.4 (Fall 2012), p. 145. 21. Simon De Bourcier, “Reading McHale Reading Pynchon, or, Is Pynchon Still a Postmodernist?” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2.2 (2014), doi.org/ 10.7766/orbit.v2.2.68, pp. 11, 10. 22. Luc Herman, “Introduction: Approach and Avoid,” Pynchon Notes, 42–43 (1998), p. 10. 23. David Cowart, “Pynchon and the Sixties,” Critique, 41.1 (Fall 1999), p. 4. 24. Frank Palmeri, “Other than Postmodern? – Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics,” Postmodern Culture, 12.1 (2001), http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue .901/12.1palmeri.html, para. 5. Ali Chetwynd’s chapter in this collection discusses Pynchon’s work in a way that resonates with Palmeri’s argument. 25. See McHale, “Pynchon’s Postmodernism,” pp. 98–109. 26. Tore Rye Andersen, “Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon’s Global Novels,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4.1 (2016), http://doi.org/10 .16995/orbit.178, p. 8. 27. Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of “altermodernism” is the concept of postpostmodernism that highlights most explicitly the importance of globality from the perspective of the visual arts, arguing that the impact of “the extreme globalisation of world culture” (268) has transformed the postmodern condition sufficiently to necessitate new analytical tools to grasp it as something different. See Nicolas Bourriaud, “Altermodern,” in David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris (eds.), Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century (Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 255–69. 28. In his conceptualization of post-postmodernism as “renewalism,” Josh Toth reads The Crying of Lot 49 as pervaded by a “sense of ultimate groundlessness – of reality as a weave, or ‘textile,’ of so many intersecting narrative constructions” (93), while at the same time understanding that “the promise of the ‘Real’ it aims to expose as illusory must be maintained as a possibility, even if we know it to be a false ideological lure” (94). This at least complicates the rather reductive assessment that The Crying of Lot 49 is only about its own textual reality, and yet this relation needs to be complicated even more by

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considering the reality of the imaginary and the fictional in the text and in the world in which it is being read (and not just the Real in Lacan’s or Žižek’s usage), not as a supplement but a truly complementary part in a complex relation. See Josh Toth, The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (SUNY Press, 2010). 29. The most extensive reading of the novel in those terms is proffered in Manfred Kopp, Triangulating Thomas Pynchon’s Eighteenth-Century World: Theory, Structure, and Paranoia in Mason & Dixon (Die Blaue Eule, 2004).

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chapter 3

Pynchon after Paranoia Ali Chetwynd

Reviews of Bleeding Edge (2013) frequently quoted its protagonist, defrocked fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow, reassuring a client that “paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much” (11), as well her response when it turns out that his suspicions about the tech company he’s been making a film about correspond to another of her investigations: “She hates it when paranoia like Reg’s gets real-world. Probably worth a look, though” (42). Paranoia remains an overwhelmingly available rubric for discussing Pynchon,1 and Bleeding Edge uses the word more than all Pynchon’s other post-70s writing combined.2 But that statistic highlights a conundrum: much of Pynchon’s mid-to-late fiction is not in the paranoid register. As the midcareer fiction proved that Pynchon could cook without that particular “garlic,” there’s more to paranoia’s return in Bleeding Edge than just Pynchon being Pynchon. I’ve argued elsewhere that from Vineland to Against the Day paranoia gets subordinated to a new focus on deliberative moral agency that emerges through the register of obligation and dilemma.3 Bleeding Edge’s return to the paranoid register does not diminish Pynchon’s concern with “ethical angles” (11), “Unbalanced Accounts” (377), demonetizing debts (175), or the “need to be responsible” (284). But it sets them in relation to a paranoia now self-conscious, often parodic – “pretending to gasp, faux paranoid” (153) – aware of how its increasingly mainstream status in the wider culture raises problems of novelty and relevance. Bleeding Edge can’t simply transcend contemporary paranoia, but it scrutinizes and reconfigures the network of tropes, affects, and values that the name Paranoia once held together, before it lost its animating novelty. This is a paranoia-saturated novel after paranoia, acknowledging changes in Pynchon’s career, in his audience’s culture, and in literary theory that demand his early themes and techniques change if they are to retain illuminative force. A distinction emerges between Pynchon’s early and late paranoia paradigms, or – forgive 33

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the tweeness – paranoiadigms. In diagnosing the distinct epistemological conditions and possibilities of their respective eras, these paranoiadigms organize very different affective, ethical, and political rhetorics. Bleeding Edge, I’ll argue, sets up a disjunction between the epistemology and the ethics of paranoia, suggesting that, in Pynchon’s post–Cold War novel and in his readers’ post-9/11 world, paranoia is ever more warranted, but also ever less “worth”while. As Diana Benea has observed, “the epistemological quest [. . .] modulates [. . .] into an emotional quest for safety.”4 There’s no social location outside or beyond paranoia, but, the novel suggests, there’s moral potential in acknowledging and turning away from paranoia’s exhaustion.

“After Paranoia” as a Threefold Rubric Bleeding Edge is post-paranoid in relation to career, to culture, and to criticism. Within Pynchon’s career, everything after Gravity’s Rainbow is after paranoia insofar as it departs from the paranoid-rubric Cold War Pynchon that still constrains his popular reception. Critics like Timothy Melley and Patrick O’Donnell have mapped that early paranoiadigm: paranoia there is a disturbing new orientation, an illusive pathology that nonetheless remains the only way to approach truth, an acknowledgment of external constraint that nonetheless facilitates perception and connection.5 Such Cold War narratives – Pynchon’s and others’ – share a structure by which they first emphasize threat or delusion but finally stress the positive as paranoia preserves threatened categories such as knowledge, subjecthood, and agency. But, as political power today appeals to the individual autonomy and decentralized responsibility that paranoia fiction had ranged against corporate domination, so acknowledging our agency-compromising enmeshment in global power-networks has lost its revelatory appeal and oppositional force. What was once an achievement, demanding real work, is now a default. Bleeding Edge’s squarest characters can joke about paranoia, it’s no longer for lone outsiders – the privatecontractor frenzy that followed 9/11 is anticipated months in advance by “Word around the cubes” (48) – and a base rate can be presumed, as when Maxine judges that one acquaintance “makes the average urban paranoid look like James Bond” (146). Bleeding Edge addresses the cultural forces behind this shift, in particular by skeptically reconstellating the associations around two terms ubiquitous in theorizing about contemporary paranoia: “postmodernism” and “neoliberalism.” Jamesonian understandings of postmodernism insist on its

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inability to articulate base-and-superstructure models of history or politics, destroying the conditions for what Mitchum Huehls calls the “vertical structure of Pynchon’s earlier conspiracies”6: it’s no surprise then to find Maxine wondering “What could lie behind a front like this, when it’s front all the way through?” (192) as she investigates the house of Gabriel Ice, CEO of hashslingerz, the tech company whose accounts seem bound up with the September 11th attacks. But the house’s cellar soon opens up into Cold War tunnels: the novel repeatedly insists on the “vertical” historical continuity between 9/11’s obscure global connections and the dynamics of Cold War paranoia. Neoliberalism, meanwhile, is often defined as the coercive naturalizing of the competitive-market analogy in all human affairs, which institutionalizes the paranoid resentment of self-consciously economic agents sure that everyone else is optimizing zero-sum transactions at their expense. Maxine’s brother-in-law duly finds, working at hashslingerz as business heats up after the attacks, “a rat’s nest of empire building, turf defense, careerism, backstabbing, betrayal, and snitchcraft. What Avi once imagined as simple paranoia about the competition is in fact systemic by now” (425). This allows Maxine a paranoid reading of neoliberalism’s “systemic” production of manipulable affects: a “deliberate company policy of keeping all the employees paranoid” (386). But the word “neoliberal” is never used about Ice or hashslingerz: it’s reserved for Nick Windust, an intelligence operative/“neoliberal terrorist[]” who’s a walking refutation of some of neoliberalism’s premises (108). Discovering that he never cashed in his off-book in-kind rewards, Maxine realizes that Windust must be doing it all out of ideological conviction, which undermines his ideology’s own axiom that all behavior is motivated by economic self-interest. Bleeding Edge acknowledges the relevance and discursive centrality of concepts like “postmodernism” and “neoliberalism” to the extraliterary cultural critique of its era, but offers its own corrective modulations of them. Even as it acknowledges paranoia’s changing cultural conditions, then, Bleeding Edge probes their explanatory limits. Founding a challenge to paranoia’s value on an acknowledgment of its basic validity, Pynchon parallels what has been called the post-paranoid movement in recent literary theory. Much as many readers see Pynchon’s fundamental project as the disclosure of viable alternative possibilities beneath the fatalism of received history, it has become a shibboleth that literary criticism’s task is to disclose the hidden ideological work of texts. Critics like Rita Felski dispute such “symptomatic” criticism’s claim to self-evident value and priority on three grounds: its dubious record of actual political success;

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its denial that its own politicized moralism might have affective or material motives; and its inability to recognize its own shifting relation to the category of surprise.7 Symptomatic reading, suggests Felski, is the institutionally sanctioned form that paranoia’s affective reward-system takes in literary culture today. If symptomatic reading, like paranoia, pays off in the moment of exposing unsuspected ideological underpinnings, it also operates defensively in its need for certainty: for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick “The first imperative of paranoia is There must be no bad surprises” (italics in original)8; for Tobin Siebers it forestalls potentially wrong beliefs.9 Such a paranoia kills hope to avoid the harm of disappointment. Paranoia’s ubiquity makes this hip hopelessness a critical default, so that Sedgwick finds the potential values of the kind of paranoid sensibility we find in Pynchon’s earlier work – discovery, surprise, agency – best pursued by rejecting paranoia, both in criticism and in life: it’s now “an actual achievement – a distinct, often risky positional shift – for an infant or adult to move toward a sustained seeking of pleasure [. . .] rather than continue to pursue the self-reinforcing because self-defeating strategies for forestalling pain offered by the paranoid/schizoid position” (italics in original).10 Maxine’s eventual turn against her paranoid instincts leads her to prioritize Sedgwick’s categories of “pleasure” and especially “nourishing,” relating to others not through suspicion but – as she rebuilds her marriage on the basis of care for her children, and dreams of redeeming the childhood innocence of Windust and Ice – through helping them to flourish.11 John Farrell sees Pynchon’s early work as attacking the idea that “actions can be guided by notions of truth and value that are more valid than paranoid delusions.”12 This misreads Pynchon, but along with Sedgwick and Siebers it provides a vocabulary for Bleeding Edge’s after-paranoia challenge: to make the familiar paranoid register offer genuine insight and surprise, formulating nonillusory values that even an audience conditioned by the cultural saturation of defensive and competitive paranoia can believe in. To understand Pynchon’s attempt, we first need to delineate the changed paranoiadigm that grounds it.

New Epistemologies: The Late Paranoiadigm The major point of continuity between Pynchon’s two paranoiadigms is their insistence on what Huehls called a vertical view of structural insight: that foreground events stem from a different, deeper level of organization. Insisting on the underacknowledged Cold War underpinnings of the

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“postmodern” 9/11 attacks, Bleeding Edge’s base/superstructure argumentation exceeds even Pynchon’s Cold War work13: where The Crying of Lot 49 draws narrative impetus from the possibility that Oedipa’s paranoia might be delusive, Bleeding Edge uses overt narratorial intervention to correct insufficiently vertical delusions: “This was nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat ‘Ground Zero’ over and over do so without shame or concern for etymology” (328). Pynchon’s insistence on etymology as a calibrator of epistemological competence – since it reflects language’s vertical character, roots entailing depths – makes a distinctive claim for language’s critical capacities in regard to an event most often discussed in terms of image.14 The late paranoiadigm insists ever more directly on the objective reality of the motivated substructures behind public experience. The novel’s various verticals – beyond the Cold War, for example, Sascha Pöhlmann identifies the flow of digital money as an irreducible “metareality” that consistently and legibly underpins the machinations of the novel’s characters15 – preserve paranoia’s necessary depth-intimations in exactly the places that a “postmodern” “neoliberal” world works hardest to eliminate or at least obscure them. This, however, is just the groundwork required to give real stakes to the novel’s eventual turning away from paranoid investigation, in Maxine’s narrative and in its rhetoric of proportional “worth.” Bleeding Edge discards the paranoid diagnostic orientation before we reach any determinate analysis. Nothing here matches the precision of nonfictional research on paranoid institutional responses to September 11th, for example,16 and the novel’s uneditorialized presentation of multiple paranoiac 9/11-theories doesn’t help in assessing their relative plausibility. The mere implication that something was going on behind the attacks and their exploitation risks Sedgwick’s objection to contemporary paranoid reading: “suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy [. . .] what would we know that we don’t already know?”17 The basic moral contours of Pynchon’s world have long been clear: the public world is organized by an elite at everybody else’s expense. Why should the infrastructural and procedural particulars matter? Perhaps, Pynchon’s earlier fiction implies, if we knew the exact workings of the system, we might better be able to fight it. But Bleeding Edge is more skeptical both about our capacity for full enough discovery, and about the moral priority of the fight. The late paranoiadigm’s epistemological departures from its predecessor help explain why. Paranoia has become less a matter of conscious investigation than of passive reception, with knowledge bearing the grammatical agency of its own apprehension. As Maxine reads hashslingerz’ accounts, for instance,

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“first thing that jumps out of the bushes, waggling its dick so to speak, is a Benford’s Law anomaly” (41). Applying Benford’s Law requires checking datasets against the relative frequency of the first digits in truly random sets of numbers, but Pynchon’s syntax makes the anomaly insist on its own significance. Maxine is less often seen actively cogitating than passively “visited by a strong hint of secret intention” (158), which affects the basic linguistic texture of the novel. Where paranoid association organized the famously sinuous, outwardly expansive tissue of Cold War Pynchon’s narrative syntax, blurring together narratorial knowledge and focalized apprehension, Bleeding Edge’s language of insight is blunt and ugly, as intruding details prompt straightforwardly free-indirect interjections such as “Uh-oh. Intuition alert” or “Whoopwhoopwhoop” that sever paranoid discovery from deliberate investigation (59, 36). Early chapters end on questions, or nonanswers to questions posed in the penultimate line. In a classically organized paranoid narrative, this would prompt us to reconsider details our protagonist has processed, but Bleeding Edge frustrates such impulses: these questions are never answered or answerable with the information it gives us. Paranoid epistemology’s sphere of competence hence shifts away from analysis, toward subdeliberative attunement. As Doc in Inherent Vice has a nose that runs in the presence of significance, “[a]mong Maxine’s more useful sensors is her bladder” (84). But these subpropositional bodily alerts to the presence of vertical organization can’t parse what’s discovered. James Liner and I both find Inherent Vice progressively prioritizing the human “connections” involved in demonetized systems of information exchange over the informational data-connections that could scaffold better access to empirical truth.18 As discovery and insight leave the realm of the deliberate, Pynchon’s later novels investigate alternative outlets for our deliberate energy. This divorce of paranoia from mental work can leave paranoid insight entirely devoid of content. The investigation that brings Maxine to Ice’s tunnels, for example, begins with her getting Vip Everdene’s answering machine: “there’s something strange in its tone, as if incompletely robotized, that conveys inside knowledge, not to mention You Poor Idiot. A paranoid halo thickens around Maxine’s head, if not a nimbus of certainty” (183). This has the structure of paranoia: the emphasis on “knowledge,” the geometry of epistemological insiders and outsiders, and the verb – “thickens” – that figures insight as an enfolding process. Yet it’s all severed from propositional realization or determinate connection. Instead we get the apostrophic sympathy of “You Poor Idiot.” Without

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the promise of informational content, social and affective goals outweigh paranoia’s intrinsic rewards. Maria Cichosz notes how the weed fog of Inherent Vice’s focalization produces revelations that “have no definite content,” such that “[i]f there is a hermeneutic logic at work in Inherent Vice, it is an atmospheric one” rendered “as in a painting” through vague luminescence like the halo Maxine projects onto herself (italics in original).19 Cichosz and David Haeselin both see Pynchon’s recent protagonists striving less toward information that could answer determinate questions than toward affects – “melancholy” and “dread” respectively – that paranoia’s mainstreaming threatens to flatten away.20 The early paranoiadigm was powered by the hope that discovering hidden power might help to dismantle that power. Even if not, every discovery testified to the investigator’s agentive coherence in the face of the threatening determinants they were discovering. But Bleeding Edge’s severing of the link between discovery and active cogitation removes paranoia’s sense of agentive achievement. The vivid unease that was once among paranoia’s affective rewards now comes when our protagonists turn away from paranoia, whose initial promise fades away into unproductive, entropic numbness. Unable to take seriously the righteous “halo [. . .] of certainty” that paranoia lays claim to, Maxine deliberately moves on to the uneasier projects of redeeming criminals and of helping her children flourish in the face of dread. Bleeding Edge most appeals to conventional paranoid reading, and most overtly highlights its dwindling rewards, in the bathetic prophecy of its prefigurations of September 11th. Whether overtly and para-naturally prophetic, as in the “proösmic” nasal detective, who tells everyone to leave New York because she has smelled the coming aftermath of something terrible; allusive to the initiated, as in the scene where Maxine, hiding out overnight near the landfill site that became the repository for the Twin Towers’ wreckage, hears industrial work going on and wonders what’s being prepared; or achieved through focalized rumination, as when Maxine watches people leaving a party, “[f]aces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead [. . .] that no one is quite imagining” (311–12), the novel constantly insists that the signs were there for the competent paranoid to have joined the dots and “imagined” exactly what came to pass. But none of these intimations add up. Lot 49 sustains the possibility that its disparate discoveries might resolve into explanation, right up until its final page. But while Maxine’s overnight overhearings can only entail that people with infrastructural access knew about the attacks in advance, the novel never gives us further details that

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could eliminate suspects: as with its recited conspiracy theories, the novel itself does no further synthetic work. It constantly lets us play the detectivenovel game of connecting the dots ahead of the focalizer. Since we know the later history of Fresh Kills Meadow, we can make a connection unavailable to Maxine. When Jewish Maxine has a dream in which a recently dead client repeats “Azrael,” we are told that “In nonbiblical Jewish tradition, as she is perfectly aware, Azrael is the angel of death. In Islam also, for that matter” (210). Our knowledge of the connection between Islam and the September 11th attacks allows us to interpret Maxine’s dream more “perfectly” than she does, finding the real story hidden away in subordinate syntax. This is the feeling of paranoid discovery, and the stipulated horror of Maxine’s dream suggests, contra Cichosz or Haeselin, that paranoia can still offer that urgent dread that tells you you’re onto something. But the fact that this sentence asks to be read paranoically disguises the basic emptiness of its paranoid content. What surprise is there in one more connection of 9/11 and Islam? What’s specific enough here that, had Maxine understood it fully, she could have done anything differently? Bleeding Edge hollows out paranoia’s claim to prophetic achievement by coercing us into unrewarding mental work. In a mock-sinister encounter with an Arab taxi driver, “Maxine happens to be looking him in the face. What she sees there will keep her from getting to sleep right away. Or that’s how she’ll remember it” (313). Retroactively creating a prophecy, paranoia here is belated and redundant. When Maxine herself comes to realize this – “The Arab angle, I have these Jewish reflexes, so I have to work to avoid paranoia” (349) – she clarifies that within the changed late paranoiadigm, productive work more often comes from refusing paranoia than from indulging it.21 The late paranoiadigm’s most fundamental change, though, is the ever greater complexity of paranoia’s network location. In Lot 49 or Gravity’s Rainbow vertical conspiracy descends from a single organizing force, but Bleeding Edge reveals a tissue of competing depth-factors, each unsure of its own place in the whole. Pöhlmann claims that Ice’s “money turns against him because it reveals what he is up to,” which helps “to expose the turpitude of those who are usually too rich to be persecuted.”22 I’ll return to the question of turpitude, but we never do discover exactly what Ice is “up to,” a confusion that even overcomes Ice himself. Our final revelation about the attacks’ financial underpinnings is that Jewish Ice has been sending money to what he thinks is a Wahhabist organization, but is, unbeknownst to him, an undercover operation disrupting religious extremism in the Middle East. The source of this information, Maxine’s

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Russian contact Igor, has himself been sending money to Chechnyan independence groups as penance for his role in Russian violence in Chechnya, but that money may have entered the attacks’ funding stream. Ice and Igor lose track of what they and their money are “up to” in terms of network consequences, and as Maxine loses the ability to keep track through them, so she lets her investigation drift. Early Pynchon draped complex plots over a stable geometry of knowledge and control, with conspirators working top down and investigators pushing linearly outward into the field of available knowledge. Bleeding Edge’s conspiratorial geometry is of overlap and recursion; it depicts independent interests each pursuing ends complicated by the competing ends of those on whom they rely in the base network of money. The limited perspectival control within networks of this scale leads to nonlinear consequences and indeterminate allegiances.23 Such multiplying overlaps and recursions prevent any single intelligence deliberately achieving full comprehension. When manipulators lose the thread of their own actions’ consequences, there’s no objective motivational base for an investigator to uncover. Theodore Ziolkowski reads Lot 49’s eventual irresolution as the parodic end point of a tradition of paranoid fiction that has existed “as long as there have been groups of at least three people in which one is convinced that the other two are plotting against him or her.”24 Bleeding Edge’s nonlinear pluralization of paranoid structure breaks with the basic premise that paranoia is a matter of “one” investigating subject “against” a consistent conspiracy. This leads to a new geometry. The novel may insist on accessible vertical organizations, but connections, horizontal or vertical, are no longer stably intelligible in terms of motive or consequence. Paranoid investigations can thus no longer associate fresh discovery with progressive uncovering toward a final understanding. This dawning realization conditions the priorities of Pynchon’s initially paranoid late protagonists. Lot 49 cuts out before resolving the finely balanced indeterminacy into which Oedipa’s investigations have led her, but her investigative involvement has been on a stably increasing trajectory, and the novel ends at its most finely tuned paranoid point. In both Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, though, investigative paranoia dwindles as concern for the personal connections made along the way takes precedence. This is framed as both cognitive inertia and moral achievement. It’s an achievement because, as the novel shows, paranoia and its traditional rewards – feelings of comprehension, heroism, and rectitude – are hard to relinquish. Kathryn Hume associates paranoia above all with control, noting how control’s dwindling threat in Inherent Vice reduces

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the value of paranoid self-conception.25 The moralism Farrell identifies in paranoia’s concern with uncovering responsibility is disarmed when greater paranoid acuity only better reveals the distance between each manipulating agent’s intentions and their consequences.26 The less conceivable a final vertical revelation, the more illusory the rewards. The striving for unease that Cichosz and Haeselin identify in Doc and Maxine may be nostalgia for the easy vertical that could restore the early paranoiadigm’s easy rewards.27 Bleeding Edge’s characters frequently respond to the unprocessable geometrical complexity of contemporary conspiracy by reading the confusion itself as a symptom of one last transcendent layer in power’s vertical structure: the novel’s representative early paranoid, March, thus tells us that “[b]ack in the days of hippie simplicity, people liked to blame ‘the CIA’ or ‘a secret rogue operation.’ But this is a new enemy, unnameable, locatable on no organization chart or budget line – who knows, maybe even the CIA’s scared of them” (399). This is not among the verticals the novel ratifies. Indeed, Maxine’s own grasping toward such stably dreadinducing ersatz verticals is often framed as yearning for the super- or paranatural: that Windust might be a time traveler, that various people’s souls survive their deaths, or that “bad dreams” have a prophetic force (270). Igor, on the international machinations of money, tells us “You want secular cause and effect, but here, I’m sorry, is where it all goes off books” (376). Associating the need to believe in final resolving insights with a widespread resort to supernaturalism, Bleeding Edge suggests that to believe a single conspiracy can operate through the scale and obscurity of infrastructures such as the internet requires positing a consciousness beyond anything one secular paranoid could consider a peer. The way that supernatural experience becomes the object of Maxine’s most deliberate attempts to recapture paranoid unease establishes the structural contrast between Bleeding Edge’s late and The Crying of Lot 49’s early paranoiadigms. In Lot 49, supernatural feelings come unbidden and early: when a TV advertisement echoes Oedipa’s present concerns, she registers the “promise of hierophany” with bodily “immediacy,” through fragmentary noun phrases of passing feeling (31). Maxine’s supernatural experiences are more consciously constructed by overlaying a supernatural interpretation onto data whose capacity for secular comprehensibility has been exhausted. Where Oedipa’s sense of revelation persists in uncanny promise, Maxine’s supernaturalism is a strained nostalgia for that promise, which she eventually gives up. But Bleeding Edge’s supernatural also intersects with moral matters the novel takes more seriously, as in the scene that most directly sets Maxine on

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her turn away from investigation toward care. Having discovered Windust’s decaying body in his apartment, she hears his phone ring and hears “no voice she recognizes, a high harsh whisper. ‘We know you’re there’” (411). The voice then intimates that while she’s out investigating, her children may be at risk. Maxine takes this voice as an unambiguous encounter with that CIA-scaring level of supraorganization. But it comes straight after she lists “spooks” among possible explanations for online Windust having just told her to come to his apartment even though his body smells long dead, and the scene is punctuated by her hallucinating the lyrics of a children’s song. The rest of the novel gives the voice no more existential ratification than the visual hallucination. The phone voice’s threat is partially ratified within a day when an armed intruder pursues Maxine’s son. But this narrative too fizzles out: despite her heightened worry, there are no more direct attacks on her or her family, and her investigation loses steam of its own accord rather than because of violent obstruction. Supernatural experiences uncover few hidden narrative facts, but in signaling the point at which the paranoid orientation loses epistemological grounding, such moments make characters conscious of paranoia’s practical limitations, and so become increasingly reliable as a prompt to turn back to earthly moral matters.

Proportion, or What’s “Worth” More than Paranoia? As in Sedgwick or Siebers, paranoia’s limitations in Bleeding Edge are normative – hindering positive value-cultivation and forestalling ethical practicalities – as well as epistemological.28 The novel stresses the validity of choosing self-preservation over risky pursuit and increasingly focuses on the question of what, in a world where real harms are caused by hidden machinations, might be more worthy of our deliberate effort than paranoia. An early discussion of the Deseret, an apartment building around which much of the novel’s paranoid action is concentrated, earns a rare narratorial interjection amid the novel’s otherwise Maxine-tight focalization: “I heard it’s run by the mob.” “Which mob exactly, Heidi? And what difference does it make?” Plenty, as it would turn out. (29)

This stokes conventional paranoia through the implication of a future, clearer state of knowledge from which objective claims about meaning, cause, and relative significance might be adjudicated. But we never find out

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who owns the Deseret, and while Maxine’s investigation brings her into contact with both American and Russian mafias, neither has any clearer relation to the Deseret than various state intelligence agencies or notionally private corporations. It may be that building ownership matters to the novel’s events, but within Maxine’s investigation, and thus to us in reading, it makes no difference at all. Hence Maxine’s drift away from investigation, and conscious turn to other matters. The novel revises Maxine’s initial instinct that whatever warrants “real world paranoia” is necessarily “worth a look.” The early chapters that end on questions make an implicit demand that we think ahead of the focalizer: have we been presented with information that will let us answer these questions even as they remain open to fallible Maxine? But this technique falls away, recurring only after the last revelations about Ice and Igor’s money. Redirecting funds is harmless “till somebody finds out.” “Ice?” “Whoever is running Ice? You tell us.” (461)

“You tell us” is a cue not for a finally successful deductive synthesis of the novel’s evidence, but for the conversation, and at this point of the novel the whole investigation, to be set aside. Insofar as the “You” specifies the covalence of Maxine’s and the reader’s perspectival knowledge, it also implies that, for us as for her, there may be better things to do with the previous 460 pages than try to “tell” the entire fictional universe that underlies the selective focalization. Put bluntly, Bleeding Edge finally asks us whether we can actually be bothered with investigative synthesis, reforegrounding the question asked by Maxine of Deseret ownership and Sedgwick of perfectly vindicated paranoia: “what difference does it make?” The phone voice’s threats affect Maxine’s life less than she anticipated, but prompt a realization that conditions the rest of the book: “Every place in her day she’s taken for granted is no longer safe, because the only question it’s come down to is, where will Ziggy and Otis be protected from harm? Who of all those on her network really is trustworthy anymore?” (412). This redirection of paranoia from factual discovery toward Sedgwick’s category of “nourishing” supplants the epistemological emphasis of the novel’s first half, reframing “networks” and “connection” into social rather than informational terms. Like the para-natural voice, Maxine’s prophetic dreams offer valuable normative orientation, beyond the accurate but unhelpful forebodings of “Azrael.” Before the attacks she dreams of “a theme shopping mall which she understands has been

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deliberately designed to look like the aftermath of a terrible Third World battle [. . .] yet here at these carefully distressed outdoor cafés sit yuppie shoppers [. . .] behaving no differently than if they were at Woodbury Common” (196). This comports with the novel’s other depictions of the culpable triviality with which pre-attack New York treats distant violence. When this dream scene becomes a fire zone, “Maxine stands paralyzed in the jagged light, running through her options and responsibilities. The burning is violent, all-consuming, the heat too fierce to approach [. . .] She wakes with this feeling of urgency, knowing she has to do something, but can’t see what” (196). This stress on the paralysis that comes from “knowing” real threat prefigures the novel’s eventual turn from the merely diagnostic toward specific caring action. The novel’s normative vocabulary makes a virtue of secularizing the potentially supernatural. By contrast to the old “warm and comforting” paranoia in which “we know the names of the bad guys,” March warns us about others “so evil, so deep and comprehensive” (118). This syntax makes “deep” and “comprehensive” gloss “evil” rather than supplementing it, defining it through scale rather than moral viciousness. A conspiracy is “evil” not in its underlying intent but in exceeding the “secular” scale comprehensible by human minds, and hence requiring the positing of para-natural suprahuman consciousnesses if it is to remain comprehensible in intentional terms. Such entities exceed the scale of any “bad guys” that could let us think of ourselves as counterpart “good guys.” Farrell argues that paranoia has always been a normative category, a “disease of justice” that – in seeking blameworthy external causes for our struggles – pathologically perpetuates the “indispensability and attraction of moral and political idealism” in depressing times.29 As the late paranoiadigm defangs paranoia’s surety about responsibility, it undermines the “ideality” of our separation from evil. Maxine’s move from epistemological to moral concerns in response to her encounter with the newly defined “evil” is part of a scale shift in Pynchon’s own moral vision. David Letzler faults the novel in comparison to Gravity’s Rainbow for Ice’s inability to conjure the “metaphysical terror” of Pynchon’s earlier apocalypse-scale villains.30 But Ice is evil on the scale that Maxine is good: of basically compassionate orientation toward the vulnerable. In Pöhlmann’s terms, the novel is clear that Ice’s dealings with Wahhabists follow from his “turpitude.” Yet he’s not a figure of destructive malevolence; his evil is closer to Arendtian thoughtlessness. He’s most overtly turpitudinous in his final appearance – red-faced, at once bloated and frail, trying to bully his wife for control of their child – rather than in his role in conspiracy. Having held

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out the possibility of his collusion in the September 11th attacks, the novel finally reveals that involvement’s inadvertence, and his subsequent bathetic, evil-deflating appearance takes part in the novel’s overall redirection of urgency away from conspiracy toward the question of who gets to look after our children. The return of the paranoia register doesn’t greatly shift Bleeding Edge’s basic moral commitments away from the obligation concerns I’ve identified in Pynchon’s other late work. Instead, paranoia is the foil highlighting another attractive and ostensibly rewarding orientation toward the world: it’s there for the small-scale ethics to be chosen over. The novel insists on the valuably hard, deliberate work of such choices, by contrast to nostalgic paranoia’s structurally intrinsic rewards. Early on, Maxine watches children playing a computer game in which they kill offensively yuppie parents and save their kids: “‘All we have to do – ’ Fiona clicking on the kid and dragging him to a window labeled Safe Pickup Zone. ‘Trustworthy family members,’ she explains, ‘come and pick them up and buy them pizza and bring them home, and their lives from then on are worry-free’” (34). The novel subsequently shows how much more complicated the creation of safety actually is. DeepArcher initially seems to offer a safety premised on privacy and invisibility, but we learn early on that it’s surrounded by “bots [. . .] mighty fuckin evil, the instant they see any disallow code, they home right in” (78). Again “evil” is reformulated into structural rather than purely moral or spiritual terms: privacy and safety are good, so what threatens them is evil: they are vulnerable, it is “mighty.” But the novel’s overall ethics depend on the fact that Maxine’s own initial self-conception matches this description of the bots. As she approaches Ice’s cellar, she congratulates herself: “Somewhere ahead lies a confidential space, unaccounted for, resisting analysis, a fatality for wandering into which is what got her kicked out of the profession to begin with and will maybe someday get her dead” (193). Disallow codes are catnip not only for destructive bots but for paranoids. Yet the turn away from paranoia to preservative care is explicit when Maxine, on the following page, belies her self-conception in practice: she encounters a para-human figure and flees in fear of her life. In her practical moral calculus, the possibility of paranoid discovery doesn’t dominate. Here the preserved life is her own; later, prompted by the voice at Windust’s apartment, she turns back toward preserving her children. Paranoia on Farrell’s moralistic model always “arises from the difficulty of formulating a coherent ethics in light of the prevailing views of ontology and knowledge.”31 Bleeding Edge associates paranoia with idealistic and absolutist ethical divisions between I and They, good and evil; the

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novel’s pursuit of a more modest ethical coherence turns Maxine from a paranoid to a compassionate orientation, from global to domestic scales of action, and, as Benea frames it, away from “the public space of the city, regarded as an epistemological repository of clues,” back toward “the private realm of the family, predicated on relations of care.”32 Finally, this post-paranoid shift affects the novel’s treatment of the September 11th attacks, its central paranoid event. If thoughtless selfishness is the paradigm of individual evil in Bleeding Edge, its consequences can nevertheless finally be as great as those of the grand malevolence paranoia needs to believe in. Vyrva’s regret over her affair with Ice leads Maxine to mockingly wonder, “Is this the listen-up-all-you-slackers speech? American neglect of family values brings al-Qaeda in on the airplanes and takes the Trade Center down?” But Vyrva takes this idea seriously: “They saw how we are, what we’ve become. How soft, how neglectful. Self-indulgent” (363). On Bleeding Edge’s moral scale, the spectacular “atrocity” and domestic betrayal are neither causally separable nor incommensurable. With so much speculation and accumulated significance surrounding it, “9/11” is a paradigmatic paranoid event. The voice at Windust’s apartment, threatening Maxine’s children in paranoid relation to the event, raises domestic care to equal footing with national apocalypse. But the novel’s post-paranoia cumulatively works in the opposite direction: the attacks are reduced to just one among any number of daily threats to safety. After the one intruder, “[e]ach day [Maxine] sees Ziggy and Otis get through safely is another thousandth of a point added to her confidence level that maybe nobody’s really after them, maybe nobody holds her responsible for whatever Windust did” (424). The novel ends as Maxine finally lets the boys walk to school on their own.33 This fulfills Sedgwick’s imperative to abandon paranoia’s defensive orientation and be open to surprise. It also resolves a dynamic established in the novel’s opening pages, when, on the way to school, “she drifts into a pick so as to stay between them and any driver whose idea of sport is to come around the corner and run you over” (1). Maxine’s path to school is an ever expanding “list of things to keep alert for” (2) as threats to her children, a list to which terrorist attacks have eventually to be added. But as Maxine relinquishes defensive paranoia for a more open model of maternal cultivation, so the novel’s repeated emphasis on proportion insists that fetishizing the September 11th attacks is just more dispensable paranoia. Pynchon’s gripe about the use of the term “Ground Zero” is not merely etymological, but proportional: the attacks, though an “atrocity,” were

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“nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on downtown Manhattan” (328). When Maxine muses that “there may be no accidents anymore, the Patriot Act may have outlawed them along with everything else” (341), she redirects her paranoia from concern with the vertical causes of the events to concern with how the state promulgates paranoia itself.34 Bleeding Edge takes for granted that something deep and immoral was going on behind the accepted story of September 11th, then, but stresses that we shouldn’t organize our lives in defensive reaction to that fact.35 Rushing home to her children after hearing the threatening voice at Windust’s, Maxine tries to hail a cab; in metaphysical terms that seem to match the high stakes of paranoid 9/11, she “tries from the absence of hope, the failure of redemption, to summon a magical escape” (412). The next sentence brings this down to earth: “maybe all it is really is an act of faith. Which in New York even stepping out onto the street is, technically” (412). This brings us back to page 1, putting herself between her children and the ever imminent bad driver. Many more children die in traffic accidents every week than terrorist attacks every decade: the paradigmatic paranoid event becomes just one accident among many “to keep alert for.” Bleeding Edge may thus be most distinctive within the “9/11 fiction” category for going out of its way to downplay the event’s significance. Some critics took against Pynchon’s rehearsal of extant conspiracy theories for trivializing the event. But the novel’s framing of the event as “Mardi Gras for paranoids and trolls” (388) and subsequent call to turn away from apocalyptic paranoia, back toward small-scale practical care, are a different, more fundamental deflation: not of the attacks themselves but of their paranoid trappings that lead straight to the Patriot Act.

Limited Edge Bleeding Edge is not, then, just an extension of what Huehls calls Pynchon’s career-long “paranoid whole.”36 It is deliberately, renunciatorily “after paranoia,” pushing against paranoia’s current cultural and political givenness. It attempts distinctive and unusual things – a September 11th novel about the events’ comparative insignificance, a detective novel about valuing discovery less than discomfort, a symptomatic diagnosis of how symptomatic thinking became barren – and we should judge it by these standards. It often fails: examining how its paranoia-skepticism limits the very alternatives it offers to paranoia is one task for future work. One could explore at length, for example, the way its reduction in moral scale forsakes Sedgwick’s goal of making reparative thinking the

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ground of a much more system-wide “oppositional” “hope.”37 Or the way this moralism works within a narrowed social focus that, somewhat absurdly, figures vulnerability in the sons of an investment banker. The sons’ comparative security makes their being the main source of the novel’s moral energy rest on the simple fact of their being children per se, which lays Pynchon open to the charge of replacing critical ethics with undifferentiated sentimentalism. The novel’s narrowness is national too: Maxine’s dream figures the complacent comfort of US café culture built on the infrastructure of third world destruction, but since the novel never shows us the non-US world that both contributed to and experienced the consequences of the attacks, it reduces that world to a prop or foil for a provincially US account of their significance. Just as the dream ends with Maxine wondering how to save Lester from the fire, so the novel’s final moral questions hinge on protecting or redeeming individual Americans. A properly global-scope novel in the deep-connective paranoid tradition might have been obliged to take both the Islamic aspects of the attacks and their harmful consequences in the Islamic world more seriously. Such things are addressed mainly in terms of their impact on US cultural reflexes, as when March laments a cultivated tendency “‘[j]ust to say evil Islamics did it [. . .] One look at these faces and we know they’re guilty of the worst crimes we can imagine’” (321). Pynchon’s nigh-exclusive focus on the US elements of the attacks, though, takes us no further behind those faces. The very events that have changed the conditions of US paranoia have shown that a “comprehensive” novel that dealt seriously with the “evil” behind international events would need a vision capable of encompassing the internal machinations of non-Western empires. For all its marks of distinctive evolution, then, Bleeding Edge’s particular ways of superseding paranoia limit its engagement with global-scale power, ideology, and commitment. It thus throws a few babies out with the traditional-paranoia bathwater – if there’s more Pynchon to come “after paranoia,” we might hope for a less awkward synthesis of critical and reparative rhetoric.

Notes 1. See Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “Negotiating the Paranoia Narrative: The Critical Reception of Bleeding Edge (2013) by Thomas Pynchon,” Anglia, 134.1 (2016), pp. 88–112, for a survey of just how pervasive and exclusive this

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2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

ali chetwynd angle was in the reviews of Bleeding Edge. They attribute this pattern not to the book’s own qualities, but to paranoia’s status as default trope for any discussion of Pynchon. This is true of the word paranoia, but not of the word paranoid, which makes an earlier comeback in Inherent Vice, having been equally absent from Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. See Ali Chetwynd, “Inherent Obligation: The Distinctive Difficulties in and of Recent Pynchon,” English Studies, 95.8 (2014), pp. 923–48. Diana Benea, The Political Imagination of Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels (University of Bucharest Press, 2017), p. 217. Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell University Press, 2000); Patrick O’Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary US Narrative (Duke University Press, 2000). Mitchum Huehls, “The Great Flattening,” Contemporary Literature, 54.4 (2013), p. 864. Rita Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” Poetics Today, 32.2 (2011), pp. 215–34. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003), p. 130. Tobin Siebers, Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism (Oxford University Press, 1993). Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 137. Ibid. John Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 4. For a fuller treatment of Bleeding Edge’s preoccupation with the Cold War, in terms of Pynchon’s own involvement in Cold War defense work at Boeing, see Jeffrey Severs, “‘A Terrible Inertia’: Thomas Pynchon’s Cold War History of 9/11 and the War on Terror in Bleeding Edge,” in Heather E. Pope and Victoria M. Bryan (eds.), Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives in Literature, Television, Film and Theatre (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016), pp. 77–96. See Joseph Darlington’s reading of the novel as a critique of Baudrillardian understandings of “9/11” in “Capitalist Mysticism and the Historicizing of 9/ 11 in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57.3 (2016), pp. 242–53. Pynchon’s etymological focus suggests a case for prose fiction’s distinct – because linguistic – capacities for investigating historical verticalities and undoing the flattening of public perception. This adds a medium-specific element to the self-justification many critics identified in the more widely remarked passages of Bleeding Edge that repudiate the post9/11 antipathy to fiction or irony per se. Sascha Pöhlmann, “‘I Just Look at Books’: Reading the Monetary Metareality of Bleeding Edge,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4.1 (2016), https:// orbit.openlibhums.org/article/doi/10.16995/orbit.189/. See, for example, Richard Jackson’s “The Epistemological Crisis of Counter-Terrorism,” Critical Studies on Terrorism, 8.1 (2015), pp. 33–54,

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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which makes a pretty convincing case that the state response to 9/11 has institutionalized paranoia’s pathologies at the policy level, in particular the “extreme precautionary dogmatism in which the ‘unknown’ is reflexively governed through preemptive action” and “the acceptance of a permanent ontological condition of ‘waiting for terror’ in relation to the next attack” (35). Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 124. See Chetwynd, “Inherent Obligation,” and Liner’s contrast between Bigfoot and Doc’s knowledge economies in “Utopia and Debt in Postmodernity; or, Time Management in Inherent Vice,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4.1 (2016), https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/doi/10.16995/orbit.174/. Maria Cichosz, “Postmodern Allegory and 1960s Melancholy in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58.5 (2017), p. 527. Cichosz, “Postmodern Allegory”; David Haeselin, “Welcome to the Indexed World: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge and The Things Search Engines Will Not Find,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58.4 (2017), pp. 313–24. Maxine’s dialogue persistently flattens the distinction between the paranoia of prejudicial reflex (her US cultural-Jewish suspicion of Arabs) and the paranoia capable of accurate vertical perception (her trained reading of financial patterns): their lack of productive consequences unites them. Pöhlmann, “Reading the Monetary Metareality,” n.p. This is as true of the investigators as the investigated: David Haeselin shows how the novel tropes the google logic that the more we search, the more searchable we ourselves become. This contributes to the saturation of paranoia, as when the olfactory detective Conkling explains that whenever he turns up to investigate the smellable but invisible remnants of a crime, the police “get paranoid, they think maybe you’re scanning them too, snorting into all those deep cop secrets” (203). Haeselin, “Welcome to the Indexed World.” Theodore Ziolkowski, Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 9. Kathryn Hume, “Pynchon’s Alternate Realities from V. to Inherent Vice,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2.1 (2013), https://orbit.openlibhums.org/article/ doi/10.7766/orbit.v2.1.50/. Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity. Cichosz, “Postmodern Allegory”; Haeselin, “Welcome to the Indexed World.” Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Siebers, Cold War Criticism. Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity, p. 16. David Letzler, “How to Read Bad Books by Great Authors: A Review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge,” The Writing Disorder, 2014, www .thewritingdisorder.com/nonfiction-david-letzler.html. Farrell, Paranoia and Modernity, p. 16. Benea, The Political Imagination, p. 218.

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33. See also Michael O’Bryan’s analysis in this volume of the political implications of the parallel relinquishment of DeepArcher’s founders letting the code go open source. 34. Again, see Jackson, “Epistemological Crisis.” 35. See also Hanjo Berressem’s suggestion in this volume that Bleeding Edge adds up to a critique of defensive or repressive responses to the concept of “crisis.” 36. Huehls, “Great Flattening,” p. 862. 37. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 146.

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chapter 4

Pynchon and New Materialism Martin Paul Eve

Materialism, Idealism, and Thomas Pynchon Materialism is the philosophical school of thought that privileges physical matter above all other things, including thought and existence. For the diehard materialist, all consciousness, experience, and other mental phenomena – as well as apparently supernatural happenings – can be attributed to physical causes. In a “naive” or “precritical” materialism, such matter is thought to be independent of humans. As it was for the early Wittgensteinian incarnation of Captain Blicero (or Lieutenant Weissmann as he was then known) in Thomas Pynchon’s V. (1963), in materialism the world is all that is the case (278). Traditionally, materialism could be set against the philosophy of idealism. This model of idealism, albeit caricatured here for the sake of brevity, is one in which human senses do not necessarily have access to the real world.1 Such a stance is introduced because it is impossible for humans to know whether matter exists independently of our senses, since we cannot step outside of our own human perception. Indeed, in its Kantian version, our very humanness distorts the thing-in-itself to conform to the preconditions of our sensory apparatuses.2 For instance, in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” – an early section of his Critique of Pure Reason – Kant writes that it is impossible for perception to exist separately from our concepts of space and time. For Kant, this does not mean that objects themselves have spatial and temporal qualities. It instead means that our consciousnesses structure objects into spatiotemporal terms so that they can be perceived. In such a philosophy we can never know the truth of objects and instead only have access to the phenomena (our perception of the thing) and not the noumena (the thing-in-itself). Idealisms are philosophies of reference or signification since that which is presented to our senses refers to or signifies, but is not, the thing-in-itself (independent physical matter). 53

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The novels of Thomas Pynchon sit uncomfortably between these two strains of philosophical thought. It will be clear to even the most green of Pynchon readers that his novels are scarcely materialist. In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), for example, the physical and chemical sciences are subjected to extreme scrutiny as emblems of a positivist materialism that leads to the culture of the V-2 rocket; the belief that scientific knowledge of physical processes can only ever lead in the direction of human advancement is thoroughly undone. On the same side of this debate, perhaps the most well-known of all of Pynchon’s novels, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), famously asked whether the world was created by its protagonist’s mind: “shall I project a world?” (82). Indeed, the overt solipsism of Pynchon’s novels is precisely of the idealist school; the world is formed by individuals and does not necessarily exist independently of them. Furthermore, the supernatural or extraordinary occurrences that run through all of Pynchon’s novels, up to the Ouija board incident in Inherent Vice (2009) or the fact that, in Bleeding Edge (2013) “there’s no shame in going for a magical explanation” (441), have an idealist quality to them. For David Cowart, Pynchon is the master of “challenging and subverting materialist complacency.”3 On the other hand, though, Pynchon’s novels also yield what I have referred to as a “quasi-materialism” and there are three reasons why his work is not well served under a purely idealist label.4 The first is that the events Pynchon depicts that seem to express idealist leanings, such as the supernatural space of the séance, are usually in fashion for the time period that Pynchon is depicting; the details may be incidental and part of a mediated historiography.5 The second reason is that Pynchon’s supernatural spaces – “the beyond,” ghost worlds, and dreams – are not wholly materially inaccessible, as they would be in an idealist setup. It is suggested, for instance, that in order to fend off the ghoulish “spiritual rampage” of the dead in Camp Dora in Gravity’s Rainbow, one can “[u]se the natural balance of your mind against them” (296), a crossing over between the material space of the brain and the immaterial space of the mind that somehow allows access to the realm of the dead. Finally, Pynchon’s work yields environments in which the external reality is controlled not by the senses of the observer but by a malign outside entity. Elsewhere in Gravity’s Rainbow, the reader is told, for instance, that “[t]he War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image” and that it is “their time, their space” (257, 326, italics in original). And Enzian claims, in a different context, that matter exists independently of individual subjective experience: “[n]one of it may look real, but some of it is. Really” (659).

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In recent years philosophical thought has brought a set of loosely interconnected paradigms, dubbed the “New Materialism,” to the fore. The stance is primarily concerned, as I will go on to outline, with the anthropocentrism of traditional philosophies of materialism and idealism. Indeed, if one traces Kant’s original thought back, it is clear that idealist suppositions are predicated on human sensory apparatuses, while, conversely, materialisms tend to flounder in the face of arguments about human consciousness and its links to matter. This has led to the development of a new approach to materialist thinking that tries to refresh its account to work around such anthropocentrism. Yet I will note, before turning to this “New Materialism” and Pynchon’s position in relation to it, that materialism has itself already undergone several renewals. Most notably, the new materialism of the later nineteenth century fused a form of idealist logic developed by Hegel – the dialectic – with the new idea that an underlying study of material societal economics might yield a historical truth: the unfolding of the historical dialectic. With respect to this earlier new materialism, Pynchon leaves us in no doubt what he thinks: “Karl Marx, that sly old racist” (317).6

The New Materialism The “New Materialism” is one of a cluster of other closely related emergent philosophical theories: immanent naturalism, posthumanism, antihumanism, speculative realism, and object-oriented metaphysics.7 The main thinkers of the “movement” are Quentin Meillassoux, Karen Barad, Manuel DeLanda, Jane Bennett, Diana Coole, Samantha Frost, Sara Ahmed, Elizabeth Grosz, William E. Connolly, and Rosi Braidotti, among many others.8 In William E. Connolly’s definition, there are several features of this new materialism that differentiate it both from idealism and other previous forms of materialism: 1. A “protean monism” – in which it is asserted that minds are entangled with nonliving entities, as traditionally conceived – challenges dualistic views of mind and body. 2. Matter is not regarded as dead or nonliving but rather as in a relationship to various energies. It is an “energy-matter complex.” 3. Metaphysics, once thought to be dead and gone in philosophy, is back, albeit in a contestable form. 4. Subjectivity is stretched well beyond the bounds of the human, thereby yielding a postanthropocentric philosophy. In other words,

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the human subject is seen as a construction but it is not treated as a ground. 5. A speculation on elements that exceed current understanding. 6. A sense of shifting ontological uncertainty, entwined with the epistemological. 7. A planetary approach to thinking about microcosmic matters.9 New materialist ideas have sprung from a variety of sources, and to some extent also seem to have grown independently. A recent edited collection on new materialisms or neomaterialisms, for instance, interviewed prominent figures working within this space, only to find that, as just one example, Manuel DeLanda had not read the work of another interviewee, Quentin Meillassoux.10 Indeed, it is inaccurate, really, to speak of “the” new materialism. Rather, a range of neomaterialisms, which share various precepts, have arisen over the past decade or so. Core to this new materialism, insofar as it can be considered homogeneous, is a type of overcoming of binaries that is different from that found in the postmodern phase. A good example of this is furnished by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, who turn to perhaps the ultimate postmodern theorist, Jean Baudrillard. Dolphijn and van der Tuin astutely point out that, when Baudrillard says of Disneyland that “[i]t is no longer a question of a false representation of reality but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real,” he does not step outside the binary of the representational and the real but rather twists it around.11 In other words, the frequent reversals that we see in these types of postmodern thinking are not such radical breaks with the past. They are still a type of negational dialectic in which one continues to negate within the bounds of accepted dualities. New materialisms, on the other hand, generally work differently, casting aside previous binaries, the most important of which to discard being life as somehow opposed to mere matter. Another central aspect of the new materialism is that it takes aim at both a pre-Kantian realist model and a post-Kantian idealism. In fact, as Quentin Meillassoux charts it, the past two hundred years of philosophical thought have been erroneously following a mode called “correlationism,” in which humans believe that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”12 The problem that Meillassoux puts at the heart of this is that, under such a model, thought is not capable of thinking objects that emerged at an ancestral time in which there was no subject capable of perceiving them (he calls this thought experiment the “arche-fossil”). Yet,

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empirical science continually manages to produce meaningful statements about such a time. It is in this way that the new materialism is designed to reinstate a way of thinking that acknowledges the limits of our perception while also granting a realism beyond the bounds of the human species.

Pynchon beyond the Human It is unwise to take theoretical or philosophical precepts and then merely apply them to literary works. There is a reason that fiction expresses itself in its own register, distinct from philosophical thought, even when we are dealing with the “novel of ideas.” Nonetheless, in the remainder of this chapter I will illustrate how Pynchon’s novels intersect with the philosophical ideas explored above. The novels of Thomas Pynchon have long held a postanthropocentric viewpoint, at least superficially. As early as Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, a type of “mineral consciousness” is described in which the timescales of experience for rocks are stretched, in language that is typically cinematic, to “frames per century [. . . or] per millennium” (612). Such a thinking is a type of new materialist practice that posits a center of consciousness that is distinctly nonhuman but also nonanimal. Yet, at the same time, we might question whether such a view is truly postanthropocentric. For the “intellectual system” that is ascribed to the rock is anthropomorphic: the consciousness is “not too much different from that of plants and animals” (612). In this way, even while subjectivity is here pushed beyond the bounds of humanity, it is done so by analogy to human consciousness. This is not, as Ian Bogost might put it, a true “alien phenomenology” in which the subjectivity of objects is made primal but instead a comparative understanding of nonhuman subjectivity.13 It is one that may admit that there is a “contingent being independent of us” but it remains one that is “of a subjective nature.”14 The classic example of such a quasi-postanthropocentric stance in early Pynchon is, of course, the episode of Byron the Bulb in Gravity’s Rainbow (647–55). In this well-known section, the light bulb known as Byron appears to be immortal, never burning out, and thus thwarts the Phoebus cartel’s attempts to build in a planned obsolescence for the sake of profit. At first glance, it appears that such a narrative might perfectly fit the postanthropocentric standpoint of a new materialism: a light bulb is imbued with a subjectivity that is constituted through the language of an “energy-matter complex.” After all, the language of the bulb is one of power grids and electricity, which brings in what was thought for a long

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time to be the original “animating force” of life ‒ its vitalism ‒ thereby reuniting two sides of a previous binary opposition.15 Yet, the life cycle metaphors that are used within the tale of Byron the Bulb once more transpose traditional conceptions of human and animal mortality into the realm of objects. Bulbs, we are told, have lives, and “through no bulb shall the mean operating life be extended,” leading the narrator to remark that, like great prophets, such bulbs will be “either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think” (655). In the imagination of Gravity’s Rainbow, we certainly see consciousness stretched beyond the bounds of the human estate to which it was previously confined. However, I would also argue that such a stretching is also more of a superposition, in which one way of thinking is laid on top of another. When thinking in terms of biological life cycles, even on metaphorical grounds, it becomes easier for us to “imagine” subjectivities beyond the human. However, it is unclear whether such subjectivities – if that word can even be used in these contexts – exist within objects or whether, if we could perceive them, they would be recognizable as such to us. There is also the further challenge of communication in fiction. What would it look like to imagine and describe a nonhuman or even nonanimal consciousness in fiction that did not bear resemblance to the known subjectivity of human readers? Would such a fiction be possible? Even if Pynchon’s nonhuman subjectivities are imbued with an anthropomorphism – from Byron through to Skip the speaking ball-lightning in Against the Day (2006) (73) – the leaps of his imagination toward speculative alternative realities (an underpinning notion of the new materialisms through the “principle of facticity”16) are well known and charted. Indeed, such a concept seems to sit well with the mid-range literary history of postmodernism within which Pynchon’s work sits since, as Brian McHale charts the change in focus, the shift from an epistemological to an ontological dominant in postmodern fiction closely tracks the contemporary movement in philosophical thought with which I am concerned in this chapter.17 This is because in the change from an idealist notion of understanding being shaped by consciousness – an epistemology – the new materialism is more concerned with unstable ontologies: with the plurality of modes of being. Pynchon has long been preoccupied with such issues of being and alternative ontological possibilities. However, the clearest of Pynchon’s explorations of such other realities lies, as Adam Lifshey puts it, “between Mason and Dixon’s marking of a rationalizing European narrative on one

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hand and the corresponding suppression of multiple hypothetical indigenous worlds on the other.”18 When Pynchon writes, then, of the ways in which America served as a “Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true” – even as the cartographic enterprise begins “changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities” – he is himself mapping the way in which things could be very different, as almost every critical approach to the novel has noted (MD 345, italics in original). This ontological uncertainty is a core proposition of both the new materialism and speculative realism, as both these philosophies hold that there is no reason why things should be as they are and that any other set of possible permutations are as likely. That said, there are bounds to even this type of “otherwise-thinking” in new materialist and speculative realist models (as there are also in Pynchon’s writing, to which I will return later). Core to these efforts is the abolition of all necessary logical rules except for the principle of noncontradiction (that a proposition cannot be true and false at the same time) and the principle of facticity (that things can be otherwise). The former – the principle of noncontradiction – must hold even in new materialist thinking since its eradication would undermine the possibilities of the principle of facticity. (That is: if statements could contradict themselves and remain true, then the principle of facticity, that things could be otherwise, could contradict itself, meaning that it would not be possible for things to be otherwise, leading to a logical paradox.) In Against the Day, however, Pynchon presents various scenarios that seem to violate even the principle of noncontradiction. Bilocation, for instance, in which characters can appear in two locations simultaneously, as do the character(s) Renfrew and Werfner, appears to be such a phenomenon. Within a new materialist frame, bilocation poses the question of whether an individual coexisting in two places at once – exhibiting a “predisposition to the echoic,” as Pynchon puts it – violates the principle of noncontradiction (AD 227). The actual answer to this question rests on the relationship of linguistic propositions to the basic laws of physics. Is the contradiction of “Renfrew is here,” the phrase “Renfrew is there” or “Renfrew is not here”? Indeed, not all negations in natural language constitute a formal logical negation. Time also has a part to play, as it does in Pynchon’s work. (As James Gourley notes, “bilocation and time travel are more closely linked than one might initially consider”; Inger H. Dalsgaard also links Pynchon’s representations of bilocation to technologies of travel and time distortion.19) In a linguistic sense bilocation

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must possess a sense of concurrency. “Renfrew was here” and “Renfrew is not here” clearly do not contradict each other. Pynchon, though, leaves no ambiguity that his bilocation violates the basic rules of physics. To give another example from Against the Day, the Stupendica and the Emperor Maximillian “share a common engine room”; the two ships physically occupy exactly the same space, at the same time (519). These alternative physical ontologies are part of what Simon de Bourcier has called Pynchon’s “impossible objects,” in which we must consider that the generally understood propositions of logic and physical science may not hold.20 Pynchon takes the new materialist focus on facticity – the plurality of modes of being – and stretches this to breaking point, going even further than the new materialists in violating the fundamental logical principles on which such stances usually rest. This, of course, is the prerogative of fiction, as opposed to philosophy. For, while philosophy aims to describe and understand the complexities of the world, fiction is often less mimetic, probing alternative realities for situations unfathomable within the bounds of logic to which reality is wedded. Fiction is free to craft such strangeness – imagination is the form’s prerogative, after all – and readers are free to interpret such oddities as either literal elements of a textual narrative or through “lateral” reading “solutions, sidestepping the crisis by passing into metaphorical identities,” as Pynchon puts it (AD 418). One such lateral solution has frequently been to cast Pynchon’s impossible dynamics into a political reading, a move that is thoroughly in accordance with a new materialist philosophy.

New Materialism, Anti-biologism, and Pynchon’s Gender Thinking While Pynchon’s worlds are certainly strange, we should also consider that our own is somewhat odd. As Karen Barad has pointed out, the field of quantum mechanics – while forming the basis for many hackneyed theoretical literary readings – has implications for how we think about the materiality of the gendered body; the strange entanglements between material elements question our very understandings of time.21 For, in her reading, the intra-actions between bodies and environments are not deterministic in the traditional senses of linear time. Causality runs across strange patterns of spacetimemattering that has implications for social justice in the feminist space. The type of question that might be posed by such thinking is: how, for instance,

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does a future gender identity map onto a previous bodily materiality, if linear causality has been disrupted? It may appear similarly strange to some readers to learn that new materialist approaches have often been central to debates in contemporary feminism. Sara Ahmed, for instance, takes umbrage at the way in which new materialist philosophies often implicitly or explicitly claim that many forms of feminism are antibiological. That is, Ahmed alleges that new materialists “caricature past feminisms” as focusing so strongly on the social construction of gender and sex that they ignore bodily realities. For Ahmed, this is simply untrue and thinkers such as Sedgwick, Frank, and Grosz conduct “an uneven distribution of the work of critique,” reading feminist writers with insufficient attention and bestowing more time on male than female authors.22 On the other side of this debate, Noela Davis disagrees with Ahmed’s allegations against the new materialism. For Davis, the figures criticized most explicitly in Ahmed’s piece are not accusing past feminisms of neglecting the materiality of the body but rather of engaging with such materiality in a space that is somehow apart from the social. Davis instead argues that, in the work of Karen Barad, “matter is not an object, absent or present, but instead ‘it’ can productively be considered as an active process” and this is what past feminisms are accused of neglecting.23 For Davis and Barad, nature and culture do not exist separately (or the bodily space and the separate socially conditioned space) but as natureculture together in an unfolding process, in Donna Haraway’s terms.24 Without commenting on the merits of either of these arguments, I suggest that they demonstrate that the abstract philosophical concepts of the new materialism are of real-world relevance for a set of engaged thinkers who wish to transform their theories into practice. The works of Thomas Pynchon, though, are curiously framed with respect to feminist thought of any kind. Certainly, two of his novels have female lead characters: The Crying of Lot 49 and Bleeding Edge. Yet, as Joanna Freer points out, in many of Pynchon’s works women are treated as “(semi)-inanimate objects upon which men have a right (or even a duty) of possession, imposition or defilation.”25 In Freer’s reading this situation does improve over the course of Pynchon’s literary career but only in relative terms to a somewhat low starting bar.26 When it comes to the kind of new materialist approach put forward by Barad, in which bodies and social contexts are intertwined and cannot be treated separately, Pynchon’s representations of the male body are certainly far easier to align with this than his depictions of female bodies. For

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instance, in Gravity’s Rainbow the particular focus on the Pavlovian conditioning of Tyrone Slothrop is integral to the novel’s plot. This is an instance in which Slothrop’s masculinity is directly tied to an ongoing process of exposure to environmental stimuli that at once wrests the character’s sexuality away from him (“The Penis He Thought Was His Own”) and also focuses upon the body’s relationship to this decentering process. There is rarely a commensurate focus upon the female body and its relationship to socially constructed notions of gender in Pynchon’s works. In the same novel, the closest we perhaps get is the query about whether Katje Borgesius’s performance as the Domina Nocturna, who enacts the sadistic coprophagous episode with Brigadier Pudding, interrelates traditionally opposed sets of genitalia and sexual function. In this episode, Katje wonders whether her potential constipation is “anything like male impotence,” thereby locating her analogical equivalent of Slothrop’s penis with the female digestive tract. On the other hand, her “cunt” is described as a “fearful vortex” – a literal emptiness – from the perspective of Brigadier Pudding, and she herself refers to it as “her last mystery” (235). Even if this infamous scene in Pynchon’s early novel does present a reversal of conventional power and gender stereotypes, with a commensurate focus on the biological and the interrelation of gendered spheres of experience, it is in other ways that Gravity’s Rainbow more thoroughly adheres to the question-lines of the new materialism as it informs feminism. For the challenge of the new materialism is to provide a mode of thought that is not merely predicated on an existing negation; feminist new materialisms do not define the female body in opposition to the male, for example, but query the entire premise of binary genders based on sexual difference. As Donna Haraway put it as far back as 1988: “bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects” (italics in original).27 This is, then, a question of undoing dualism, of seeing how the lines of separation that we map in order to delineate objects are part of a social process with material implications for human bodies. As I have pointed out elsewhere, Pynchon’s novels do more than most to query the dualist framework that pervades Western thought.28 In the light of new materialist thinking about feminism, it is also fair to extend such a pronouncement and to say that the primary way in which Pynchon does so is through the body and the breakdown of the

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traditional division between the insides and outsides of bodily forms. In V. the plastic surgeon and maker of beautiful bodies, Schoenmaker, makes the ironic statement “[i]nside, outside [. . .] you’re being inconsistent,” while in Gravity’s Rainbow Pirate Prentice is able to get “inside the fantasies of others” (48; 12). Also in the latter novel Edward Pointsman considers “the cortex of Dog Vanya’s brain” as the bridge between “[i]nside and outside,” while Kevin Spectro, the more ethical of the pair, “did not differentiate as much [. . .] between Outside and Inside” (78–9, 141). In Pynchon’s later works, there is a continued breakdown of the divides between the internal and the external (implying a critique of Cartesian dualism, the philosophy of an internal mental state and an external body). For instance, Mason and Dixon are told that their voyage will let them explore “any number of things you may have been wond’ring about both inside and outside” (225), while in Against the Day the Vormance expedition is unable to contain the meteorite since “[t]rying to get it to fit inside the ship, we measured, and remeasured, and each time the dimensions kept coming out different – not just slightly so but drastically” (144). In other words, in this latter example, Pynchon’s entity is determined not just by its own objective existence but by its interaction with measurement. Its bodily size is a combined result of the specific social situation within which it is gauged and the object’s innate properties intra-acting, to use Barad’s term denoting strangely interacting and constituting feedback loops, with those situations. Such an intra-action, or onto-epistemology, is typical of new materialist philosophies. It is an onto-epistemology because, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, “the concept is not given, it is created” or, in Barad’s terms, “[w]e do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because ‘we’ are of the world” (italics in original).29 In challenging dualism thus, from the early writing in V. right up to Bleeding Edge, Pynchon’s work exhibits a certain resistance to the charting of a straightforward move from a modernist epistemology to a postmodern ontology, as though these were separate spaces. It seems clear, as Kathryn Hume has signaled, that, when considering Pynchon’s works, “we can no longer think in terms of alternate realities” by the time of Inherent Vice.30 Or, at least, not just in terms of alternate realities. There is, in Pynchon’s later works, often a more confined approach to strange materialities; they appear not in separate spaces, but integrated into the more singular world. That said, in Bleeding Edge, the DeepArcher network is a good example of a subspace; a virtual world that remains separate from the main reality,

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even while being nested within it – a space that is other and integrated at the same time, thereby yielding the odd topology of knowledge posited by Barad. DeepArcher is both a space apart but also known by its presence in the world. Instead of the shift charted by McHale from epistemology to ontology, which works within a dualist framework of mind and body, what we can see emerging over the course of Pynchon’s literary career is a form of onto-epistemology, in which knowledge is more successfully gained by those who oppose such binaries. It was Pavlov who, Pynchon claims, was “fascinated by ‘ideas of the opposite,’” yet Pynchon’s Pavlovian pedophile Pointsman is hardly a model to follow (GR 48). In Pynchon’s novels we are given glimpses of spaces that resist the idea of the opposite, including in terms of gender dynamics, but that never wholly break free from a binary system. For instance, consider the gender ambiguity of Cyprian Latewood in Against the Day that leads to Yashmeen’s pregnancy, via his mouth: “a complex love/sexrelation that is as ecstatic as it is healing and transforming,” as Heinz Ickstadt has put it (AD 881–83).31 This setup is one in which, in Michael Jarvis’s words: Cyprian demonstrates an understanding of the rhetorical, performative valence of sexual identity, a deliberately anti-essentialist reading of his homosexuality which does not reduce sexual preference to mere fad, but rather elevates it above identity and gender into the realm of desire, of love. Because Cyprian performs in and out of the bedroom as a duallysexed subject, he is, like Tiresias, able to possess an empathic knowledge of self and other, a wisdom and a completeness that makes achieving gnosis feasible.32

My reading of Pynchon’s works within the frame of a feminist new materialism hits the buffers at this point. Cyprian’s pronouns shift from “he” to “she” with corresponding adjective agreements. However, gender remains a binary in which Cyprian is “dually-sexed.” It is not that the binary is here destroyed but rather that the character fluidly traverses the dualistic structures. Regardless, then, of whether Pynchon’s novels exhibit instances of an onto-epistemology that remap binaries of inside and outside into new forms (which they do), it does not seem true or fair to state that Pynchon’s works radically extend this thinking into the realm of gender and sex. The breakdown of dualistic thinking in Pynchon’s

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works, insofar as they intersect with a new materialism, appears limited to certain more traditional, philosophical areas of dualistic thought, rather than to the biologism, or otherwise, of new materialist feminisms.

Reading Pynchon after Theory The time of high Theory in literary studies may now have passed. There is also current talk, in the prestigious venues of literary studies, of a postcritical movement led by Rita Felski, among others.33 Yet, new philosophies are continually generated and provide fresh ways of understanding the aesthetic, political, and mimetic contexts for literary work. Philosophy, as I have pointed out elsewhere, provides us with a common bridge to a mimetic reality that is shared with fiction, even when the two disciplinary spaces diverge in their approaches.34 As Catherine Belsey writes, “[a]ssumptions about literature involve assumptions about language and about meaning, and these in turn involve assumptions about human society. The independent universe of literature and the autonomy of criticism are illusory.”35 The various strands of the school known as the new materialism are of some help to us in coming to grips with the works of Thomas Pynchon. For, in many ways, Pynchon’s works have often been about the limits of the human perspective on the world. His novels have been postanthropocentric from the consciousness of rocks and light bulbs through to automated, flying ducks. His writings have also worked against a reductive dualism in which consciousness is neither separate from bodily matter nor wholly integrated with it. There is certainly scope to say that the onto-epistemology of new materialist schools is present in Pynchon’s novels, contesting the chronology asserted by Brian McHale. Such readings can only go so far, though. Pynchon’s nonhuman consciousnesses are framed through analogy to human psyches, which may be an intrinsic boundary of fiction’s ability to represent. Furthermore, the breakdown of dualism that we can detect in Pynchon’s novels is rarely framed through recourse to feminist thought about the body, gender, and sex. Indeed, while often transgressive, Pynchon’s works remain inside a dualistic framework of gender and sex in which transgression is enacted by negation but within the same paradigm of thought.

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Notes 1. See Karl Ameriks, “Introduction: Interpreting German Idealism,” in Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–17, for why this is a crude and reductive definition. 2. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, “Interview with Quentin Meillasoux,” in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012), p. 72. 3. David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 36. 4. Martin Paul Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Adorno (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 138–45. 5. Brian McHale, “Genre as History: Genre-Poaching in Against the Day,” Genre, 42.3–4 (2009), doi.org/10.1215/00166928-42-3-4-5, pp. 5–20. 6. For more on this passage, see Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 110. 7. William E. Connolly, “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things,” Millennium, 41.3 (2013), p. 399. 8. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray Brassier (Continuum, 2009); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007); Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone Books, 1997); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press, 1994); Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2010). 9. All of these points are paraphrased and summarized from Connolly, “New Materialism,” pp. 399–402. 10. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, “Interview with Manuel DeLanda,” in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 46–47. 11. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012), p. 122. 12. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 5. 13. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 14. Meillasoux, Dolphijn, and Tuin, “Interview with Quentin Meillasoux,” p. 80. 15. For more on vitalism in new materialisms, see Jane Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” in Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 47–69. 16. A principle that states that the only absolute certainty is that everything that is could also be otherwise.

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17. Brian McHale, “Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing,” in Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (eds.), Approaching Postmodernism: Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism, Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature, 21 (John Benjamins, 1986), pp. 53–79. 18. Adam Lifshey, Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures (Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 125. 19. James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 119; Inger H. Dalsgaard, “Readers and Trespassers: Time Travel, Orthogonal Time, and Alternative Figurations of Time in Against the Day,” in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 115–38. 20. Simon de Bourcier, Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels (Continuum, 2012), p. 48. 21. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, “Interview with Karen Barad,” in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 48–70. 22. Sara Ahmed, “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism,’” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 15.1 (2008), doi.org/10.1177/1350506807084854, p. 30. 23. Noela Davis, “New Materialism and Feminism’s Anti-biologism: A Response to Sara Ahmed,” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 16.1 (2009), doi.org/10 .1177/1350506808098535, p. 75. 24. See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm, 2003). 25. Joanna Freer, “Is Pynchon a Feminist?,” Berfrois, June 9, 2011, www .berfrois.com/2011/06/thomas-pynchon-relative-feminist-by-joanna-freer/. 26. Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture, pp. 126–56. See also Freer’s chapter in this volume, in which she partially revises this view. 27. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14.3 (1988), doi.org/ 10.2307/3178066, p. 595. 28. Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy, p. 66. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 11; Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs, 28.3 (2003), doi.org/10.1086/signs .2003.28.issue-3, p. 829. 30. Kathryn Hume, “Attenuated Realities: Pynchon’s Trajectory from V. to Inherent Vice,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2.1 (2013), https://doi .org/10.7766/orbit.v2.1.50. 31. Heinz Ickstadt, “History, Utopia, and Transcendence in the Space-Time of Against the Day,” Pynchon Notes, 54–55 (2008), https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.37, p. 230.

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32. Michael Jarvis, “Very Nice Indeed: Cyprian Latewood’s Masochistic Sublime, and the Religious Pluralism of Against the Day,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 1.2 (2013), doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v1.2.45, p. 13. 33. Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, “Engaging the Humanities,” Profession (2004), p. 45; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 59; Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations, 108.1 (2009), doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1, pp. 1–21; Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 225–48; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 34. Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy, pp. 5–6. 35. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (Routledge, 2002), p. 24.

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chapter 5

Pynchon’s Posthuman Temporalities Pieter Vermeulen

Miracles in Geological Time Pynchon’s 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” is, on the face of it, a confident declaration of human exceptionalism. Published in the same year as Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” which rejects the rigid boundaries between technology, nature, and the human, the essay lingers on “the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery.”1 Luddite rage against the machine, for Pynchon, testifies to an “abiding human hunger” for meaning that the modern disenchantment with nature forces us to wrestle from “amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents.”2 Only near its end does the essay anticipate the posthuman erosion of the borders between technology and human life: if the insistence on the miraculous used to be a placeholder for the human that “den[ies] to the machine at least some of its claims on us,” in the coming computer age our machines may themselves become operators of the miraculous, as it seems “the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good.”3 It is here, Pynchon writes, that Luddites finally come to share common ground with a “cheerful army of technocrats.”4 If this seems to spell an end to Luddite resistance, Pynchon’s use of the term “army” – followed by a reference to “a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s” – points to a residual violence besetting the coming entanglement of human life, nature, and technology.5 That entanglement has in the meantime received a name. In 2000 the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen adopted ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer’s term “the Anthropocene” to name human life’s irreversible impact on the chemical and climatological makeup of the planet. With the help of its technological and fossil-fuel–driven prostheses, human life has become a geological agent that warrants recognition as a geochronological unit in its own right.6 Although the Anthropocene Working Group’s 2016 69

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recommendation for the official adoption of the term (as the successor of the Holocene) still – at the time of writing – awaits ratification by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the term has in the last decade begun to serve as a catalyst for questions and anxieties about the impact of human action on the environment. The notion of the Anthropocene entails an altered understanding of human life, as an awareness of human impact on the planet – thanks, in no small part, to computational infrastructures that make that impact measurable and visible – becomes increasingly inescapable and the separation between the human and the nonhuman that the beginning of Pynchon’s essay still upholds becomes increasingly untenable.7 Indeed, the leakage between natural and human history means that human life now belongs “at once to differently-scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies.”8 The imaginative challenge, then, is “think[ing] of human agency over multiple and incommensurate scales at once.”9 These derangements of scale are particularly challenging for the traditionally human-scaled technology of the novel. Customarily tied to the scales of personal psychology and social life, the novel in the age of the Anthropocene engages differently scaled realities, while it also reflects on the entanglement of human life with nature and technology. The issue of scale surfaces in the (predominantly negative) critical reception of Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day, which singles out for special opprobrium the novel’s sheer bulk (at over 1,000 pages) and its failure to present fully realized characters10: in the words of reviewer Tim Martin, the novel is “too big, too broad, too stuffed [. . .] to permit of a continuous conception of character.”11 This chapter argues that it is precisely these two features that invite a reading of the novel as a work of Anthropocene fiction. Pynchon has always been “a writer of modernization, of its historical preconditions, aims, and limits,”12 and one concern Against the Day shares with scholarly Anthropocene discourses is reimagining the (only ever imaginary) modern divorce between nature and society, between the human and the nonhuman. This concern is reflected in the different dates that have been proposed for the beginning of the Anthropocene.13 For Crutzen himself, “the advent of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 provides a logical start date for the new epoch”;14 other proposals situate it in the early days of the European colonization of the world, or in the so-called Great Acceleration after World War II, when the human impact on the socioeconomic and biophysical spheres of the planet increased spectacularly.15 These various accounts foreground different dimensions of modernity: capitalist industrialization,

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colonization, and the nuclear capacity for self-destruction. These are all crucial thematic emphases in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and Against the Day offers an Anthropocene update of that oeuvre’s historiographic concerns. As we will see, this update foregrounds human life’s entanglement with planetary forces (geological time), its orientation to its imminent undoing (disaster time), and its untranscendable implication in interlocking economic and physical materialities (untranscendable time).

Geological Time: Planetary Frontiers Against the Day engages a bewildering range of global historical developments in the period between the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and 1923; in this way, it nominates the turn of the twentieth century as a crucial threshold in the deep history of the intercourse between the human and the nonhuman. As Against the Day reminds us, the World’s Fair was the occasion for the formulation of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “Frontier Thesis.” Turner’s thesis, as summarized in the novel by Professor Vanderjuice, holds “that the Western frontier we all thought we knew from song and story was no longer on the map but gone, absorbed – a dead duck” (52). Situating the continuous confrontation with the frontier at the heart of American character, Turner’s thesis on the closing of the frontier leaves the fate of that character in doubt: in Vanderjuice’s words again, “[t]he frontier ends and disconnection begins” (53). The vast geological and thematic expanses of Against the Day are a record of that disunion; it presents the United States as a project that is no longer mainly organized by the horizontal pursuit of ever new territories (even if territorial expansion did not magically stop around 1900, of course), but that increasingly displaces its expansive drive in more erratic directions: downward (in the novel’s concern with mining operations in Colorado or with the conquest of “Inner Asia”), upward (in the sustained interest in spirituality and the aerial narratives of the Chums of Chance), but also inward (toward an intensified capitalist exploitation of territories already conquered). Of course, such multidirectional movements have always characterized American (or indeed world) history; what changes around 1900 is that horizontal expansion is no longer the dominant streamlining historical force. The novel connects these different vectors as part of an overarching dynamic: “the history of all this terrible continent,” one character remarks, “was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their

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incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land” (928–29). These crisscrossing trajectories entangle human life with different nonhuman agencies – whether they are infrahuman geological forces or supernatural spiritual ones. When Frank Traverse, who succeeds his father Webb as the “Kieselguhr Kid,” an anarchist bomber, pauses to wonder “[w]hat was there to do out here but run and pursue? What else made sense? Stand still, under this vast of a sky?,” his response reflects how the closing of the frontier signals the increasing awareness of the human’s implication with geological forces: “Dry out, grow still as the brush, as a cactus, keep slowing down until entering some mineral condition . . . ” (395). The point of Against the Day’s engagement with the Anthropocene is that the human condition is already, among other things, a mineral condition, and that the exhaustion of westward expansion makes that realization increasingly inescapable; rather than merely psychological or biological, it is always also geological. The first chapters of Against the Day present the spectacle of an American continent almost fully saturated by railroads and electrical grids (just as it will later imagine Eurasia as a continental system connected by railroads “in steel proliferation across the World-Island” [567]); as territorial expansion is almost over, intensified exploitation is the one available option. When the Chums of Chance arrive in Chicago at the novel’s opening, they no longer see “the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains” or indigenous populations but rather “unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices” (10). Later in the novel, this American condition will tentatively be reimagined as a planetary one.16 The late nineteenth century world is what Rosalind Williams has called “an intensely humanized world,” in which “a vast, general expansion of human knowledge and power” informs “the realization that soon the entire globe would be mapped.”17 After the “scramble for Africa” and the completion of the world map, the American closing of the frontier coincided with the more encompassing “closing of the world frontier.”18 The aftermath of the closing of the American frontier is customarily described as a displacement of the frontier across the globe – through new American imperialisms, or through the American participation in World War I. Indeed, Turner’s original lecture announces as much, noting that “the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.”19 Williams makes clear that such a global solution is illusionary at best: the closing of the world frontier means “a turning point in history as human beings entered into a new relationship with the earth”20 – an earth

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that is no longer a supposedly infinite resource but a finite reserve that requires ever more violent and intrusive strategies to exploit. One way to phrase this shift is to say that in Against the Day, fantasies of global expansion run up against processes of planetary disorientation. Recent criticism has not failed to read Pynchon as a postnational or global author, yet accounts of Against the Day as a “globe-spanning narrative”21 and as “the most explicitly global of Pynchon’s texts”22 if anything underestimate the capacious remit of a work that not only crosses the globe but also digs into the earth, “begin[s] colonizing the Sky” (AD 131), and, through its fantastic and spiritual conceits, robs the earth of its ontological robustness. If global ways of thinking allow for a sense of totality and cognitive control, the notion of the planetary underlines the insufficiency of all-too-human or all-too-horizontal ways of apprehending the world.23 The planetary, that is, names a reality that can never be decisively conquered and escapes human imposition. When we return to Turner’s lecture, we see that he delivers human life to constellations of the human, nature, and the earth that are planetary rather than global. If his lecture is officially a strong statement of the impact of geology on human life (“civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology”24), the saturation of the continent by human endeavor comes to affect the priority of geology: “[T]he wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent.”25 The figure of a “complex nervous system” intimates a new reality of entangled lives, in which human life has become a geological and a natural force, just as geology has become an aspect of a life that is never simply human or natural. Against the Day shows how expansion in a saturated world around 1900 takes the shape of encompassing conflict. When territorial expansion is no longer an option, the novel notes, “the modern State depend[s] for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege – through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits” (19, italics in original). Take the example of the Chums of Chance: they begin their career as world-traveling balloonists with the end of the Paris Commune, only to end up as agents in “a world-wide, never-ending state of siege” (19). For all their dreamy naivety and childlike innocence – and despite their “dual citizenship in the realms of the quotidian and the ghostly” (256) – the novel makes it clear that they serve particular power interests; they operate as “a mysterious agency that seems to be (at least connected to) the US government”26; with their Russian counterpart, the

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Tovarishchi Slutchainyi (AD 123), they participate in a power struggle as “the unwitting agent[s] of a new internationalism driven by energyobsessed corporate interests.”27 That they clearly belong to a different diegetic order than the other characters in the novel (Pynchon’s narrator intermittently refers the reader to other books in a series of Chums adventures) does not release them from their earthly bounds “into any realm of the counterfactual”; instead, they participate in an earthly life that has lost its status as a stable background for human action: the Chums make the earth visible as “[a]nother ‘surface,’ but an earthly one. Often to our regret, all too earthly” (AD 9). The adventures of the Chums of Chance underline that the world of the novel is a fundamentally unstable one, as their initial carefree globetrotting as the “juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative” (1024) ultimately leaves them on “the counter-Earth, on it and of it, yet at the same time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left” (1021). Returning to Pynchon’s 1984 essay, this means that the “miracles” he then saw migrating from the human to the machine have now become a feature of the earth. The ineluctability of chance and unpredictability – in which “[t]he entire geopolitical matrix [. . .] acquire[s] a new, and dangerously unverifiable, set of coefficients” (229) – is reflected in one of the book’s signature refrains: the curious phrase “who, but” – as in “who should show up but Reef’s old New Orleans Anarchist bunkmate” (890) or “who should he catch sight of but a face out of the past” (1013) – which recurs over a hundred times throughout the novel. As Richard Hardack has noted, this refrain serves “to describe how characters perpetually run into one another across the globe in emphatically unbelievable fashion”28; it conveys a sense of synchronicity proper to a destabilized planet. The phrase also has the effect of (however briefly) keeping the identity of people suspended, and of having the encounter precede a clear identification; it registers the event of an encounter, and thus the fact of relatedness, before specifying an identity. Upon the closing of the frontier, it seems, human life is enmeshed in novel social and spatial relations that it is only beginning to name and recognize.

Disaster Time: Archiving the Earth The “who, but” structure creates a range of potentialities (there is an encounter, but with whom?) that it then forecloses by actualizing only one of the possibilities. This temporal logic is also reflected on a larger narrative level. The intermittent prolepses show that the novel’s omniscient narrator shares some of the characters’ (most notably the Trespassers’)

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capacity to time travel, and they most often point forward to a coming cataclysm. The whole novel is situated as awaiting “the twilight of the European future” (543) and marked by “the sorrow of anticipation” (544). More often than not, this future doom is linked to World War I (whereas in contemporary life, it is most often linked to climate change), in which, readers are reminded, “Flanders will be the mass grave of History” (554). Equally remarkably, the novel’s evocation of “the mass-grave-to-be of Europe” (578) refuses to linger on the specifics of the World War, which is neither “narrative climax” nor “historical climacteric”29; it is only from the perspective of the Chums that the Great War is treated directly. Indeed, if there is such a thing as a central event, it is the 1908 Tunguska explosion, a freak incident (customarily attributed to a meteorite or a comet) on the Eastern Siberian Taiga that left massive destruction but no human casualties, and which in the novel “jolt[s] the axes of Creation, perhaps for good” (795). The novel puts forward the suggestion that the Tunguska incident, a “sudden catastrophic” release of energy “on a planetary scale” (781–82), is “the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event” (797). The world war, in Against the Day, is not only a passage in human history but entangled with a geological and natural history of destruction. Global war, that is, is but one aspect of planetary instability. The novel’s accumulation of characters, incidents, thoughts, songs, jokes, and calamities takes place in the shadow of an always imminent yet intractable disaster. Narrative theorist Mark Currie has underlined that literature’s famed power to make the past feel present also entails its opposite: by implying that the present relies for its meaning on a future revelation or undoing, narrative in a sense “depresentifies” the present.30 Reading fiction, for Currie, trains readers in the awareness that the present is the object of a future memory and therefore never fully coincides with itself. If such a recognition is intensified through the modernist and postmodernist “ascendance of anachrony,”31 Against the Day’s radical time warping, together with the unavailability of well-rounded characters to identify with, make the historical realities it evokes eerily insubstantial; the recurrent prolepses do not allow the reader to forget that the novel’s expansive present is overshadowed by “an always already existing future.”32 This striking emptiness goes together with the novel’s overcrowded and bulging feel. Currie notes that an awareness of the instability of the present informs an “archive fever” – a frenzied urge to record and preserve traces from the past.33 Critics have characterized Against the Day as “a catalog of disasters”34; have analyzed the opening passage as “an encyclopedic rhetoric

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composed from the major styles of the literary nineteenth century”35; categorized the novel as “a philippic, an inventory of all that is arrayed, in modern times, against the light”36; or as “a virtual library of [turn of the twentieth century] entertainment fiction.”37 Paul K. Saint-Amour has linked this encyclopedic impulse – marked, he notes, less by a drive for order than by “internal contradictions, deviant styles, [and] a profound sense of arbitrariness and contingency,”38 which accords with the literary eclecticism that characterizes Pynchon’s approach – to a “pre-traumatic stress syndrome” that emerges “in response to a potentially oncoming rather than an already realized catastrophe” (italics in original).39 While Saint-Amour sees this encyclopedic drive as a hallmark of modernism, he also extends this notion to the postwar period and argues that notably Gravity’s Rainbow conveys a sense of what he calls “perpetual interwar”: “the real-time experience of remembering a past war while awaiting and theorizing a future one.”40 Against the Day’s proleptic orientation to World War I, then, shows that the novel’s strange blend of archival overcrowding and experiential voiding is a measure of its occupation with the pervasive impact of planetary war. Against the Day’s engagement with planetary wartime not only informs its archival drive, it also sets it apart from the genre customarily associated with war: the epic. Since Edward Mendelson’s double-barreled defense of Gravity’s Rainbow, it has been customary to link Pynchon’s work to the genre of the “encyclopedic narrative.” In his critique of Mendelson’s work, Saint-Amour notes that this use of the label erroneously elides the encyclopedic mode with epic form. For Saint-Amour, encyclopedic novels (from Ulysses to Gravity’s Rainbow) are in fact “counter-epics”: while they hint at the authority and inclusiveness of epic, they only do so to undermine the genre’s coherentist logic: they refuse “the bellicose holism of epic,” and they “understand the project of synoptic presentation as at once necessary and impossible.”41 Encyclopedic works, in Saint-Amour’s new definition, are “a conflicted, self-disrupting project that welcomes formal instability, contradictoriness, or play” that, far from assuming the unbroken transmissibility of knowledge, erect “a bulwark against knowledgeloss.”42 If epic is “congruent with the emergent discourse of total war,” which keeps a cognitive distance from the violence it describes and purports to control, the encyclopedic mode is more appropriate to a planetary wartime that cannot be confidently mapped or integrated.43 This counterepic approach is reflected in Against the Day’s peculiar omniscient narrator, whose radical free-indirect speech, far from controlling the world of the novel, is continuously infected by the tics and vocabularies of one character

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only to abandon them for other tonalities and phrases when other characters come along.44 In a discussion about the literary mediation of geological temporalities in the pages of Critical Inquiry, Mark McGurl objects to Wai Chee Dimock’s coinage “low epic” because, McGurl writes, the term cannot shake the genre’s association with “the booming, war-mongering braggadocio” of the traditional epic.45 Nor is the tragic tonality of Dimock’s proposal quite adequate for literary works that factor in “scientific knowledge of the spatiotemporal vastness and numerousness of the nonhuman world.”46 Works in which nonhuman vastness “becomes visible as a formal, representational, and finally existential problem,” McGurl argues, are better characterized as instances of “posthuman comedy.”47 As Krzysztof Piekarski and colleagues have noted, Pynchon has undermined tragic form throughout his career, and Against the Day is written in “a form that is both anarchic and nontragic.”48 Against the Day’s willingness “to risk artistic ludicrousness in [its] representation of the inhumanly large and long”49 is then a measure of its status as an Anthropocene novel – anti-epic, antitragic, antiwar, yet permeated by an encyclopedic anxiety over the imminence of a disaster that (like planetary war around 1900 or like climate change today) has already happened.

Untranscended Time: The Political Economy of Posthuman Life So far, I have analyzed Against the Day as a peculiar historical novel set around the turn of the twentieth century that, by twisting global tragedy into planetary comedy, shifts that turn beyond historical time to posthuman temporalities. Yet apart from contributing to the historiography of the Anthropocene, Against the Day also intervenes in the present time of its publication – a moment in which the ongoing erosion of the life world and the alteration of the climate have become objects of scientific knowledge and public concern; as Joshua Clover remarks, the novel presents “an ironic 1900 haunted always by 2006.”50 The Anthropocene present directly intrudes into the world of the novel, and this intrusion disables a reading of the novel as a straightforward allegory of contemporary life. It does so through the time-traveling Trespassers, who connect to the Chums through “visual conduits” (417) that have less to do with advanced science than with “some chance blundering upon a shortcut through unknown topographies of Time” (555). The Trespassers resemble nothing so much as the zombified inhabitants of the postcatastrophe worlds that are such

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a ubiquitous part of the Anthropocene imagination: they appear as “resurrected bodies of all ages, dazed smiles and tangled bare limbs [. . .] who must somehow be fed, clothed, sheltered, and explained to, not to mention away” (413). Their leader (of sorts), Mr. Ace, describes them as “seekers of refuge from our present – your future – a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty – the end of the capitalistic experiment” (415). It might be tempting to read this description of the Trespassers’ present as our future (rather than our present), and thus as a devastation we can still avoid. The problem here is that the warped temporality of the novel does not allow such consolation: the world around 1900 is already the future world, just as our Anthropocene present is already the Trespassers’ dystopian reality. The notion of the Anthropocene captures the realization that many processes of planetary disintegration are by now irrevocable, and that the question is not whether our species will abolish itself but rather how we will “learn to die in the Anthropocene” (to echo the title of a provocative book by Roy Scranton).51 Notice how the Trespassers describe “the end of the capitalistic experiment”: “Once we came to understand the simple thermodynamic truth that Earth’s resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalist illusion fell to pieces” (415). The salient event is not resource depletion, but rather the knowledge that such depletion is inevitable. Once we know that (and we now do), we are already dead. Against the Day’s unsettling combination of emptiness and overcrowding and its destabilization of the relation between the human and its environments convey an awareness that as inhabitants of a climate changed world we are, strictly speaking, already the living dead. This is not to say that there is not also a public discourse about a “good” Anthropocene. In their widely publicized “Ecomodernist Manifesto” from 2015, eighteen scientists express their belief that technological developments “might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”52 By “[i]ntensifying” activities like “farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement,” human flourishing can increase while “decoupling” from environmental impact.53 The ecomodernist ambition to harness technological development for “human prosperity” by delinking from nature denies the multifarious imbrications between the human, nature, and technology that the Anthropocene reveals54; it bespeaks less a critical posthumanism than the intensification of humanism that goes by the name of “transhumanism,” a movement that aims at “transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether.”55 Against such fantasies of transcendence, Against the Day emphasizes how human life is implicated in different forms of

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materiality – physical as well as economic – that it cannot transcend and that it is fated to deal with. Against the Day toys with the temptation of an impactless and weightless humanization of the globe, which today often presents itself as a belief in the frictionless circulation of signs and data. The novel presents Nikola Tesla’s plan to mobilize the planet as a “gigantic resonant circuit” in the production of “a ‘World-System’” (33). Scarsdale Vibe, the novel’s hypercapitalist villain, does not oppose this technological pipe dream, but merely Tesla’s business plan – his ambition to “produc[e] huge amounts of electrical power that anyone can tap into for free” (33). He opposes it through a “counter-transformer,” a piece of equipment that will detect the Tesla rigs and then “broadcast something equal and opposite that’ll nullify its effects” (34); his plan is, in other words, as deeply invested in the possibility of transcending materiality as is Tesla’s. The Chums of Chance, at the same time, have to navigate not only the winds, but also “electromagnetic lines of force” (55). The “[d]aily skirmishes” they are fighting are “no longer for territory or commodities but for electromagnetic information” to grasp the “mysterious mathematical latticework” surrounding the earth (121). Significantly, the novel refers to “the high edge of the atmosphere” as “the next untamed frontier” (121) – a frontier of data and invisible forces only seemingly released from earthly friction. As in the example of Tesla, supposedly immaterial forces get entangled with material interests they cannot transcend. Late in the novel, the character Yashmeen comes to accept her multiple interests in mathematics, anarchism, and sex as related attempts to transcend earthly consequence: “[A]ll had presented themselves as routes of escape from a world whose terms she could not accept,” “as some kind of transcendence,” as a “hope of passing beyond political forms to ‘planetary oneness’” beyond “the frontiers and seas of Time” (942). For Yashmeen, as in the world of the novel more generally, there is no such transcendence. While techno-optimists and ecomodernists have celebrated the rise of ubiquitous computing and the proliferation of electronic media, critical scholarship has emphasized the inevitable geological impact of digital technologies. For all the rhetoric of immateriality and instantaneous delivery that surrounds them, digital technologies leave a considerable environmental footprint through their vast expenditure of (often unclean) energy as well as through the use of rare minerals and the proliferation of e-waste; Jussi Parikka has shown that “the purified industries of computing [are] secretly just as dirty as the industrial ancestors.”56 Against the Day consistently exposes what Sean Cubitt has called the “myth of immaterial

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media,” as the novel foregrounds “the cultural difficulties that emerge from the separation of the dirty business of generation from the clean image of energy consumption.”57 The novel pays ample attention to processes of mining and to the material resistance that the Chums experience on their underground travels. And there is the weird phenomenon of the Interdikt, a gas line installed across the Balkan peninsula that, even though it remains invisible, becomes a geological force that interferes with the contested and even terrorist politics on the peninsula (690). Designed to serve human interests, it becomes an agent in its own right: “It behaves as if it’s alive. Knows when someone’s coming and takes steps to protect itself” (952). Energy extraction, it seems, brings together human designs with geological forces in a way that dismantles ecomodernist geoengineering fantasies. Dominant discourses of communication, information, data, and signs – a context in which Pynchon’s work has been extensively discussed, and which, as should be clear now, is intimately connected to the Anthropocene temporalities unleashed in Against the Day – tend to misrecognize material dimensions that resist human endeavors. Even the novel’s neatest example of resistance to the bounds of time and matter, time traveling, does not escape material decay and environmental impact. Together with Professor Vanderjuice, the Chums visit a junkyard of failed time machines – “broken, defective, scorched by catastrophic flares of misrouted energy, corroded often beyond recognition by unintended immersion in the terrible Flow over which they had been designed and built [. . .] to prevail” (409). Professor Renfrew’s compulsive documenting of the lives of “everyone who had ever crossed his path” relies on material infrastructures – just as Google’s capacious data archiving, for instance, requires vast disavowed expenditures of energy and rare earth materials: “The data by now filled several rooms he was obliged to rent for the purpose, as well as odd cabinets, closets, and steamer trunks” (495). The novel links Renfrew’s archive fever to the desire to map the world ever more intensively after the closing of the frontier: Renfrew aims to “gather enough information to reduce the staring white patch of the Unrecorded to something he could tolerate” (495). Here again, the thorough penetration of the planet by human life (which leads to an ever further reduction of “the Unrecorded”) fuels a manic drive to archive the traces of that process. If Pynchon joins critical Anthropocene discourses in underlining the inevitable material dimensions of technological and cultural change, he yet manages to avoid another analytical limitation of many such critical discourses. Accounts that upscale human life to the level of the species

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often obscure the socioeconomic differences through which planetary change affects different constituencies in unequal ways; indeed, constituencies that bear little responsibility for pollution and climate change tend to disproportionally suffer the fallout of the excessive consumption by others. Against the Day articulates the domains of geology and political economy through, among other things, the centrality of dynamite, which resonates throughout the novel as both an agent of resource extraction and a device for political terrorism used by the anarchists. The connection is also underlined in a passage where Frank Traverse (one of the characters assuring the thematic link between extraction and political activism) is shown a piece of argentaurum – the result of a process of transmutation that changes gold into silver (306). The problem is that in the age of the gold standard, the stability of gold is the linchpin of the US economy, and so “this stuff could knock the Gold Standard right onto its glorified ass” (306, italics in original). And because the United States are increasingly connected to “the Bank of England, and the British Empire, and Europe and all those empires, and everybody they lend money to – pretty soon it’s the whole world” (306–7, italics in original). In an age when the material properties of metals are no longer stable, the global economy is deeply affected too, as human-made systems are thoroughly enmeshed with nonhuman ones. In Against the Day, it is not just science and engineering that recalibrate human relations to the earth but also the mutations of capitalism.

The Anthropocene’s Posthuman Temporalities Against the Day’s major contribution to theories and historiographies of the Anthropocene is its circumstantial exploration of the slow turn of the twentieth century as a key threshold. The novel is a protracted investigation of the epochal shift from territorial expansion, which is almost exhausted after the closing of the world frontier, to an ever intensified exploitation and ever more intractable reorientations – to dimensions that, I have argued, are properly planetary rather than global. The implication of human life in planetary forces manifests as at least three kinds of posthuman temporalities. First, there is a geological temporality that explodes the firm distinction between human and nature and that distributes agency across the planet – across rocks, volcanoes, computers, and humans – and extends human timescales. Second, there is the disaster temporality that positions life in the shadow of its imminent undoing, a sense that the intermittent prolepses in Against the Day make inescapable for the reader.

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A third emphasis underlines that human life’s implication with economic and physical materialities is untranscendable and a transhuman future unavailable. These three temporal modes are reflected most visibly in such features as the novel’s engagement with scale, its temporal organization, and its sustained insistence on material agents and its concomitant bracketing of the psychological and the social as the privileged milieus of human action. Cumulatively, these formal elements – which, as I have shown, resonate with many of the novel’s thematic concerns – qualify Against the Day as a work of Anthropocene fiction – a work that, in Chakrabarty’s words, sees the task to “think of human agency over multiple and incommensurate scales at once” as a formal, rather than merely a thematic, challenge.58 Does this constellation of temporalities mean that Against the Day’s rescaled and rematerialized human is merely heading for an inevitable collapse? In the 1984 essay, Pynchon observed a crisis in “the Luddite sensibility” when the sense of miracle moves from the human to the machine: “With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk – realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.”59 Against the Day shows that these pipe dreams were not very different from those of the slow turn of the twentieth century. Yet the main difference between the 1984 essay and the 2006 novel might well be that the latter shows that budgets and computer time are never properly deployed, and that there is always a material glitch destabilizing the cybernetic dream of frictionless communication and returning life to the earth. Pynchon’s 1984 prediction comes with a proviso: “[I]f the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible.”60 Against the Day is a massive, messy, and meandering demonstration of Pynchon’s later conviction that the logistics can never be worked out. Which, for better or worse, means there will be no miracle. Which means that we will need a nonmiraculous intervention to forge a future for the human in an irrevocably posthuman world.

Notes 1. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” New York Times, October 28, 1984, www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid.

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5. Ibid. 6. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human,” Oxford Literary Review, 34.2 (2012), pp. 169–70. 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History, 43.2 (2012), p. 10. 8. Ibid., p. 14. 9. Ibid., p. 2. 10. David Cowart, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History: Against the Day,” Modern Philology, 109.3 (2012), pp. 386 and 399; Justin Gautreau, “‘Clearer than Real’: A History of Mediated Realities in Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Genre, 47.2 (2014), p. 141; Jeeshan Gazi, “Mapping the Metaphysics of the Multiverse in Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Critique, 57.1 (2016), p. 80; Christopher Leise, “Introduction: ‘Exceeding the Usual Three Dimensions’: Collective Visions of the Unsuspected,” in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 1–4; Justin St. Clair, “Binocular Disparity and Pynchon’s Panoramic Paradigm,” in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), p. 73. 11. Tim Martin, review of Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon, The Independent, November 26, 2006, n.p. 12. Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, qtd. in Cowart, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History,” p. 385. 13. Szerszynski, “End of the End,” p. 170. 14. Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369 (2011), p. 842. 15. Will Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review, 2.1 (2015), p. 82. 16. Leyla Haferkamp, “‘Particle or Wave’: The ‘Function’ of the Prairie in Against the Day,” in Sascha Pöhlmann (ed.), Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives (Rodopi, 2010), pp. 312. 17. Rosalind Williams, The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. ix and x. 18. Ibid., pp. x and 7–11. 19. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (Dover, 2010), p. 37. 20. Williams, The Triumph, p. 8. 21. Cowart, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History,” p. 401. 22. Sascha Pöhlmann, “The Complex Text,” in Sascha Pöhlmann (ed.), Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives (Rodopi, 2010), p. 18. 23. See Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 72–73; Jennifer Wenzel, “Planet vs. Globe,” English Language Notes, 52.1 (2014), p. 21.

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84 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

pieter vermeulen Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” p. 14. Ibid., pp. 14–15. Pöhlmann, “Introduction,” p. 23. Henry Veggian, “Thomas Pynchon Against the Day,” boundary 2, 35.1 (2008), p. 205. Richard Hardack, “Consciousness without Borders: Narratology in Against the Day and the Work of Thomas Pynchon,” Criticism, 52.1 (2010), p. 105. Cowart, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History,” p. 405. Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction, and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 30–31. Ibid., p. 22. Hardack, “Consciousness without Borders,” p. 91. Currie, About Time, p. 10. Cowart, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History,” p. 392. Veggian, “Thomas Pynchon Against the Day,” p. 201. Cowart, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History,” p. 403. Brian McHale, “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching,” in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), p. 20. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 9. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 305. Ibid., pp. 186, 183, 185. Ibid., pp. 185, 189. Ibid., p. 185. See Hardack, “Consciousness without Borders.” Mark McGurl, “Critical Response II: ‘Neither Indeed Could I Forbear Smiling at Myself,’” Critical Inquiry, 39.3 (2013), p. 636. Mark McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry, 38.3 (2012), p. 537. Ibid. Krzysztof Piekarski et al., “Mapping, the Unmappable, and Pynchon’s Antitragic Vision,” in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), p. 56. McGurl, “Posthuman Comedy,” p. 539. Joshua Clover, “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital,” Journal of Narrative Theory, 41.1 (2011), p. 39. Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (City Lights, 2015). John Asafu-Adjaye et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” Ecomodernism.org, April 2015, www.ecomodernism.org. Ibid. Ibid.

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55. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. xv. 56. Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 111. For ecologically attuned readings of the novel, see Christopher K. Coffman, “Bogomilism, Orphism, Shamanism: The Spiritual and Spatial Grounds of Pynchon’s Ecological Ethic,” in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 91–114; and Amy J. Elias, “Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the Day,” in Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), pp. 42–43. See also Coffman’s chapter in this volume. 57. Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Duke University Press, 2016), p. 13. 58. Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies,” pp. 1–2. 59. Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”, n.p. 60. Ibid.

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chapter 6

Pynchon, Gender, and Relational Ethics Joanna Freer

In the preface to the second edition of Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2015), bell hooks reiterates the idea that “a successful feminist movement” must “encourage everyone, female and male [. . .] to come closer to feminism.”1 Feminist movements have tended to keep men at arm’s length, identifying them as the source of women’s oppression but as incapable or unwilling to help change this, or viewing their involvement as counterproductive. There are signs, however, that in the fourth wave the necessity of men’s inclusion is meeting greater acceptance. As Nikki van der Gaag observes, there is currently “growing interest in the ways in which men can support gender equality,” as the UN Women’s “He for She” campaign illustrates.2 Particular men have, of course, supported feminism in important ways over the years, but there currently seems to be emerging a larger cohort of men eager to identify with and participate in achieving feminist goals. The degree of support for feminist goals expressed in the novels of Thomas Pynchon has been a matter of critical debate since the late sixties.3 There has been no real consensus, with some critics finding his work misogynistic, others arguing for his (pro)feminism, and many taking up qualified positions in between. If there is any agreement, it is that there has been some development toward greater investment in gender equality.4 In my own previous analysis of Pynchon’s writing of women, I have expressed skepticism about this idea. However, in the present chapter I partially revise my earlier view, offering a new interpretation of the “apparently gratuitous representations of female sexual submission” I had identified in Pynchon’s oeuvre, and extending my arguments around the author’s apparent distaste for feminist separatism, emphasis on male responsibility, questioning of gender essentialism, and the centrality of the family to his later work.5 The shift in my thinking has been provoked by examining gender as a relational dynamic and by considering how Pynchon’s later work speaks back to his earlier fiction.6 This chapter 89

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thus reconsiders gender-thinking in Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), which it reads against the more recent Against the Day (2006). Although these novels conceive very differently of the realities and potentialities of malefemale relationships, I argue that in both Pynchon foregrounds male responsibility for male-female antagonism and violence as well as for producing new relational modes. However, while V. struggles to envisage alternative relationalities, Against the Day presents concrete images of their realization. The centrality of questions of relationality and responsibility to this chapter means that it builds on the recognition in Pynchon studies that his novels “value ethical human relations” and express an “ethical concern with violence and oppression.”7 According to Ali Chetwynd, Pynchon’s posthiatus work emphasizes obligation and the ethical “experience of deliberate decision.”8 In considering the gendered nature of this experience in Pynchon, I analyze his gendering of agency, as well as his representation of possibilities for male-female understanding, care, and sympathy. Agency is necessarily central to any discussion of the ethics of postmodern fiction. This is partly because, as Adorno states, “all ideas of morality or ethical behaviour must relate to an ‘I’ that acts,” but post-structuralism understands the “I” as a social construction, an entity that cannot stand outside of society to get the distanced perspective that seems to be required in making moral judgments.9 However, Judith Butler argues that this poststructuralist/postmodern view of the self – which is, I note, fundamentally a relational self – is not only compatible with moral agency but enables it. Although “we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start,” she posits that “acknowledg[ing] the limits of self-knowledge can serve a conception of ethics and, indeed, responsibility.”10 In fact, “our fundamental dependency on the other,” “the relationality that conditions and blinds the ‘self,’” is “an indispensable resource for ethics.”11 An awareness of the validity of Butler’s argument – of the interdependence of relationality and responsibility – increasing undergirds Pynchon’s writing of ethics and thus of alternatives to oppressive gender relations. This understanding of the world as a complex web of related entities rather than autonomous actors, which has produced over the last few decades a “relational turn” in such diverse fields as literary studies, sociology, psychology, law, and quantum physics, is of course an insight central to all antiessentializing discourses, and therefore to constructionist feminism from de Beauvoir onwards. Indeed, recent feminist approaches underscore notions of “the perceiving subject [as] not an island but deeply and multiply connected to the world around her,” viewing “the subject as relational

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and critique[ing] the masculinist bias in monadic models of subjectivity.”12 Moreover, debates in contemporary feminism have been organized around ideas of mutual dependency and responsibility – for instance, choice feminists have been criticized for ignoring the “serious harm” their broad definition of feminist choice may do to other women,13 and anticolonial feminists have called out Western feminism for neglecting or spreading damaging misinformation about the experiences of nonwhite women.14 My focus on responsibility and gender thus sheds light on Pynchon’s position in relation to such feminist debates.

“Operational” Relationality in V.: The Construction of Male Hyper-heterosexuality In Pynchon’s early work, male-female relations are consistently antagonistic. V. is not a novel in which men and women get on; rather, they act is if biological sex mandates their inability to understand, communicate with, or otherwise identify with the sexual “other.” Superficially it may seem that V. endorses a Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus mentality. It certainly does reflect “prefeminist” American culture, as Molly Hite suggests.15 But contra understandings of V. as espousing essentialized gender norms, I argue that the nearly total disconnection between the sexes it depicts is represented as learned rather than innate and as specifically and deliberately produced within Western society. In males, we witness it being instilled via Western military institutions (the US navy and German colonial army) and via pornography.16 In females, it is transmitted through the media and via direct and indirect experience of male mistreatment. It breeds a male inability to perceive women as anything other than inanimate objects and often a female acceptance and even embrace of sexual objecthood. Yet this dynamic does not satisfy; rather it produces a disrespectful and even violent irresponsibility. That this is not presented uncritically is indicated by the way some of the novel’s male characters – albeit haltingly and tentatively – come to realize their complicity with the institutional production and interpersonal spread of this form of relation and begin to accept the responsibility to women this awareness entails. Firstly, to illustrate V.’s foregrounding of the institutional construction of masculinity, I turn to chapter 9, “Mondaugen’s Story,” set in German South-West Africa in the early twentieth century. Here, sexual aggression against women is a key aspect of the military training Foppl undergoes within the colonial army, serving to control both soldiers and natives.17

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Indeed, in one of Pynchon’s revelations of lesser-known historical actualities, the systematic sexual abuse of women and girls is revealed to be integral to the organization of the Shark Island concentration camp on the coast of modern-day Namibia.18 As Pynchon imagines the formation of the ideology underlying this practice, we learn that in Foppl’s regiment an (overtly gendered) sense of “human brotherhood” is believed to be created through the collective abdication of responsibility; men’s position within the institution is confirmed by the ability “to take a Herero girl before the eyes of your superior officer, and stay potent” before killing her (257, my italics). This does not come naturally, but involves a struggle to consciously reject mainstream morality, what Foppl terms the “continuous educationto-guilt” that produces “the sheep’s eye, the shuffling, the prickly-heat of embarrassment” (257). Moreover, we learn how dissent is brutally quashed: “unpopular soldiers – reluctant? humanitarian. [. . .] bleeding hearts” are killed in mock error by their comrades (257). This conscious rejection of responsibility, this “pleasure of making a choice whose consequences, even the most terrible, [Foppl] could ignore” (271), is firmly linked to a learned inability to empathize or to recognize “the value and dignity of human life” (253). As he becomes more adept at this, Foppl theorizes what he terms an “operational sympathy” between himself and his victim. This term oxymoronically denotes a lack of sympathy so extreme that it becomes possible to imagine a unity existing between the “destroyer and the destroyed” (264), an acceptance and a common feeling of “peace” (263), such that acts of murder are “in no sense killing” (261) but reflections of a cosmic “pattern” divorced from “colonial policy” (264). As such, it entails total solipsistic blindness to the affective experience of others and is the obverse to Butler’s ethical relationality. (Henceforward I use the term “operational” as shorthand to describe cultures or individual relations that are based on this logic of disconnection.) Although operational relationality is not restricted to male-female interactions in V., I argue that it is epitomized in these, especially where sex becomes a form of violence, revealing itself as fundamentally bound up with gender hierarchy. This is because of the particularly unsettling juxtaposition of heterosexual sex, which dominant Western discourse tends to associate with “sympathetic” romantic connection and view as ideally productive, and the “operational” act of cold-blooded killing, which is destructive of all connection and productivity. Thus the racial dynamic in this violence, although present, does not signify in excess of the malefemale dynamic. In the West itself this operational logic is acted out most forcefully in male-female relations between whites. However, Pynchon is

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attentive to how the remoteness of the colony from the West, as well as racial stereotyping, enables the production of operational culture in its most extreme form. V. is aware of the overlapping interplay of gendered and racial understandings of the “other” in the production of a globally dominant masculine heterosexist Western culture; in line with anticolonial feminisms, it registers “the complexity of the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the colonial condition.”19 But despite the fact that V., like all of Pynchon’s novels, contains more overt antiracist statements than antisexist ones, I argue that the “operational” male-female gender dynamic is revealed in this novel as being, for Pynchon, the fundamental hierarchical dynamic on whose basis all other Western hierarchical dualisms are structured. As well as revealing aggressive male heterosexuality as institutionally produced rather than innate, “Mondaugen’s Story” also provides a rare and thus important indication that submissive female heterosexuality is no more innate to women. This becomes apparent in the passage that depicts the violent relationship between Foppl and Sarah. Within the concentration camp, Foppl encounters Sarah, “a Herero child” (270), lifting rocks to build a breakwater and forces her to become his “concubine.” In contrast to the white women Pynchon so often portrays as taking masochistic pleasure from the exercise of male power over them, this scenario does not even border on the “consensual”20: Sarah actively resists the brutality of the colonial army and is not depicted as enjoying it. When Foppl first goes to touch her she avoids him. She ignores his order to come to his cabin that night, and is tortured for it the following day. Yet on the second night she again refuses to be subjected to his sexual abuse, and he subsequently rapes her, during which “[s]he lay in a cold rigor” (272). After this she allows herself to become his sexual slave, which given her previous actions is most convincingly interpreted not as Foppl does (“Woman’s perversity!” [272]), but as the result of a preference not to be violently forced. Later, however, Sarah is discovered in Foppl’s quarters and gang-raped by a number of men. But when Foppl returns to find her “drooling, her eyes drained for good of all weather” and unthinkingly unchains her, it was as if like a spring she’d been storing the additive force that convivial platoon expended in amusing themselves; for with an incredible strength she broke out of his embrace and fled, and that was how he saw her, alive, for the last time. The next day her body was washed up on the beach. She had perished in a sea they would perhaps never succeed in calming any part of. (272–73)

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Despite the fact that Sarah’s agency is limited to removing herself from the colonial system through suicide, she is not – she refuses to be – a victim. Unlike Pynchon’s Western women (and men), Sarah is not inanimate but vividly animate – “alive,” forceful, and strong – even in a passage that is focalized through the perspective of Foppl. She is presented as highly aware of her oppression and able to act against it. As an indigenous African, Sarah’s agentic, animate perspective can be seen as having developed externally to Western influence. Indeed, the impact of colonial incursions on the pastoral Herero was limited until around the time in which Sarah’s narrative takes place, shortly after the replacement of General von Trotha by General Lindequist in November 1905. That Sarah has been written in such a way as to reveal the nature and limits of Western culture is confirmed by her association with the sea and the sky as formless, untamable spaces – spaces over which the colonial “science of the surface”21 has no power, spaces that resist the cultural, legal, and scientific forms of inscription on which the “legitimacy” of Western imperialism depends. Sarah both perishes in “a sea they would perhaps never succeed in calming any part of” and is initially encountered by Foppl “a mile out in the Atlantic” (270). The whites of her eyes are perceived by Foppl as “reflecting something of the sea’s slow turbulence” (270); “[c]louds moved across those eyes; whether reflected or transmitted he’d never know” (270); she has “eyes giving back the red sun, and the white stalks of fog that had already begun to rise off the water” (271). Although this association of the colonized female with formless nature problematically recalls Western notions of the supposed “primitive atavism” of African women,22 or implies that native Africans had no culture of their own, we see Sarah through Foppl, and her association with the natural seems to be reflective of his particular manner of understanding her resistant qualities. This depiction of Sarah, I suggest, provides evidence of Pynchon attempting to take his own responsibilities seriously in his manner of representing non-Western women. Even though she suffers abuse and ultimately dies, Sarah resists the role of “Third World Woman” as “archetypal victim” promulgated by (often well-meaning feminist) Western writers that Chandra Mohanty finds to be damaging to the political aims of non-Western women.23 Nor does Sarah fit the Western discourse that Anne McClintock calls the “European porno-tropics,” in which African women in particular “figured as the epitome of sexual aberration and excess [. . .] given to a lascivious venery so promiscuous as to border on the bestial.”24 Indeed, Pynchon reverses this discourse; Sarah’s experience on Shark Island underscores the brutal reality behind the explorer Hugh

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Godolphin’s Orientalist dream of being “the randy young subaltern somewhere out in the back of beyond, collecting himself a harem of dusky native women” (170). Rather than identify non-Western women with bestial sexuality, the novel locates this firmly in the institutionalized Western male. Also, while Sarah’s agency is severely limited, her exercise of it reveals in turn the limits of Foppl’s power and gives the lie to his notion of “operational sympathy.” She concretizes the resistant strength of the colonized woman that so unnerves Godolphin in his image of Vheissu – a “godforsakenly remote region” (170) of unspecified location that he stumbles across while part of a surveying party. Vheissu, envisioned by Godolphin as “a dark woman tattooed from head to toes” (171), ultimately resists colonial control. The surveying party is unable to “get maps” of the region or any other data back to the Foreign Office or Geographical Society: “Only a report of failure. [. . .] Thirteen of us went in and three came out” (172). Rather than the pliant virgin territory of the idealizing colonial imagination, Vheissu is an agentic space that inflicts suffering on the colonizer. Godolphin’s account, in fact, epitomizes the male anxiety around the threat of the colonized (female) that McClintock identifies in the double character of imperial discourse: “the simultaneous dread of catastrophic boundary loss (implosion), associated with fears of impotence and infantilization and attended by an excess of boundary order and fantasies of unlimited power.”25 Just as Vheissu haunts Godolphin, Sarah brings Foppl’s “discontent to a focus” (270), causing his retreat inland into the defined boundary of his farm, “the best fortress in the region [. . .] protected on all sides by deep ravines” (234). In this “tiny European enclave” (235), a space Foppl can control entirely, such “fantasies of unlimited power” are played out by whites without the risk of challenge.

Limited Female Agency and Male Responsibility: V.’s Western Gender Dynamics In V.’s German South-West Africa, then, we witness the institutional construction of an inherently antiethical white male “operational” sexuality. The continuity between the relational dynamic of the German colonial army at the turn of the twentieth century and 1950s American society is overtly suggested by parallels between the former and the US Navy, and between the hedonistic “Siege Party” Foppl holds at his farm and the revels of New York’s “Whole Sick Crew.” But the continuity is also legible in several heterosexual relationships presented in the

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New York chapters, which illustrate the production of operationality through male-female interaction in the West. In this section, I focus on what V.’s New York strand reveals about how operational relationality comes to be accepted, or even actively embraced, by white Western females. To take the example of the novel’s most literally “operational” dynamic, when Esther Harvitz meets the plastic surgeon Schoenmaker to have her nose reshaped, she has already learned to consider her Jewish nose ugly but has not entirely lost her spirit. Desiring a Westernized “ideal of nasal beauty established by movies, advertisements, magazine illustrations” (103), Esther arrives at her appointment feeling “passive, even (a little?) sexually aroused” (104), but mentally resists the metaphorically sexualized violence of the operation she is subjected to. Recognizing the surgical team’s “malevolent” (104) intent, she becomes virtually hysterical as the operation proceeds, looking for “something human” in Schoenmaker’s eyes and feeling “helpless” (106). However, her afterimage of the experience accords with the kind of peace Foppl had imagined producing in his victim: “I felt myself drifting down, this delicious loss of Esterhood [. . .] no worries, traumas, nothing: only Being” (106). The suggested progression in her submission to the operational dynamic is further confirmed when she begins a sexual relationship with Schoenmaker, who the novel explicitly aligns with the inanimate and with irresponsibility (101). An additional layer of resistance is ironed out when she protests Schoenmaker’s plans to surgically reform her entire body, but isn’t able to break off the relationship (294). Finally, impregnated by a neglectful Schoenmaker, she accepts being bullied into an abortion by the male Whole Sick Crew and is branded “a victim” by her friend Rachel, who predicts that after this second operation “[s]he will come out of the ether hating men, believing they’re all liars and still knowing she’ll take what she can get whether he’s careful or not” (357). Esther’s interaction with Schoenmaker demonstrates how women’s gradual acceptance of objecthood (as symbolized in the increasing physical artificiality of the various incarnations of V.) is concretely produced in Western male-female relationships. For Rachel, Esther’s tragedy seems to be that she will not give up hope of male-female connection and continues to pursue it even in relationships she knows are personally damaging. Other female characters react differently to the overwhelming male propensity to objectify and mistreat women. Rachel’s pose of cynical aloofness brings her no closer to the connected relationship she also seeks. Mafia Winsome embraces operationality, consistently presenting herself as a sexual object and publishing

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books espousing her theory of “Heroic Love.” This is premised on the idea that “[a] woman [. . .] wants to be taken, penetrated, ravished” (288); expressed just a few pages after the rape of Sarah, it clearly denotes the absence of both heroism and love. Fina tries to transcend her sexual dimension by acting as a “Christian, unworldly and proper” figurehead for the “Playboys” gang. But whatever approach Pynchon’s female characters take, they end up either acquiescing or being forced into operational relationalities characterized by loveless or violent sex. As we have seen, Esther is subdued by the media, Schoenmaker, and the Whole Sick Crew. Rachel, for most of the novel one of the most rounded female characters, aware of gendered oppression and only “half” inanimate (288) according to Profane, eventually becomes so desperate to maintain her relationship with him that she gives up on real sympathetic connection: “‘You don’t have to try not to hurt me. Only come home, with me, to bed. [. . .] Only pretend to love me’” (381). Mafia is punished by her husband Rooney, who physically assaults her before having sex with her without a condom against her wishes. And Fina is gang-raped by the “Playboys” before being beaten for this by her brother Angel. The collective result is a generation of women who’ve lost their spirit, their “anima” or soul, and, unlike Sarah, have eyes that are “dead” (141) or “hollow” (129). In replicating this female trajectory throughout the novel, I suggest that Pynchon points not to inherent female weakness but to the limits of female agency in the West in this time period. Even those women with the personal resources to challenge oppressive gender dynamics are unsuccessful in their attempts. Expressing a traditional feminist perspective, Rachel takes Schoenmaker to task for exploiting Esther and fostering her lack of self-respect, but he refuses to accept her argument. As he puts it, “[m]y bank balance is big enough so I don’t get disillusioned” (49). Later, aiming to prevent Esther going through with an abortion she has apparently been physically bullied into, Rachel again fails to make an impact (363). Similarly, although Mafia initially seems to have considerable agency – she characterizes herself as an “unbossable broad” (289), exerts control over her sex life, and has a successful writing career – this is again curtailed by male figures such as Rooney, who, as noted, ultimately asserts his physical power over her, and points out that career-wise she is beholden to her (presumably male) editor and publisher (348).26 The fact that Mafia is not a sympathetic character but espouses interlinked theories of hierarchical racial and gender difference (theories that do not fit with her expectations for herself), suggests that for the Pynchon of the early 1960s the embrace of heteronormative sexual liberation – a stance

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that has parallels with certain strands of contemporary choice feminism – cannot lead to female empowerment. The logic of operational division and its firm alignment with sexual abuse and capitalist colonialism means that although Pynchon does acknowledge that forms of sex that mimic these hierarchies can afford pleasure, if they do not stem from or produce sympathetic connection between partners, they are incompatible with equality outside of the sexual arena and thus with thoroughgoing female empowerment.27 While Against the Day envisages such sympathetic connection in a range of relational dynamics between partners, in the earlier novel’s overwhelmingly operational culture, female sexual agency within heterosexual pairings (which typically manifests as women’s exploitation of their normative sexual attractiveness to control men) merely reinforces a rigid and restrictive gender binary. It offers a reversal of the gender hierarchy that can only be temporary because in the novel’s 1950s – which are historically pretty accurate in this regard – men hold all the other cards. Given such limitations on female agency, then, in V. it is men who Pynchon suggests can take action to alter destructive gender relations. Unlike the debate around responsibility in feminist circles, which has tended to emphasize women’s responsibilities to each other, even in their earliest forms Pynchon’s novels target men for their inactivity in the face of gendered injustice. This is not to say that V.’s male characters have substantially greater agency than its female characters; they too are subject to external forces regulating their behavior. However, they have enough agency to make a difference. Profane is a case in point. The passage that recounts Fina’s beating ends with a depiction of Profane’s inaction as witness to it. Despite anticipating that Angel may kill Fina, “[h]e couldn’t go in and stop it; didn’t know if he wanted to” (151) – instead, he simply leaves the scene, absorbed in his own problems. By focusing in this way on Profane as the chapter concludes, Pynchon underscores his potential agency against Fina’s lack. Given that Profane has professed to worrying about the potential for violence against Fina in the lead-up to this scene, his protestation that he “couldn’t go in and stop it” is unsatisfactory, and is undermined by the second clause’s insinuation that the real issue is a lack of motivation or courage, an inability to commit to deliberate moral action. When Profane encounters Fina again, she accuses him for his inaction. He initially denies responsibility, claiming that “‘they would have got you sooner or later,’” but then admits “‘I did it [. . .] It was me’” (364). This is the first time “he could [. . .] remember ever having admitted anything like this,” to which he immediately adds his responsibilities for “letting Esther

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get away” to have her abortion, for Rachel as a “dependent,” and for Paola, who may also require his help (364). Contra Mark Hawthorne’s suggestion that Profane consistently “chooses to remain [. . .] free from limitations and responsibilities,” this event can be seen as starting Profane off on a trajectory of moral development.28 Later in the novel, when Pig is attempting to rape Paola, Profane does intervene (379). By the final scene of the novel proper, this trajectory appears to be complete; Profane seems to have rejected operational relationality. In one of V.’s rare glimpses of male-female connection, he runs “[h]and in hand” with Brenda, a white American he has met the day before, down a street in Valletta, Malta, toward the Mediterranean sea (455). This pattern of initial complicity with operational culture followed by gradual moral awakening and the decision to dissociate from it is also seen in other of V.’s relatively sympathetic male characters, notably Fausto Maijstral, who comes to recognize that in failing to help “The Bad Priest” he “is guilty of murder” (345), and Kurt Mondaugen, a guest at Foppl’s Siege Party, who gradually comes to appreciate the analogy between his voyeuristic sexuality – a learned propensity that “had been determined purely by events seen, and not by any deliberate choice, or preexisting set of personal psychic needs” (277) – and the violent decadence of the Party as a whole. This recognition provokes “those first tentative glandular pressures that one day develop into moral outrage” (277), and he decides to remove himself from Foppl’s European enclave. Profane, Maijstral, and Mondaugen’s movements toward greater sympathy with others, and especially with the female sex, indicate that it is the men in Western society who have the responsibility to recognize that their forms of sexual alienation are socially constructed rather than innate. It is men rather than women who can and must make the moral choice to explore more sympathetic relationalities. But in V. the reader witnesses male characters only gradually approaching awareness and responsibility, achieving this in limited forms late in their individual narratives, and we are not therefore presented with fully realized alternatives to operational relationality between the sexes. This is not the case in Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day, where responsibility is a major thematic focus and is felt much more keenly earlier on in the trajectories of particular male characters.

Imagining Male-Female Connection in Against the Day Against the Day is structurally very different from V., with implications for its treatment of both gender and ethical action. While in V. the world the

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characters navigate is starkly binary, as ubiquitous capitalist-colonial power insinuates its logic of division into every area of life, in Pynchon’s “least paranoid”29 novel the situation is more open, reflecting both changes in political and economic systems between 1963 and 2006 and the novel’s less claustrophobically controlled late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settings. In Pynchon’s fourth global novel, operational culture remains a prominent, oppressive presence, but other forms of social organization and individual relationality coexist alongside it. While the traditional nation-state system “depend[s] for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege – through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities” (19, italics in original), not everyone is in attendance at some version of V.’s Siege Party. Travelers (rather than tourists), anarchists, and (eventually) the Chums of Chance and the Sodality of Ætheronauts, all embody “the supranational idea” (1083): a world without geographical borders or arbitrary hierarchical divisions between people, with “[n]o ranks, no titles, chain of command . . . no structure, really” (933).30 Against the Day does contain characters who wield operational power, most notably the Vibe family. Indeed, in a scene set in South Africa that resonates back to V. and Foppl’s notion of “operational sympathy,” Fleetwood Vibe accuses a black mine worker of stealing a diamond and forces him to throw himself down a mine shaft to his death, as he does so feeling a “queer euphoria expanding to fill his body, [and being] amazed to see, moreover, that the Kaffir not only recognized the state but was entering it himself” (169). Yet in Against the Day the Vibes and their ilk are vulnerable, and the novel focuses primarily on those who operate outside or on the borders of their power. In nonbinary space, whether imagined as a physical space – the untamed “Wild West,” the Æther, the Anarchist spa at Yz-les-Bains – or as the possibility of nonbinary relations with others, we witness the simultaneous reduction of tensions relating to differences of race, gender, and sexuality, whose production via capitalist colonialism was depicted in V. Dyadic oppositions blur into each other and are recognized as inimical to the nonoperational, supranational alternative. In such spaces and formations characters acknowledge and embrace their “fundamental dependency on the other” and reveal such an acknowledgment to be, as Butler put it, “an indispensable resource for ethics.” However, operational and nonoperational spaces, groups or forms of relationality in this novel often overlap and particular characters move back

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and forth between impulses to accept or reject ethical responsibility. Again, the imperative to responsibility primarily attaches to male characters and is often formed in relation to females. But in this later novel some men have already taken this on when we meet them (Merle Rideout as father figure to Dally), others follow V.’s model of gradual acceptance (after abandoning Stray and his first child, Reef Traverse steps up for his “second chance” with Ljubica (954)), and still others make a half-hearted attempt before returning to former patterns of behavior (Deuce Kindred pursues Lake’s forgiveness for her father’s murder, but later avoids responsibility for his involvement in the death of several women in L.A.). Yet despite the range of trajectories depicted, the novel’s morality is clear: men who attempt but initially struggle to accept responsibility are granted happy endings; men like Deuce, Woevre, and Scarsdale Vibe, who explicitly reject the consequences of their actions, are consistently brought to justice. Male responsibility is conceived in broader and more nuanced terms in this novel, suggesting significant developments in Pynchon’s thinking. Men are compelled to accept responsibility primarily to those they are immediately connected to – female partners and friends, but also male and female family members (especially children), and male friends or lovers – but also to unknown suffering others. In the novel’s treatment of male to female responsibility, an important distinction is introduced between responsibility manifested as sympathetic care and as paternalistic protection. Women in this novel have significantly more agency than they did in V. and rarely need men to worry about “keeping [them] safe” (930). (Due to this, the discourse of responsibility that in V. attached exclusively to men certainly extends to women in Against the Day.) Masculinist notions linking obligation and honor are also discredited as Reef’s strongly held notion of honor is robustly challenged by Cyprian (885), and his narrative ends satisfactorily not with the honor killing of Deuce Kindred, but with his formation of a family unit with Yashmeen and Ljubica based on bonds of mutual respect and care. In line with the general breaking down of hierarchies in nonoperational culture, male characters who recognize their ethical responsibilities are also men who (come to) exhibit qualities considered traditionally feminine. Just as anarchist forms of social organization are shown to be inimical to “all male structures” or those with “a single male authority behind the scenes” (934), so forms of relationality that enable ethical action via the recognition of interpersonal connection reverse the “disavow[al] [of] aspects of male identity, displaced onto a ‘feminized’ space and managed by recourse to the prior ordering of gender” that McClintock identifies

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with capitalist colonialism.31 Thus when Dally grows up and goes off to New York, Merle searches for her old doll, Clarabella, and is “surprised to find himself with emotions somehow not his own, as if the forlornness were old Clarabella’s there,” an affective identification with the feminine which makes “a man’s damn values start in to dribbling, if not unseat completely” (449). Reef, a particularly macho character, comes to reject exclusive heterosexuality in developing a romantic as well as sexual connection with Cyprian, and bands together with Yashmeen in “comradely persistence” and shared commitment to their child, “the small life it had become their duty [. . .] to protect” (971). Even Deuce, in his briefly repentant mood, “surrender[s] his hardcase ways in favour of helpless, unmanly pleading” (484). While Wes Chapman has read “disentanglement from masculinism” as impossible in Gravity’s Rainbow due to the representation of social gender coding as unchallengeably overwhelming, in Against the Day’s more plurivocal world it becomes a mode of “political praxis.”32 In associating the feminine with care and connection, however, this novel does not essentialize gender. Although women in Against the Day do not tend to reject responsibility to the extent that men do, no easy equation is made between biological sex and “feminine” or “masculine” qualities, pointing back to V.’s portrayal of these as learned traits. For instance, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin is fully aligned with operational culture and the rejection of consequences, while Cyprian’s gender is nonbinary. Female characters are still tiresomely “presentable” throughout the novel, but their roles are much more varied than in Pynchon’s first novel. Against the Day contains female stunt performers, spirit guides, arms dealers, spies, anthropologists, miners and mathematicians, alongside its prostitutes, actresses, and models. As Jeffrey Severs puts it, “rather than inspire and serve as objects of worship or despoiling, [women in Against the Day] work – and work hard.”33 The novel also makes space for the voicing of feminist issues from domestic sexual abuse to unequal employment opportunities, and from suffrage to underrepresentation in higher education. The social forms that Against the Day presents as capable of challenging capitalist colonialism are founded on antipatriarchal sensibilities and full female involvement. But while in no sense the “dependents” they often were in V., even the strongest female figures in Against the Day are still prone to at least partial seduction by operational culture, as occurs with Dally’s drift into forms of employment that increasing depend on her objectification, apparently leading to her preference for Clive Crouchmas with his “minimal” (1067) demands (read amorality) over Kit Traverse,

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who is on a trajectory to responsibility and is represented as her true love. Similarly Yashmeen, gradually embittered by the power exerted over her by male governmental forces, comes to accept Vlado’s aggressive sexual treatment of her, a dynamic whose gendering she reverses after his death and acts out on Cyprian. Whether male or female, then, individuals in Against the Day tend not to be simply or permanently identified with operational or nonoperational culture. As V. indicated, “slow, frustrating and hard work” (365) is involved in caring; for some this is simply unappealing, for others it is unachievable due to a lack of agency, optimism, or confidence. However, through the parallel it sets up between the relationship of Lake, Deuce, and Sloat and that of Yashmeen, Reef, and Cyprian (two female-male-male relationships from which the second man is ultimately removed), the novel indicates the extreme divergence of outcomes that result from either accepting or rejecting responsibility, while clarifying that such outcomes are not predetermined according to character nor always reached in the same manner. Heinz Ickstadt summarizes the Yashmeen-Reef-Cyprian threesome as “a complex love/sex-relation that is as ecstatic as it is healing and transforming,” and is “therefore at once mirror- and counterimage of Lake’s degrading sexual bondage to the two killers of her father [Deuce and Sloat]).”34 Yet this summary neglects the development of these relationships. The latter is structured by power games in which sex is firmly disassociated from love, recalling the Foppl-Sarah relation in the detail that Lake is left shackled to the bed, and relies on the reinscription of traditional gender roles (when Lake suggests Deuce and Sloat “do each other for a change,” she is met with “shock and outrage” [269]). However, as previously noted, it is indicated that Deuce desires at one point to atone for the murder of Webb, and Lake’s willingly unethical participation, given her knowledge of the men’s guilt, is explained by Webb’s own irresponsibility toward his family in his manner of taking on more abstractly political forms of responsibility. It ends with Sloat’s death, and Deuce and Lake’s persistence in an unloving, abusive, and childless marriage, but the relationship’s operationality is not presented as inevitable. Nor is the Yashmeen-Reef-Cyprian relation inevitably “healing and transforming.” Initially it too is characterized by the operational dissociation of sex from love, and on sexual power games, which all three characters have come to accept via their prior involvement with, respectively, Vlado, Ruperta, and Derek Theign – lovers who exclusively seek their own hedonistic gratification rather than mutual pleasure based on sympathetic understanding. Like Deuce and Sloat, moreover, Reef is initially

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scandalized by the suggestion that he might take the submissive role in sex with Cyprian. However, the S/M sexual dynamic here, which I interpret as initially the expression of a common disillusionment and pessimism, a lack of faith in both the self and others, becomes a route to shared understanding and the building of trust. Rather than expressing the violence implicit in the denial of connection to the other, it enables the acceptance of mutual dependency through “tenderness” (879) and “love” (883). Although initially the trio’s S/M sex is subject to role limitations, it later aligns with nonoperational or “supranational” relationality: “The rule” comes to be that “there are no rules” (943), and we witness a true “Sadoanarchism” (GR 737). Gender roles blur as each individual is able to take on “masculine” or “feminine” positionalities, reflecting, in the case of Cyprian and Yashmeen, earlier nonbinary sexual inclinations. Moreover, rather than encouraging the mutual abdication of responsibility, this relationship supports a movement toward the taking of responsibility, both in broad political terms (the search for the Interdikt weapon) and personally, following the birth of Ljubica. However, the novel suggests that even such a positive S/M dynamic is at least partially also a form of escapism, that the freedom it enables, “the freedom to act extraordinarily,” may be “closer to the freedom of the suicide than that of the ungoverned spirit” (967). This may merely be because it is a freedom that exists only within a small, closed group and hence mimics the escapist impulse to control and separation of Foppl’s Siege Party. It also appears to be incompatible with the commitment to futurity involved in the raising of children. Cyprian, who seems to be unable to ultimately disconnect from this escapism, removes himself from the trio, leaving Reef and Yashmeen to raise Ljubica. This is part of what may seem to be a problematically gender-essentializing reinstation of the primacy of heteronormative male-female relationships toward the end of the novel, as multiple couples form and reproduce. But I would argue that the situation is not quite that simple: on the diegetic level of the text that accords with the “real world,” what we witness is the formation of an unconventional family group as a locus of hope. Reef, Yashmeen, and Ljubica band together with Reef’s brother Frank, Stray, who is mother to Reef’s first child Jesse, and the couple’s two other children Ginger and Plebecula. This is hardly a typical “nuclear” family. Moreover, within this group a homosexual relationship develops between Yashmeen and Stray. Formed as an attempt to exist outside of the “capitalist/Christer gridwork” (1075), this relation does involve heterosexual reproduction, but it works against the biopolitical heteronormative productivity of capitalism.

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Just as S/M does not signify monolithically in this text, then, neither do heterosexuality, productivity, or teleology. Rather than the kind of celebration of what Lee Edelman terms “queer negativity” that Marie Franco locates in Gravity’s Rainbow35 – the legitimation of nonproductive forms of sexuality as disruptive of repressive norms of gender and sexuality – Against the Day makes space for what we might call “queer positivity,” by which I mean the recognition that anticapitalist but productive political and personal outcomes will be inherently nonheteronormative. Rejecting binary gender norms and sexualities thus enables an anarchist teleology, which is reflected, in fact, in the very narrative structure of this novel, a rhizomatic network structure rather than a narrative of linear progression, but one that still incorporates a teleological relationship to futurity via its discourse on responsibility. Such an approach to teleology is, of course, already implied in the idea of ethical action based on a recognition of mutual dependency. In conclusion, between V. and Against the Day Pynchon’s conception of the potential for destructive gender hierarchies to be challenged and overturned has changed radically. Whereas V. presented female agency as so limited as to make this impossible, and male characters as slow and reluctant to take on responsibility to women, in Against the Day both sexes can participate in various ways in the reimagining and living out of nonrepressive and nonhierarchical relationalities. The lack of an “outside” to operational culture in the earlier novel is not an issue in the latter; like Butler, over the course of his career Pynchon comes to see that the ideally distanced critical perspective was only ever an illusion, and that it is exactly through our awareness of the social production of the self (in which gender is only one aspect) that we can assess our own flaws and carve out spaces in which to construct ourselves and our relationships differently.

Notes 1. bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2015). 2. Nikki van der Gaag, Feminism and Men (Zed Books, 2014), p. 3. 3. The earliest critical interventions were those of Alvin Greenberg, “The Underground Woman: An Excursion into the V-ness of Thomas Pynchon,” Chelsea, 27 (1969), pp. 58–65; Mary Allen, The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties (University of Illinois Press, 1976); Catherine Stimpson, “Pre-apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon’s Early Fiction,” and Marjorie Kaufman, “Brünnhilde and the

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

joanna freer Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow,” both in George Levine and David Leverenz (eds.), Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 31–47 and pp. 197–227. This is, on the whole, illustrated by contributions to Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos (eds.), Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender (University of Georgia Press, 2018). Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 152. Where Pynchon critics have previously taken such a relational approach to gender, it has been limited by a focus on the earlier novels. Important examples are Wes Chapman’s “Male Pro-feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of Gravity’s Rainbow,” Postmodern Culture, 6.3 (1996), n.p., and Mark D. Hawthorne’s “A ‘Hermaphrodite Sort of Deity’: Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Blending in Thomas Pynchon’s V.,” Studies in the Novel, 29.1 (1997), pp. 74–93. Amy J. Elias, “History,” in Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 129; Shawn Smith, Pynchon and History: Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Routledge, 2005), p. 12. Ali Chetwynd, “Inherent Obligation: The Distinctive Difficulties in and of Recent Pynchon,” English Studies, 95.8 (2014), p. 931. Theodor Adorno quoted in Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 7. Butler, Giving an Account, p. 19. Ibid., pp. 34, 40. Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 7. Jennet Kirkpatrick, “Introduction: Selling Out? Solidarity and Choice in the American Feminist Movement,” Perspectives on Politics, 8.1 (2010), p. 243. See, for instance, Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2, 12.3–13.1 (Spring–Autumn 1984), pp. 333–58. Molly Hite, “When Pynchon Was a Boys’ Club: V. and Midcentury Mystifications of Gender,” in Chetwynd, Freer, and Maragos (eds.), Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, p. 5. For a discussion of how militaristic and pornographic influences also combine in Gravity’s Rainbow to produce a “masculinist coding of sexuality such that all [the state’s] citizens will respond sexually to a scenario of dominance and submission,” see Chapman, “Male Pro-feminism,” para. 9. I will be referring to the protagonist of the passages that detail the experiences of the young trooper in this chapter of the novel as Foppl, for the sake of simplicity and given that the narrator makes it clear that the “events were Foppl’s” (255). However, these passages carefully avoid using anything other than the third-person male pronoun to identify the trooper, and their

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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narratorial transparency is further destabilized by the fact that they seem to be dreamt by Mondaugen, who confuses Foppl with Hugh Godolphin. Moreover, “Mondaugen’s Story” as a whole is narrated by Stencil, whose potential shaping influence on the narrative is pointed out by Eigenvalue (249). Pynchon draws here on historical sources including the “Blue Book” report on the German treatment of native Africans commissioned in 1918 by the British (who soon thereafter ordered its destruction). See Jeremy Silvester and Jan-Bart Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book (Brill, 2003). Breny Mendoza, “Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality,” in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 105. Hite argues that in “Mondaugen’s Story” “both rape and murder [are] consensual” and “there is no implied criticism,” basing her argument on the ambiguous response of another Herero girl to Foppl’s violence. Apart from its ambiguity, this earlier scenario is given three lines to the three pages afforded to Sarah’s narrative. See Hite, “When Pynchon Was a Boys’ Club,” p. 12. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995), p. 23. Ibid., p. 41. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” p. 339. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 22. Ibid., p. 26. See Hawthorne, “A ‘Hermaphrodite Sort of Deity,’” pp. 84–85, for an alternative reading of Esther, Rachel, Fina, and Mafia’s attempts to assert their agency. As I demonstrate in what follows, neither conventional heterosexual pairings nor S/M are automatically to be considered disempowering on this basis. While I am less enthusiastic than Marie Franco in her analyses of Gravity’s Rainbow about S/M’s propensity to “destabilize[] the System,” I accord with her view of it as a “potentially valuable mode of relationality” in Pynchon’s work. Marie Franco, “Queer Postmodern Practices: Sex and Narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 63.2 (2017), p. 154; Marie Franco, “Queer Sex, Queer Text: S/M in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Chetwynd, Freer, and Maragos, Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, p. 89. Hawthorne, “A ‘Hermaphrodite Sort of Deity,’” p. 88. Kathryn Hume, “Attenuated Realities: Pynchon’s Trajectory from V. to Inherent Vice,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2.1 (2013), n.p. See Michael O’Bryan’s chapter in this volume for more on the significance of anarchism to Pynchon’s novels’ politics. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 27. Chapman, “Male Pro-feminism,” n.p. Jeffrey Severs, “‘The abstractions she was instructed to embody’: Women, Capitalism, and Artistic Representation in Against the Day,” in Jeffrey Severs

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and Christopher Leise (eds.), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (University of Delaware Press, 2011), p. 219. 34. Heinz Ickstadt, “History, Utopia, and Transcendence in the Space-Time of Against the Day,” Pynchon Notes, 54–55 (2008), p. 230. 35. Franco, “Queer Postmodern Practices”; and Franco, “Queer Sex, Queer Text.” See also Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004).

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chapter 7

“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day Sue J. Kim

Prior to the presidential inauguration of January 20, 2017, the state of affairs for people of color was far from ideal, in the United States and globally. The Black Lives Matter movement against the brutality and increased militarization of the police had launched over three years earlier, and previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, had established the deportation system and the for-profit immigration detention industry and carried out drone strikes abroad.1 Structural inequalities persisted in education, health care, employment, and many other everyday aspects of existence. But it is difficult to deny that things have gotten markedly worse. The roster of injustices is too long to present in any kind of comprehensive list. While for-profit prisons and prison labor are being given new energy, the Justice Department stymies civil-rights investigations and communityrelationship efforts in local police departments.2 In June 2017 the Supreme Court partially reinstated the travel ban on citizens from six Muslim nations and all refugees, requiring travelers to demonstrate a “bona fide” link to the United States.3 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students and undocumented community members, some of whom have been in the United States for decades, are full of fear and anxiety. As in many towns, people in my city have been mobilizing not only to advocate for a “sanctuary city” but also to provide “sanctuary congregations,” acting against the removal of our neighbors and community members by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Health care, education, and civil rights are all under threat for people of color, working people, and women; the list is depressingly long and there is no immediate end in sight. Given this context, fictional narratives, such as those of Thomas Pynchon, may seem like irrelevant abstractions, removed from the turmoil around us. But on the contrary, the past few months of intensified political organizing – messy, complex, fitful – have reminded me of the political 109

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value of narratives such as Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against the Day. Across the nation, large, diverse groups of people have been coming together to organize against this administration’s policies, but the people in these groups – although all anti-Trump – have widely divergent points of view and politics. Navigating these dynamics has reminded me of nothing so much as reading a Pynchon novel; without any omniscient narrator to give us the answer, we must find our way amidst a heterogeneity of characters and events. In other words, recent events have driven home how much narratives matter – not just the contents but also the forms of narrative. In particular, Pynchon’s narratives about race – or rather, how race figures in his narratives – constitute an important corrective to the rather limited ideas about race that predominate in public discourse. In this essay, I argue that Pynchon’s Against the Day uses multiply mediated histories and genres in the service of what Ramón Saldívar calls a “postrace aesthetic.” While the term is sometimes used to suggest that we are “beyond” or “past” racism, Saldívar uses the term to describe the tendency of several contemporary American writers to insist on the imbrication of race with all aspects of modern life.4 Perhaps even more than his earlier work, Pynchon’s Against the Day depicts in its content and form the ways in which issues of race are ubiquitous, foundational, and flexible in our world, and how recognizing race as such can be deeply unsettling in productive ways.

Racial Neoliberalism, Antiracism, and Postrace Aesthetics As has been noted many, many times, Pynchon’s texts are centrally obsessed with history – with events of the past as well as how we represent those events to ourselves. Brian McHale reads Against the Day as a “mediated historiography – the writing of an era’s history through the medium of its popular genres,” such as Westerns, the spy novel, detective novels, and so on.5 Like Gravity’s Rainbow, Against the Day uses these popular genres to capture an era’s self-representations as well as its delusions and repressions. The two historical periods overlaid in Against the Day are the time of the novel’s action (1893 to immediately following World War I) and the time of its publication (2006); as McHale puts it, “Pynchon historicizes doubly” (italics in original).6 Through this mediaand mediation-conscious attention to history, Against the Day, like Pynchon’s other novels, engages in a range of political analyses. Critics have noted how Against the Day revisits the anarchist movements of the early twentieth century and inflects those political movements in terms of

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“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day 111 post-9/11 terrorism and media representations, while engaging in a critique of the forms and logics of global capitalism.7 My focus here is on how a critique of race and racial systems is integral to the politics of Pynchon’s prose. Pynchon treats race, especially in Against the Day, as systemic and ubiquitous; here I mean racial issues writ large, including colonialism, indigeneity, ethnicity, and racial formations of various kinds, complex formations often functioning under and against the logic of white supremacy. Against the Day, I argue, has characteristics of what Ramón Saldívar has called a “postrace aesthetic.” Saldívar uses the term to refer to contemporary writers who share a set of stylistic and thematic concerns, primarily twenty-first-century novelists such as Colson Whitehead, Junot Díaz, and Karen Tei Yamashita. Such writers deal with race less in terms of cultural nationalism and identity – although such concerns remain important – but rather by exploring the imbrication of race with every aspect of modern life, for everyone. Such texts show how racial hierarchies are constantly produced and reproduced in our social structures and discourses. “In these novels,” Saldívar writes, “the multiracial realities characteristic of the racialization of ethnicity in the United States are represented as an active doing” (italics in original).8 As such, Pynchon’s novels work against what David Theo Goldberg has called “racial neoliberalism”: individualistic concepts of race and racism that harmonize well with capitalism and neocolonialism. In racial neoliberalism, race is consigned to the private sphere (identity, culture) and erased from political and economic spheres: “[r]ace fade[s] into the very structures, embedded in the architecture, of neoliberal society, in its logics and social relations.”9 This is made possible by the conflation between what Goldberg calls “antiracialism” and “antiracism.” Antiracialism is a rejection of racial categories altogether; it is “to take a stand, instrumental or institutional, against a concept, a name, a category, a categorizing.”10 It is about “decategorization,” a pursuit of color blindness.11 This antiracialism has, ironically, become all too prevalent in popular discourses about race. In focusing on the category, antiracialism comes to see racism as a matter of form rather than system or practice. Unfortunately it has taken over the popular definition of “racism”; antiracialism is the bizarre logic that allows white supremacists to charge Black Lives Matter with being racist. Going hand in hand with this nominal, formal rejection of racial categories is the idea that racism is purely an individual feeling or attitude that is irrational and based on ignorance, and which is expressed as overt racial animosity.

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In contrast, antiracism seeks to identify and battle systemic injustices tied to race. Goldberg writes that “[a]ntiracism [. . .] seeks to remove the condition not indirectly through removal of the category in the name of which the repression is enacted. Rather, it seeks to remove the structure of the condition itself.”12 Dismantling structural, institutional, and cultural racism – the ways that racial hierarchies are built into the fabric of our societies – necessarily involves “remembering and recalling”; it “requires historical memory, recalling the conditions of racial degradation and relating contemporary to historical and local to global conditions.”13 Antiracism is not just an idea or an action; it involves a cognitive and existential shift. Historically, antiracist movements have sometimes overlapped with antiracial movements – most notably antiapartheid and US civil-rights movements – but such movements emphatically sought to include the dismantling of systemic and institutional racism. Today, however, antiracialism has superseded antiracism: “[I]n the wake of whatever nominal successes, antiracist struggle gave way in each instance to antiracial commitments at the expense of antiracist effects and ongoing struggle.”14 In the absence of recognition that race is embedded in our political, cultural, and economic systems, merely removing the racial terms authorizes the system to continue unchecked. As Ramón Saldívar puts it, “what characterizes the nature of race and processes of racialization today are post civil rights racial apathy, color-blind racism – racism without racists” (italics in original).15 In other words, “[w]hite supremacy as the unacknowledged ideology of our times.”16 Despite being very heterogeneous fields of study, ethnic and postcolonial studies share an understanding that race and racism are institutional and systemic as well as personal and symbolic. As Michael Omi, Howard Winant, and many other scholars have noted, race and/or racism are not only matters of personal identity or individual attitude, but rather “a complex set of personal and social actions, a structure of doing, by which race is enacted and racial injustice perpetuated.”17 Omi and Winant define a “racial formation” as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed,” and a “racial project” as “an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (text normalized).18 Moya and Markus describe race as “social, historical, and philosophical processes that people have done for hundreds of years and are still doing. They emerge through the social transactions that take place among different kinds of people, in

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“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day 113 a variety of institutional structures [. . .] over time, across space, and in all kinds of situations” (italics in original).19 Rather than aberrational, white supremacy is foundational to our history and culture, in the United States and the West but also globally in this postcolonial, globalized world. It is so deeply entrenched and normalized that we often do not recognize it, and, more often than not, people do not know what to do about it. It suffuses our economy, our politics, our discourses, our judicial, legislative, and executive branches, our curricula, our narratives, and our academic institutions. Like patriarchy, white supremacy as an ideology is flexible, multivalent, and constantly evolving; it’s discursive and material; and it can be structural and/or interpersonal. It’s depressingly normalized. Postrace narrative aesthetics, according to Saldívar, work against the normalization of white supremacy and dominant racial formations through content as well as form. Such texts employ a “transnational imaginary” to comprehend the global scope of racial formations, and have a “multi-perspectival quality.”20 They may use fantastic and speculative elements, not in some easily verifiable relationship to “the Real” but in service of a different kind of “critical realism.”21 Sometimes allegorically, such texts work toward “recognizing and understanding the construction of the new political destinies we may witness taking shape among diasporic groups in the US today.”22 Like his other novels, Pynchon’s Against the Day shares this postrace aesthetic. This claim – that Pynchon’s novels are about race – merits some discussion. First, the question of what is race – or what falls under the purview of the category called “race” – is important. On the one hand, representation matters; it matters who is speaking and who is getting published. On the other hand, it is important for everyone to understand race as systemic and as an ongoing process, particularly in the context of impoverished notions that equate antiracialism with antiracism. So, as Michael Bérubé, Aijaz Aimad, and others have noted, while postcolonial and minority writers are expected to represent their nation and/or community, Pynchon is not read as and is not expected to be some kind of spokesperson for his people. Despite the author’s notorious absence, it is as if he cannot but be cast as the singular brilliant artist who, ironically, symbolizes an entire epoch (postmodernism). He is not expected to represent a subgroup; he represents himself as the particular or, alternately, the era as the universal. The point here is not that Pynchon or any writer should or should not be read as representative; all writers are agentive artists, as well as historically produced by a number of groups, and

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therefore to some degree representative. Rather, the point is that a limited conception of representational politics has, until fairly recently, removed Pynchon from the burden (or privilege) of being seen as having something to say about race.23 This is curious, given the continuing interests of his fiction in American nationalism and racism in the contexts of colonialism and global capitalism. If we understand race through systems and practices – rather than bodies and individual attitudes – then it makes sense that Pynchon, the maestro of patterns, conspiracies, and paranoia, would have a lot to tell us. Even more so than Gravity’s Rainbow and his earlier fiction, Against the Day approaches race in terms of its systematicity, particularly in relation to politics and economics. I’ve written elsewhere about how Pynchon was obsessed with race in a global context in his earlier work.24 In Against the Day, issues of race are located less in individual bodies – there is no equivalent to Oberst Enzian or Captain Blicero – than throughout the network of the story-world. In this, Pynchon follows other “postrace aesthetic” writers, as well as many science fiction writers, who have dealt obliquely with race through formal innovations. Writing about the work of Ted Chiang, Christopher Fan notes that Chiang evokes not a “mimetic economy of racial representation” but rather “a narrative one.”25 Science fiction scholars have led the way in theorizing how the narrative representation of race works; rather than a representation of bodies, such cultural productions lay bare the logics of racialization as suffused throughout society. In reading Against the Day in this vein, I echo Richard Hardack, who writes that “[n]arrative style is a political act in Pynchon, for it involves the control, impersonation, mixing, and repetition of voices and identities.”26

“A land very far away indeed” Through specific thematic concerns, historical referents, and narrative strategies, Against the Day’s postrace aesthetic works against conceptual antiracialism in several ways. First and foremost, the novel explores how the making of race and racism involves practically every aspect of life, large and small – not just for people of color or the colonized, but for everyone. Race is embedded in everything, everywhere – global and local – not in any uniform or singular way but as active doings and histories in the making. The novel demonstrates this ubiquity through the use of multiple perspectives – its “multiperspectival” quality in Saldívar’s terms27 – not only through various characters but also through the trope of “bilocation,” or

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“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day 115 the (apparent) ability of a person to be in more than one place at a time. For these variously located subjects, race comes up not only in clearly marked contents but also through a variety of narrative strategies, often in odd conversations or fleeting glimpses of internal subjectivities. Via these narrative strategies, the novel shows how race emerges “through the social transactions that take place among different kinds of people, in a variety of institutional structures [. . .] over time, across space, and in all kinds of situations.”28 These snippets of conversations and fleeting glimpses of other worlds are also a means by which the novel seeks to retrieve the hidden histories of racial groups. As with many of his novels, Against the Day is exhaustively researched; these secret histories serve not only as narrative tools to defamiliarize systems of knowledge but also as reclamations of largely unknown and unrepresented histories of people of color and the colonized. We might say that in addition to destabilizing the sign, Pynchon and other postrace authors retain a commitment to at least attempting to retrieve a referent. As Goldberg puts it, postracialism requires “remembering and recalling.”29 Moreover, the novel uses the fantastic – particularly drug-induced hallucinations and epiphanies – to radically defamiliarize worldviews. As Brian McHale has noted, postmodern fiction tends to destabilize ontological security; whereas modernist fiction seeks to question how we know the world, postmodernist fiction questions the world itself.30 While McHale refers to fictional worlds, we could read this ontological destabilization as reflecting the profound cognitive and existential shift occasioned by an antiracist worldview. If racial hierarchies are built into the fabric of our societies, then antiracism requires a deep unraveling of that fabric. Against the Day’s narrative shows how race is tied up with all that is political, moral, and practical, as well as how destabilizing and unsettling a shift from racial neoliberalism to a radically antiracist worldview can be. The novel opens with a visit by the erstwhile adventure heroes the Chums of Chance to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Officially named the “World’s Columbian Exposition,” marking the quadricentennial of Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the “New World,” the Chicago World’s Fair is an overdetermined historical marker and symbol of colonialism, American nationalism and exceptionalism, and globalization. Observers of the Fair had remarked how, as one moved up and down its Midway, the more European, civilized, and . . . well, frankly, white exhibits located closer to the center of the “White City” seemed to be, whereas the

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sue j. kim farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery. To the boys it seemed that they were making their way through a separate, lampless world, out beyond some obscure threshold, with its own economic life, social habits, and codes, aware of itself as having little if anything to do with the official Fair. [. . .] Here in the shadows, the faces moving by smiled, grimaced, or stared directly at Lindsay and Miles as if somehow they knew them, as if in the boys’ long career of adventure in exotic corners of the world there had been accumulating, unknown to them, a reserve of mistranslation, offense taken, debt entered into, here being re-expressed as a strange Limbo they must negotiate their way through, expecting at any moment a “run-in” with some enemy from an earlier day, before they might gain the safety of the lights in the distance. (22)

The passage initially invokes the unsurprising metaphor of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as standing for white supremacist colonialism. Yet the characters do not safely inhabit the White City; rather, their travels “in exotic corners of the world” change them and their relationships to others. Unlike the blithe heroic comic adventurers they superficially mimic, the Chums inhabit a world of “mistranslation, offense taken, debt entered into,” through which “they must negotiate their way” and in which history “from an earlier day” is not erased but ready to reemerge at any moment. They live in a Limbo conditioned and shaped by the past; there may be a glimpse of a haven “in the distance,” but it is not one they ever reach. They are neither passive spectators nor all-powerful villains; they are multiply, variously situated participants in an ongoing transnational process that requires their active negotiation. In similar ways, the novel takes the racial logic of colonialism and renders it strange by exposing it as a “logic,” a system, deeply tied to yet distinct from capitalism. A scene from Fleetwood Vibe’s journals exhibits the multiperspectival, transnational qualities of postrace novels through snippets of conversation that provide glimpses into ubiquitous systems of power. The peregrinating son of the mogul and sometime anarchist target Scarsdale Vibe, Fleetwood keeps a journal of his travels, as all good explorers do. At the “Explorers Club,” he strikes up a conversation with an unnamed General who is presumably a colonial army officer from South Africa. Fleetwood notes that the General, like other “southern Africa hands,” speaks a “vernacular of unease and hallucination” (146): During luncheon got into a funny sort of confab about civilized evil in faroff lands.

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“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day 117 “Maybe the tropics,” somebody, probably the General, said, “but never the Polar Region, it’s too white, too mathematical up there.” “But always in our business there are natives, and then there are natives, don’t you see? Us and natives. Any particular tribe, the details of it, get lost in the general question – who is laboring to whose benefit, sort of thing.” “There’s never a question. The machines, the buildings, all the industrial structures we’ve put in out there. They see these things, they learn to operate them, they come to understand how powerful they are. How deadly. How deadly we are. Machinery can crush them. Trains can run them over. In the Rand some of the shafts go down four thousand feet.” (146–7)

A supposed conversation about “far-off lands” turns strangely inward. While the conversation starts with “us” versus “natives,” the tropics versus the Polar Region, it turns into a reflection on the transferability of exploitation. Given the novel’s concern with anarchist militancy against capitalist exploitation (of which Scarsdale Vibe is a prime symbol), the conversation links racial division to economic and political oppression. On the one hand, there are colonizers and colonized; on the other hand, the specific social configuration is always tied up with the question, who is laboring to whose benefit? Then the conversation takes an even more upsetting turn. Fleetwood, presumably, continues talking not only of the subjugation of other peoples and species but also of the normalization and acceptance of that subjection. He asks, “Suppose it were to happen to us, in the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh” (147, italics in original). When the General’s wife, finding his statement “disgusting,” protests, Fleetwood continues unperturbed, “Not literally, then . . . but we do use one another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience . . . each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.” While one unnamed interlocutor thinks that the wasteland Fleetwood is talking about is a reference to “present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts,” and blames the evolution of “the American Corporation” for this situation, Fleetwood prefers to explain it as “an incursion from elsewhere” in which “[t]ime itself was disrupted” (147). The logic of racialized exploitation here appears as an alien life form, exploiting the “civilized world” for its own purposes. Fleetwood’s recourse

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to the supernatural here perhaps indicates an attempt to distance himself, ideologically, from the kind of power structures of which his father is emblematic. The question Fleetwood poses upsets his interlocutors not so much because of the specter of colonial violence or cannibalism, but more due to the flexibility and portability of violence under the conditions of late capitalism with which they associate it. Racism and eugenics are located in bodies, in phenotypes, while global capitalism is flexible, modular, portable, and voracious. Anyone, regardless of birth, rank, race, or nation can have their surplus value extracted for capitalist accumulation. At first the General avers that only the wild tropics can be colonized; the white Polar Region is too mathematical and civilized to be so dominated. The uncanny recognition of the colonial self in the colonized other robs the General’s wife of her appetite. The issue here turns from innate racial capabilities or traits of civilizations, to the constructed and arbitrary, yet insidiously universal, nature of capitalist imperialism. It is somewhat a freak of history that the colonized are the colonized; even the colonizers themselves could have been (and could still be) made into cannibals and normalize their own degradation. The invocation of aliens and alternative realities can be read as using the speculative to further question and defamiliarize the formal logic of racial hierarchies. The novel also uses the fantastic to point to hidden histories, which serve thematic and formal ends. Understanding racial histories and structures includes understanding the surface appearance of things – cultural representations and discourses – as well as what lies under the surface, or the complex arrangements of largely unseen human activity. In New York, Dally Rideout, (adopted) daughter of Merle, goes in search of her mother and inadvertently finds work in Chinatown due to her all-American good looks: Which is how Dally found her way into the white-slave simulation industry and the tunnels of Chinatown, began to learn some of the allbut-impenetrable signs and codes, a region of life withheld, a secret life of cities that those gypsy years with Merle had always denied her. . . . Every morning she commuted down on the Third Avenue El, had coffee at a wagon parked under the tracks, and strolled on to Hop Fung’s office to review the schedule of comediettas, which tended to change from one day to the next, being careful near the corner of Mott and Canal to look up down and sideways, for here was the headquarters of Tom Lee’s tong, the On Leong – and trying to keep clear altogether of Doyers Street, which was a kind of no-man’s-land between the On Leong and their deadly rival tong the Hip Sing, who were based at the corner of Doyers and Pell.” (339–40)

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“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day 119 Dally has been hired to pretend that she is being kidnapped by Chinese white slavers. While the residents of Chinatown go about their normal daily routines (work, family), Dally’s friend introduces her to the thriving business of “white-slave simulation.” Hop Fung, the producer of the performance, started as a simple tour guide, but his proximity to the countercultural and disreputable Bowery led him to invent “short melodramas that showed a sure instinct for what would catch the fancy of the Occidental rubbernecker” (339). In other words, he has found a market in catering to the lurid Orientalist fantasies of white tourists. At the same time, while she works, Dally learns about the real underbelly of Chinatown. Pynchon’s history here is characteristically accurate; the rivalry between the On Leong and Hip Sing tongs did indeed trouble Chinatown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.31 While this highly physical display apparently plays into white tourists’ voyeuristic interest in the supposed white slave trade, we see that the complex dynamics of Chinatown politics and economics go on, mostly hidden from those same prying eyes. Underneath the racially motivated kidnapping that invokes the discourse of Yellow Peril, Hop Fung’s productions reflect, in fantastic form, the tradition of immigrant economies undertaken to cater to mainstream needs. Such apparently innocuous immigrant economies – agricultural work, laundries – have been shown to have complex racial and sexual dynamics that shaped the lives of generations of people.32 This fantastic episode does not just challenge the discourse of Yellow Peril but also reveals the many hidden histories that function with, within, against, and underneath these discourses of race. To thus understand race as multivalent and ubiquitous is deeply defamiliarizing, producing a paranoiac perspective that continually shifts how we view the world. An amusing depiction of this cognitive shift occurs when Lew Basnight, spying on anarchists, realizes that he may be on the wrong side of history. He starts to see the world differently, perhaps as a result of accidentally ingesting a mad scientist’s drugs, which are a combination of “nitro compounds and polymethylenes” (182). Sitting at dinner, he starts to “experience[e] the hotel dining room in a range of colors, not to mention cultural references, which had not been there when he came in” (182). As with every episode, the implications and allusions in this scene are multiple. Whether the phrase “which had not been there when he came in” is free-indirect discourse reflecting Basnight’s thoughts or the observation of the narrator, cultural references, of course, do not come and go – rather, they are always to be discovered by the eye of the beholder. These cultural references lead him to see in the wallpaper the

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lives of human beings in “a land very far away indeed,” who go about their lives, as all people do. He is uncertain whether these visions are due to the drugs, but whatever their cause, like the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” who sees the madwoman trapped by patriarchy, Lew suddenly sees beyond the surface – beyond the present and local and individual – to the global systems of which he is a part.33 Having been hired to track down anarchists, he starts to realize that he may have misjudged anarchism, and that he may be a tool of larger forces, which we might read as white supremacy or capitalism or the military-industrial complex. The important point here is both the revelation of an individual’s own participation in a larger system or systems and uncertainty about the exact extent and shape of those systems. The trope of drug-induced epiphany conveys, in many of Pynchon’s novels, a profound shift in worldview that is accompanied by equally profound uncertainty. Ultimately, among many other threads in the novel is the understanding that race, rather than a discrete set of concerns, is systemic, historic, and active. This pervasiveness of race is part of what, for Saldívar, characterizes a postracial aesthetic. Pynchon’s novels, particularly Against the Day, weave racial awareness into all aspects of existence – individual and collective, local and global, symbolic and material – because in the texts, everyone and everything is so connected. Hardack describes as “consciousness without borders” the way Pynchon emphasizes the links between selves through doubling and repetition; “Pynchon’s narrators [. . .] provide an unusual degree of access to the spaces between characters, to dimensions, systems, or forces that can attain their own identities or even subjectivities” (italics in original).34 In what has been called Pynchon’s encyclopedic, sometimes paranoiac sense of our place in history, race constitutes one fundamental component that can manifest in an infinite number of ways. Toward the end of the novel, while the Chums of Chance on the Inconvenience continue their adventures on “Counter-Earth,” they keep running into signs of world war, such as trenches (1022). Miles Blundell reflects on the soldiers in West Flanders: “Those poor innocents,” he exclaimed in a stricken whisper [. . .] “Back at the beginning of this . . . they must have been boys, so much like us. . . . They knew they were standing before a great chasm none could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand ‘Adventure.’ They were juvenile heroes of a World-Narrative – unreflective and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of finding themselves posed nobly against some

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“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day 121 dramatic moral geography, they were down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and death.” (1023–24)

Against the Day continually interrogates “World-Narratives” that seek to separate, atomize, and normalize, including the World-Narrative of antiracialism, a nominal rejection of racial categories that ignores and perpetuates racist systems and institutions, and racial neoliberalism, which sees race in terms of atomistic individuals rather than systems, histories, and groups. The novel works against such mononarratives through the use of transnational, multiple perspectives shown through conversation snippets and glimpses into other worlds, the revelation of hidden histories, and fantastic, ontology-upsetting epiphanies. To understand race is to understand that, as in the famous line from Gravity’s Rainbow, “[e]verything is connected.” Understanding these interconnections requires almost constant renegotiations of the world, which is a state of mind and of being that resonates through Against the Day not only in its plots and characters but in its very forms. As Kit Traverse realizes at one point, across the world, across species, “forms of life were a connected set” (728). Of all Pynchon’s works, Against the Day does one of the better jobs of fusing race into its central nervous system, not rendering it a spectacle of otherness but showing it to be deeply ingrained into every aspect of our lives. Because antiracism requires this kind of cognitive shift, these are the kinds of texts and the ways of thinking that have become more urgent than ever.

Notes 1. For further information see Medhi Hasan, “Barack Obama: The Deporter-inChief,” Al Jazeera, January 14, 2017, www.aljazeera.com/programmes/upfront/20 17/01/barack-obama-deporter-chief-170113105930345.html; and John Burnett, “Big Money as Private Immigrant Jails Boom,” National Public Radio, November 21, 2017, www.npr.org/2017/11/21/565318778/big-money-as-private-immigrant-jailsboom. 2. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Eric Lichtblau, “Justice Department to Re-examine Police Accords,” New York Times, April 4, 2017, A1. 3. Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak, “Taking Up Case, Justices Let U.S. Start Travel Ban,” New York Times, June 27, 2017, A1. 4. Ramón Saldívar, “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative,” Narrative, 21.1 (2013), p. 3. 5. Brian McHale, “Genre as History: Genre-Poaching in Against the Day,” Genre, 42.3–4 (2009), doi.org/10.1215/00166928-42-3-4-5, p. 17. 6. Ibid., p. 19.

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7. For analyses of the novel’s treatment of anarchism and post-9/11 terrorism and media, see Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “Narrative Interest as Cultural Negotiation,” Narrative, 17.1 (2009), pp. 111–29; Paolo Simonetti, “Historical Fiction after 9/11: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Modern Language Studies, 41 (2011), pp. 26–41; and Mark Young, “Phantasmagoric 9/11: Blowback and the Limits of Resistance in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Critique, 56 (2015), pp. 503–18. For a discussion of the novel’s critiques of the logic of late capitalism, see Joshua Clover, “Autumn of the System: Poetry and Financial Capital,” Journal of Narrative Theory, 41 (2011), pp. 34–52; and Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, “‘There Is Money Everywhere’: Representation, Authority, and the Money Form in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Critique, 43 (2013), pp. 147–60. 8. Saldívar, “Second Elevation,” p. 3. 9. David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Blackwell, 2009), p. 341. 10. Ibid., p. 10. 11. Ibid., p. 22. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 21. 14. Ibid. 15. Saldívar, “Second Elevation,” p. 2. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 1994), pp. 55, 56. 19. Paula Moya and Hazel Markus (eds.), Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (Norton, 2010), p. 4. 20. Ramón Saldívar, “Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4 (2012), p. 16. 21. Saldívar, “Second Elevation,” p. 5. 22. Ibid., p. 14. 23. Exceptions to this rule – critics who have insightfully explored race in Pynchon’s works – include Joanna Freer, “Thomas Pynchon and the Black Panther Party: Revolutionary Suicide in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Journal of American Studies, 47.1 (Feb 2013), pp. 171–88; Michael Harris, “Pynchon’s Postcoloniality,” in Niran Abbas (ed.), Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 197–214; Patrick McHugh, “Cultural Politics, Postmodernism, and White Guys: Affect in Gravity’s Rainbow,” College Literature, 28.2 (Spring 2001), pp. 1–28; and David Witzling, Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism (Routledge, 2008). 24. Sue J. Kim, Critiquing Postmodernism in Contemporary Discourses of Race (Palgrave, 2009); Sue J. Kim, “Racial Neoliberalism and Whiteness in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Len Platt and Sara Upstone (eds.), Postmodern Literature and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 264–78.

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“You are here”: The Postrace Aesthetics of Pynchon’s Against the Day 123 25. Christopher T. Fan, “Melancholy Transcendence: Ted Chiang and Asian American Postracial Form,” Post45 (2014), post45.research.yale.edu. 26. Richard Hardack, “Consciousness without Borders: Narratology in Against the Day and the Works of Thomas Pynchon,” Criticism, 52.1 (2010), pp. 95–96. 27. Saldívar, “Second Elevation,” p. 16. 28. Moya and Markus, Doing Race, p. 4. 29. Goldberg, Threat of Race, p. 21. 30. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (Routledge, 2003), pp. 9–11. 31. See Huping Ling and Allan Austin, Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2015); and Scott D. Seligman, Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York’s Chinatown (Penguin, 2016). 32. See Paul Siu, The Chinese Laundrymen: A Study of Social Isolation (NYU Press, 1987); and Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York, 1880–1920 (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 33. The author thanks Joanna Freer for this insight and many helpful suggestions throughout the essay. 34. Hardack, “Consciousness without Borders,” p. 95.

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chapter 8

Another Apocalypse: Digital Ecologies and Late Pynchon Christopher K. Coffman

As Oedipa Maas ponders the endless delays involved in her pursuit of the Tristero, she exists in a state of anticipation that the novel describes as “like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left” (CL49 181). Dimly visible ahead are the possible conclusions to her quest: “transcendent meaning, or only the earth” (181). The terms of the metaphor define her future as incontrovertibly apocalyptic, in either the traditional sense of apocalypse as revelation of a meaningful new order or the popular sense of apocalypse as a destructive opening onto death. Pynchon’s presentation of Oedipa’s quest as comprehensible in terms of apocalyptic conclusions is compatible with contemporary discourse about the environment, which often posits that human actions have set a course that will end in widespread destruction, unless our habits are so radically and rapidly reordered that they initiate the terms of a new relationship with the planet. Other passages in The Crying of Lot 49 suggest that Oedipa’s periodic apprehensions of potential meaning are inspired by intuition of networks conjoining disparate elements of her experience. For example, we read of the “odd, religious instant” when the streets of San Narciso remind her of the “astonishing clarity” she experienced upon first encounter with a printed circuit card (24). The “outward patterns” of both town and card offer “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate” that makes her feel as if “a revelation [. . .] tremble[s] just past the threshold of her understanding” (24). The particularly spatial orientation of Oedipa’s near-revelatory moments, highlighted in the patterns of San Narciso’s streets and the encompassing quality of the digital vision, emphasizes the degree to which these networks literally and metaphorically environ Oedipa. In this sense, the orders of meaning she intuits are structurally in keeping with the natural world described in early environmental writing. Such books as Murray Bookchin’s Our Synthetic 124

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Environment and René Dubos’s Man Adapting present nature as a complex web of systems existing in a careful balance.1 The structural similarity between Pynchon’s description of the human networks in The Crying of Lot 49 and the natural networks defined by ecologists such as Bookchin and Dubos implies that an ecological, or perhaps even a properly environmentalist, approach may illuminate our understanding of Oedipa’s experience, and of the fictions more generally.

Pynchon the Environmentalist In his earlier works especially, Pynchon’s environmental awareness typically exhibits itself as a late-Romantic idealism. On this view, nature remains a source of positive value so long as it is kept safe from human meddling. In addition, as suggested above, Pynchon’s delineation of vast networks – some positive and sustaining, others artificial and disruptive – assumes connections like those ecologists assert define ecosystems. Taken together, these two elements support readings amenable to the environmentalist view encountered in field-defining works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac: healthy nature is a network of overlapping processes that foster growth in self-supporting cycles.2 This notion is embodied most evidently in the vision of the Ouroboros in Gravity’s Rainbow: the world-encompassing serpent eats its own tail, constantly performing the renewal of life through death that characterizes the rhythms of nature (410–13). Yet, the fictions also suggest that human agency, especially when assisted by modern technologies, tends to interrupt and contaminate these healthy natural cycles. Among the most pernicious of these violations are plastics, a manipulation of natural material at a microscopic level that presages the atomic fission of nuclear bombs. In this and other ways, the human desire for mastery leads to the production of waste that does not offer itself for renewal. Similar perspectives ground Roony Winsome’s description of the corruption of Walden Pond in V. (350), Oedipa Maas’s inability to find meaning among the superhighways and housing developments in The Crying of Lot 49, references to logging trucks rumbling through Vineland, and many other passages. In each of these cases, human actions are locally destructive; collectively, they spell disaster. Where the environmental consciousness of Pynchon’s texts fits the model I have been outlining, it is compatible with a certain kind of apocalyptic eschatology often displayed in ecocritical studies. As Lisa Swanstrom points out, examples of this tendency may be found in almost

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any issue of publications like ISLE.3 Furthermore, echoing dystopian discourse from the disaster films of the 1970s to the latest news stories about the energy crisis, this aspect of Pynchon’s texts is in step with our culture’s endless displays of the accuracy of Lawrence Buell’s observation that “[a]pocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.”4 However, environmental apocalypticism is not the whole story. As Sylvia Noble Tesh explains, scholarly discourse increasingly makes space for alternatives to the idea that the impact of human activity on the natural environment needs reach destructive conclusions. Some ecologists argue that the idea of a balanced natural state is false, and, if imbalance is in fact the norm, they ask how we can justifiably describe human activity as disrupting some sort of primal purity. Others argue that nature is a social construction, one that says much more about the culture defining the divide between natural and non-natural than about nature itself.5 These perspectives suggest that a view of Pynchon’s environmental writing as exclusively apocalyptic may be in need of reconsideration. This chapter argues that Pynchon’s recent engagements with the digital follow developments in ecological thought in reconsidering the notion that technologically mediated life is necessarily the herald of environmental collapse. My intention is not to reconstruct Pynchon as a voice for technoutopianism, but to moderate the critical conversation, to demonstrate that his works are not always presentations of an unalloyed critique of the technological. More particularly, I argue that Pynchon increasingly presents digital environments as potentially fostering a process that, following Christine Ross, I understand as “ecologization.” According to Ross, ecologization is a thickening of the temporal instant that allows present-time to be inhabited as present-space is best inhabited: as an expanse for activity in tune with the environment.6 Ecologization is therefore exceptional temporally, in relation to the forward-facing impetus of progressive historical time, which subordinates what is to what might be, and spatially, in relation to the abstraction of industrial capital, which subordinates land and other resources to the regime of value estimation. This exceptionality creates a fissure, restructuring experience in a fashion that allows for awareness of the complex relations between subjects and environments. In allowing such awareness, it offers the opportunity for revelations defined not by widespread destruction, but by the disclosure of local truths. Such truths are potentially quite powerful because they promote immediacy, which, as Danny Naveh and Nurit Bird-David explain, “ipso facto precludes” the abstractions of the global in favor of “reverence and care [. . .]

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shown to the environment and [. . .] particular situations.”7 Consequently, local knowledge better accounts for the strengths and needs of communities and rescales environmental attention in a fashion more sensitive to bioregional matters.8 Also, to the degree that ecologization makes space for the local, it opens narrative to the possibility of engaging environmental processes that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Stephanie LeMenager regard as revelatory of meanings outside of typical human experience. As they explain, conventional narrative, because “[c]reated by and for humans, [. . .] has a difficult time capturing the nonhuman world, an entangled domain that is always too slow, too swift, too vast, or too small for immediate apprehension.”9 Because ecologization draws attention to the local, to the particular, and to that in the environment which usually eludes our attention due the fact that it occurs at what are to human perception scalar extremes, it provides a useful platform for reading Pynchon’s later works in relation to critical digital ecologies, which likewise encourage readers to consider how the digital and the nondigital are interwoven and mutually foster environmental consciousness. A rereading of Pynchon’s “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” from this perspective is revealing. Pynchon indeed recognizes the impulse of literature to “deny the machine” (italics in original).10 He likewise diagnoses the Industrial Revolution as the source of the direst realities and apocalyptic visions of the post-WWII era.11 The conclusion of the article, however, swerves in a more positive direction: the final paragraphs assess the computer age, and ask whether or not “mainframes [will] attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did.”12 This question does not lead to a declaration that the digital revolution heralds an era even more hostile than any before to meaningful human activity. Instead, Pynchon proposes that there is some justification for optimism with regard to “the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good,” an opinion that critics such as John O. Stark see as exemplary of Pynchon’s occasional positivity regarding technology.13 Furthermore, the close of the article posits “something for all good Luddites to look forward to”: a convergence of “curves of research and development” that will extend technology beyond the control of the “power establishment.”14 While Pynchon presents the overturning of structures of unjust power as only as-yet-unrealized potential, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” points to the qualified optimism of the former Boeing employee with regard to the separation of power and information technologies, and troubles any certainty in readings that understand Pynchon’s attitude to technology as unmitigated pessimism. Insofar as this is the case, the article proffers

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a subtler means to think about digital technology: neither harbinger of holocaust nor utopian solution, the digital can have desirable or undesirable effects. In tempering and problematizing more apocalyptic visions of the technological future, Pynchon’s piece is very much in keeping with scholarship that remains open to the interplay between the technological and the natural. Swanstrom, for example, provides several modest examples of situations in which digital technologies are imbricated with human encounters with nature, including the more careful interaction with natural spaces of smartphone users encouraged by geocaching apps.15 Similar, although grander in scale, is a project like Cornell University’s Great Backyard Bird Count, which uses the internet to crowdsource data generation for bird populations around the globe. In such activities, the natural and digital are connected in a nested fashion, supporting thoughtful engagement with both nature and technology without succumbing to the notion that the computer age necessarily spells destruction.

Digital Ecologies and Inherent Vice Although the Luddite article expresses some optimism with regard to the potential benefits of technology, one might wonder if that assessment has changed in more recent years, perhaps especially in response to the development of the internet. Inherent Vice offers some grounds for responding with a qualified “no.” Furthermore, the novel encourages a view of digital technologies, particularly complex digital networks, as tools that allow for the beneficial experiences of ecologization. While Doc Sportello’s investigations bring him into contact with several remarkable stories, none are quite so sweeping in their implications as legends suggesting the Pacific Ocean contains a force foreign to everyday experience. Among the points of intersection between our world and another is a wave surfed by St. Flip, described as “far out [. . .] the gnarliest break in the world” (99). Doc’s experience with individuals like Flip is that they operate on spatial terms others cannot easily accommodate, with the consequence that, “after a while these folks would no longer be quite where their friends expected” (100). Such qualities of these far-out surfers are perhaps the result of extraordinary causes: Sortilège argues that the break is due to the re-surfacing of the lost land of Lemuria (101). For her, this mythical land sank in a sort of self-regulation of the environment, a cataclysm initiated because Lemuria reached “levels of toxicity” that could no longer be tolerated by the planet’s “immune system” (105). Doc views such assertions as only part of GNASH, “the Global Network of

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Anecdotal Surfer Horseshit” (100–1). In spite of his misgivings, though, the mystical geography and apocalyptic destruction of Lemuria turns the surfers toward an environmental heritage hidden from mainstream knowledge. Later, following his acceptance of a tab of LSD from Vehi Fairfield, Doc finds “himself in the [. . .] ruin of an ancient city that was, and also wasn’t, everyday Greater L.A.” (108). In this vision, “Doc and all his neighbors, were and were not refugees from the disaster which had submerged Lemuria” (108). Here, Doc sees that the legends provide an alternative to the historical past of North America, underscoring the differences between surfer and mainstream culture as not so much a matter of the former group being defined by having “dropped out” into a state of elective exile, but instead by their ability to see the irrelevance of the inside/outside binary via which the social imaginary of mainstream culture conceives that of the surfers. Such aspects of Inherent Vice as the conversations about Lemuria are openings to material that narrative forms typically have a difficult time accommodating, material productive in terms of ecological consciousness. Doc’s LSD trip, which reveals an alternate Los Angeles, is an encounter with a domain that exists alongside our own, one opened to us not because of apocalyptic instants admitted by the progression of historical time, but via an alternative awareness of space, one that makes visible phenomena that otherwise elude our perception. Passages about Lemuria and the reconfigured Greater L.A. of Doc’s vision allow Inherent Vice to accommodate exactly the sorts of experiences Cohen and LeMenager describe: natural events that are so great or so infinitesimal in scale that usual strategies of representation fail to present them. As Daniel R. White has explained, Pynchon’s fictions are marked by unusual representational strategies that make room for such events, connecting “human sensibility [. . .] not only with nature but also with the social and political concerns of [. . .] life.”16 That a complementary part of surfers’ cultural discourse is frustration with real-world pollution, especially oil in the waves, is therefore appropriate (105). In keeping with this convergence of prehistoric Pacific geography and modern-day eco-consciousness, Doc later imagines water flooding the city, in tune with phenomena that Sortilège regards as heralding the rise of Lemuria from the water. The related notion of a “karmic waterscape” that both sinks L.A. and inaugurates the return of the lost continent suggests a connection between the seen and unseen, and cycles of cataclysmic destruction prompted by the “immune system” of the “living” Earth, that tie conversations about Lemuria’s fate even more closely to environmental change in southern California (166–67, 105).

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In short, GNASH is a social network that fosters eco-consciousness in a manner that judges mainstream, everyday Los Angeles as a culture heading to the brink of an environmental disaster, one that will potentially replicate the disappearance of ancient Lemuria under the waves. These ecological discussions find a digital parallel in the presentation of ARPAnet. In Fritz Drybeam’s office, Doc is introduced to a hardware room that is “like being inside a science-fictional Christmas tree. Little red and green lights were going on and off everywhere. There were computer cabinets, consoles with lit-up video screens, and alphanumeric keyboards, and cables running all over the floor” (53). The thickness of Pynchon’s description of this room amounts to the presentation of an embodied digital environment, and to this extent is reminiscent of Oedipa’s metaphorical “great digital” vision. Yet, Doc and Fritz evaluate this sort of environment differently than did Oedipa: the blinking lights and screens of data signaling connection are not in their eyes harbingers of apocalyptic revelation but a tool that liberates information. Ultimately, Fritz’s judgment regarding ARPAnet is revised on terms that suggest its delivery of information to users takes shape as a Faustian pact (365), but Fritz’s younger colleague, Sparky, experiences the network in more neutral terms, describing it as, “like acid, a whole ’nother strange world – time, space, all that shit” (195). Weighing these incompatible assessments of the technology in terms of Hanjo Berressem’s discussion of the differences between formational and informational media is illuminating: the latter convey data from one source to another, while the former foster ecological awareness by suggesting structural arrangements connecting components of the materials or information they mediate.17 In terms of this distinction, the final assessments by Fritz and Sparky of ARPAnet as a medium offer a perspective much like that described by Marshall McLuhan: no media are merely informational, and the delivery of data or materials is always shaped by their vehicles. This conclusion is reinforced when the network eventually helps Doc track Trillium Fortnight to safety. Doc’s discovery from afar of Trillium’s hospitalization in Las Vegas and reunion with her family suggests that ARPAnet’s ability to make the spatially distant present may work in terms that are compatible with the benefits of ecologization: to be here, now, is to become aware of environmental features and the connections among them in a fashion that more linear views of time and space obscure. So, when the spatial reach of Doc’s investigation grows simultaneously with his use of the digital network, his awareness of the sociocultural ecology of Trillium’s family and friends grows.18 In this sense, the return of Trillium to her family is an ecologization that transforms the subjective experience of social time

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and space in a positive fashion for Doc, demonstrating an intersection between the natural and biological ecosystem of the family and the formational mediations of ARPAnet. Although GNASH and ARPAnet provide Doc with different sorts of information, the networks are similar in that they reconfigure the spatial and temporal terms of the subjective world, and the reconfiguration is in both cases a means to become sensitive to and to interact with places connected to the local by the more-than-human range the networks allow. Furthermore, they can be regarded as working in tandem: GNASH is a social network attuned to environmental concerns; ARPAnet is an expansion of such social networks via digital mediation. That the two share some ground is reinforced by both the digital connotations of “surfing” and the surfer slang Sparky and Doc employ in discussing the network, as when Sparky calls it “the wave of the future,” and Doc replies “Tubular, dude” (366). While these connections between the two networks emphasize the degree to which the digital environment is at least sometimes supportive of social and natural environments, some differences are notable. The ecologization offered by ARPAnet, unlike that of GNASH, is not a process of slowing down and becoming attuned to events that unfold on the geologic timelines that govern the sinking and rising of continents, and are difficult to conceive from the perspective of human temporal experience because of their extraordinary slowness, but one that builds on a compression of space and time into a here that is also a now. So, while GNASH’s Lemurian vision may allow awareness of very large and lengthy natural processes, the rapidity of ARPAnet is one that opens via its speed to better awareness of very small and rapid natural events, like nanoscale pollution or wave behavior of subatomic particles. In this sense, the digital here is no assault on environmental consciousness or detachment from the world outside of the digital, but a chance to recognize the degree to which better awareness of that world depends upon the digital. Such a convergence of the digital and the nondigital is the direction in which Pynchon’s discourse on digital technologies moves at its most optimistic moments.

Digital Ecologization in Bleeding Edge While Inherent Vice considers ARPAnet, Bleeding Edge is the first novel by Pynchon set in the internet era proper. There is certainly much in the novel that justifies a pessimistic reading of the digital. As Jason Siegel argues, Bleeding Edge recognizes that “the mutual extension of human

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consciousness and cyberspace into one another and the reduction of the human to a programmable object” is something that “[i]nternet technologies facilitate.”19 He continues, “[t]he novel’s multivalent title affirms Pynchon’s Luddite belief that, under late capitalism, governments and corporations [. . .] co-opt the technologies that promise additional freedom and turn them into instruments of domination and surveillance.”20 On the other hand, this reading neglects the degree to which Bleeding Edge also makes room for the cautious optimism of the “Luddite” article and Inherent Vice. At the root of this alternate reading is the fact that Bleeding Edge displays sensitivity to a distinction that Daniel Punday makes regarding different visions of the import of digital technologies for human enterprise: on the one hand are pessimistic assessments that amount to “technological determinism,” on the other are considerations that see the possibility for extending “the workings of human agency through and in response to” digital “media.”21 This is not to say that Pynchon neglects the negative impact of technology on nature but to recognize that his work increasingly makes visible the reciprocal impact of digital and natural environments, shedding new light not only on how digital and nondigital environments oppose but also on how they reveal and complement one another. The possibility for recognizing the ways digital media might preserve or extend human agency via presentations of complex relations among characters, natural ecosystems, and digital and nondigital networks is staged from the opening paragraphs of Bleeding Edge. The novel begins with a scene that offers a complex ecological system, evident as Maxine Tarnow walks her sons, Ziggy and Otis, to school on “the first day of spring 2001” (1). To Maxine, the world has seemingly changed overnight, and she experiences what Timothy Morton might label an eco-rhapsodic episode: something “elsewhere” seems embodied in a local particular, as “what looks like every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West Side has popped overnight into clusters of white pear blossoms. As Maxine watches, sunlight finds its way past rooflines [. . .] into one particular tree, which all at once is filled with light” (1), a spectacle which brings her to a halt.22 She calls the tree to the attention of her sons, who confirm its beauty. Her heightened awareness continues, as “[s]unlight reflected from east-facing apartment windows has begun to show up in blurry patterns on the fronts of buildings across the street,” in the light of which the people of the awakening city unfold their morning routines, including “[t]wo-part buses” that “creep [. . .] like giant insects” and “kids [. . .] on new Razor scooters” (1–2).

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The natural cycles of springtime sunlight and flowerings take priority here, but the text situates them in relation to the lived experience of Manhattanites. Just as the rising sun initiates the rhythms of the day’s natural environment, so the buses and scooters move people through space in sync with markers of social ecology, such as timetables of school bells and the workday. Likewise, garbage trucks, sidewalk-cleaning hoses, and aluminum scooters connect the New Yorkers to complex mechanized and computerized systems of material production, fossil fuel consumption, water usage, recycling, and waste disposal that compose the wider ecological network of their lives. Alenda Chang demonstrates that “environments are also media, able to transmit, conceal, and come between other entities in significant ways,” and the opening pages of Bleeding Edge present a scene in which natural elements perform in some of these fashions.23 Here, sunlight reflected off and shining around the outline of buildings directs Maxine’s attention to a particular tree; its flowers, and those of others like it, relay information about meteorological and seasonal cycles; building managers use water as a means to transfer waste; and the vehicles move people through these elements of the environment at a variety of speeds, aware to greater or lesser degrees of the role its natural features play in shaping their experience of the built space. One might linger to consider other implications of the fact that the anchor of the scene is the illuminated pear tree. The tree may be viewed in one sense as an emblem of the natural in the concrete-covered world of Manhattan, but it is at the same time the product of the entirely human abstraction that is the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation. One website from that body reports that Callery Pears in New York City not only support urban wildlife and reduce noise but save over $7.5 million annually by intercepting stormwater, conserving energy, removing air pollutants, and reducing carbon dioxide.24 Furthermore, the department’s list of acceptable Street Trees for “sidewalk and lawn planting sites in the public right-of-way” notes that the Callery Pear is recommended for its spring bloom.25 To pause long enough on this tree’s appearance in the text allows a reader to recognize that, just like the elements of the text itself, the tree is a curated presence, and its moment as an object of aesthetic apprehension has been orchestrated. In this sense, it exemplifies what Donna J. Haraway calls the “naturalcultural,” a term that identifies the problematic distinction between the human and the nonhuman biota, and proposes a degree of interpenetration between the two.26 Such problematizations – conceptually for Haraway and pragmatically for Maxine and New York’s parks department – trouble the sort of perspective advanced in

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many of Pynchon’s earlier fictions, ones that regard human activity as generally inimical to environmental health. Aestheticization of nature as an expansion of environmental awareness is in this novel not only an ecologization deepening interactions between humans and the rest of the natural world but an anticipation of interactions with the constructed worlds of digital environments. The history of Horst’s work as a trader is illustrative in this regard. His trading in agricultural futures sent him “out in deep American countryside, inhaling the aroma from handfuls of wheat, scrutinizing soybeans for purple seed stain, [and] walking through fields of spring barley” (289). Like Maxine’s Callery Pear, the crops Horst investigates are non-native species, whose presence in the environment was initiated and is extended by their value to human needs – in this case financial and nutritional. The seed stain for which Horst searches is a marker of a fungal infection that will shape the market value of the yield.27 In other words, his knowledge of the crop is a naturalcultural concern that highlights the degree to which the physical and abstract needs of humans are interwoven with the rest of nature in a fashion and to such a degree that any effort to distinguish the two will prove pointless. Also, like Maxine’s encounter with the tree, this is a passage of thick environmental description: the futures-trading market is a thoroughly digitized global network, one that connects the biota of the American heartland to a variety of financial systems, which represent its health in the abstract form of capital. Horst’s efforts may be seen from a more naive environmentalist perspective as a betrayal of wholesome earthiness to greed, but a much more positive reading is possible: involvement with this side of the finance industry finds Horst “rediscovering his roots” (289). The phrase honors the connection between the heritage of the human past and the plants on which our physical and Horst’s financial futures depend. Furthermore, Horst’s visit to the Midwest finds that the roots of his social ecology reach into digital realms, including the “golden age of arcades” (96). This is an opening to another sort of environment, one that the novel will show as a means of reinforcing familial bonds and a way of negotiating regional difference. When Horst leaves his sons in a video arcade, some boys approach them with the “aura of blank menace with which the Midwest so often fails to endear itself” (291). The locals eventually introduce Maxine’s boys to a boat-driving game, in which players blast through a New York that is, like the Los Angeles Doc Sportello imagines, or the Lemuria of myth, “postapocalyptic” and “half underwater” (292). By this point, the two Midwesterners “have vanished, as if

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[. . .] not quite of this earth,” their seeming function being “to steer Ziggy and Otis into the ruinous waterscapes of [. . .] Big Apple disasters to come, including but not limited to global warming” (292–93). At this moment, the social space of the video game connects Horst’s past to the boys’ present, and although the game depends on the premise of environmental disaster, the role it plays in connecting Midwesterners with those on the coast, and one generation with the next, reminds readers of the ties that link well-being – both financial and vegetal – in the heartland to the fortunes of New Yorkers. More central to the action of the novel than the digital New York of video games is the World Wide Web. In Bleeding Edge the conspiratorial complexities push much of the action into the Deep Web, effectively an underground space comprising the internet’s detritus. As Eric Outfield explains, “no links into it exist. Now and then it can get weird”; it is, the narrator adds, “an endless junkyard” (226). In one sense the Deep Web is electronic waste, which John Johnston describes, with reference to Vineland, as “media” that “provide [. . .] more varied possibilities for ‘flight into other worlds.’”28 While some of those worlds, “beginning with kiddie porn and growing even more toxic from there,” evidence moral corruption, there are other possibilities, ones that accommodate “lovers on the run,” “pilgrims,” and those seeking video games too “intensely beautiful for the market as currently defined” (240). Deep Web spaces amenable to such seekers speak to the manner in which the digital ecologies of Bleeding Edge answer to Peter L. Cooper’s claim that, in Pynchon’s texts, “imagination recycles what is cast off by seeing in it [. . .] wonder and surprise.”29 On the other hand, Outfield continues, it may be that the Deep Web “only looks that way [. . .] behind it is a whole invisible maze of constraints” with a “hidden code of behavior you have to learn and obey. A dump, with structure” (226). The potential challenges for those visiting this space include not only possible infraction of the unwritten code of behavior but also recognition that awareness of the Deep Web opens it to potential colonization by the forces of consumerism: “shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage” (432). The Deep Web is also the digital space in which one finds DeepArcher, which is the product of Lucas and Justin McElmo’s effort to create “a virtual sanctuary to escape to from the many varieties of real-world discomfort” (74). DeepArcher foregrounds at every stage a reorientation, beginning with a splash screen that positions the user on “the edge of a great abyss,” behind which “the sunlit distances of the surface world” “recede” (75). As the application finishes loading, the abyss is transformed

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into a “framed lucid dream” that “wraps” (75) the user in the DeepArcher Lounge, a transport hub with lines leading into DeepArcher proper. The vibrancy of the place depends on exploration of details, from “labels on bottles behind the bar” to platforms illuminated by “soaring metaVictorian glass- and iron-modulated light” (76). On the other side of the train ride is a shadier space, one in which Maxine feels disoriented. In spite of a sense of foreboding, her experience is in keeping with the proleptic dialogue boxes indicating that DeepArcher is not a place but a journey, part of which is defined by this process of “getting constructively lost” (76). If forces such as that represented by Gabriel Ice seem to be pursuing the DeepArcher code for a variety of ill-intentioned reasons, the aim of its inventors is rather the opening of digital environments to exploration and creation by the user. As Maxine puts it, the experience is about “not so much [. . .] where she might get to than the texture of the search itself” (76). In this sense, DeepArcher is a call to explore in the moment; like ARPAnet, its work is one of ecologization that opens awareness to a richer diversity of connections. While the spaces of DeepArcher resemble somewhat those of the nondigital world, it and several other digital environments work in a reciprocal fashion upon that nondigital world, as well. Chang not only reminds us that “environments are media” but also that “our usual media are environments, which inevitably frame our understanding of the natural world and thus have the capacity to remediate beyond their representational margins.”30 In keeping with this point, and with her experience of DeepArcher, Maxine comes into awareness of the strangeness of her home in a fashion very much like that which allows Doc Sportello to find a hidden L.A., except that Maxine’s new New York is very much the result of digital, rather than pharmacological, influence, for “there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the [. . .] gulf between screen and face” (429). Following from this recognition are her encounters with the counterfactual, such as a plastic disc “rolling down the block [. . .] for an implausible distance” and even stopping for traffic lights, and Uncle Dizzy hawking what seems to be a functional invisibility ring (430). As with Doc’s experience, Maxine’s sense of impending flood is entangled with her recognition of events that suggest unseen causal connections that tacitly affirm a network of relations between seemingly disconnected phenomena. In other words, her experience with DeepArcher allows the intuition of environmental factors typically more difficult to perceive, a strong instance of the digital fostering ecologization.

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Bleeding Edge does follow its predecessors in being concerned with whether or not this unseen, complexly networked dimension of such everyday spaces as Maxine’s own neighborhood might have already been colonized by forces of control. If we do normally live in a world that is foreign to us, how can we ensure that such foreignness remains a space for critique, rather than a tool of hegemonic powers? The novel resists answering this question, much as Inherent Vice did in its treatment of ARPAnet. Eric Outfield voices both possibilities: “We’re being played [. . .] and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet – the real one, the dream, the promise – is destroyed,” or “Could be there’s enough good hackers around interested in fighting back. Outlaws who’ll work for free, show no mercy for anybody who tries to use the Net for evil purposes” (432). As is the case with Oedipa’s reflection on the hidden orders of San Narciso’s streets, there are enough scenes of impending environmental doom in Bleeding Edge to suggest that those with “evil purposes” are ahead in the game, from the imperiled Isle of Meadows, surrounded by oil tankers and towering landfills, to the prediction of “northward migration to fjordsides, to subarctic lakes, where the unnatural flows of heat generated by server equipment can begin to corrupt the last patches of innocence on the planet” (457). On the other hand, the conclusion of the novel suggests that it may be too early to begin tolling the death knell. When DeepArcher goes public, Maxine finds her sons there, contributing to the building of this newly opened corner of the world. Their project is a pre-9/11 New York reconstructed from old graphics files. Zigotisopolis is at once more familiar and stranger than reality; it flourishes because it undertakes exactly the sort of remixing of neglected aspects of reality that Stacey Olster declares central to Pynchon’s trash aesthetics.31 The promise it suggests, of an ongoing awareness of connection between possibilities of place and human flourishing, is echoed in the footage Maxine receives showing Eric and Reg Despard in the cab of a truck that is part of a “rolling server farm [. . .] on the move and untrackable” (437). The necessity that this band of off-the-grid hackers keep on the move ties the preservation of freedom on the internet to free movement on American highways, uniting the potential for political liberty in the digital realm with the neo-Romantic liberty of the American road – here, nondigital spatial opportunity reveals itself in mutually supportive relations with the digital. When the novel closes with a return to the annual springtime blooming of pear trees, one might expect the positive spirit of the opening pages to have been corrupted by such intervening events as the deaths of Lester Traipse and Nicholas Windust, the viciousness of encounters with Gabriel Ice, and 9/11. Yet the conclusion is

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largely positive; as David Cowart observes, “vernal recurrence signals the natural corrective to human violence, and [. . .] Maxine and Horst edge toward reconciliation.”32 As Ziggy and Otis leave for school, “[t]he boys” are “folded in [. . .] precarious light,” recalling, in a fashion that honors Pynchon’s longstanding presentation of healthy natural processes as cyclical, as well as the notion that younger generations are the inheritors of the environment we bequeath to them, the sudden and fortuitous illumination of the pear tree in the opening paragraphs (475).33 Ultimately, it seems Maxine’s investigations have led her through the digital and back to the nondigital, awakening in her a greater sensitivity to these aspects of her world, and to the ecological balance of her social, natural, digital, and built environments. To approach Pynchon’s texts from the perspective of digital ecologies offers readers opportunities to tease out their less-pessimistic environmental implications, to see the fictions as describing and diagnosing digital and digital-natural environments, rather than engaging in mere hand-wringing about environmental destruction. In this manner, the critical perspective of digital ecologies tempers somewhat the negative apocalyptic vision that has long been accepted by critics as a notable component of the fictions. Looking carefully at conjunctions between the natural and digital environments in Pynchon’s texts, and at the many ways that these environments inform and complement one another, allows readers to perceive how digital environments – even when stolen, invaded, or corrupted – continue to promote ecological awareness, shedding a qualified but nonetheless hopeful light on the potential for new forms of living in the networked world.

Notes 1. Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment, rev. ed. (Harper, 1974); René Dubos, Man Adapting (Yale University Press, 1980). 2. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949). 3. Lisa Swanstrom, “The Peripheral Future,” electronic book review, April 3, 2016, www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/peripheral. 4. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 285. 5. Sylvia Noble Tesh, Uncertain Hazards: Environmental Activists and Scientific Proof (Cornell University Press, 200), p. 51. 6. Christine Ross, The Past Is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (Continuum, 2012), pp. 64, 88.

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7. Danny Naveh and Nurit Bird-David, “Animism, Conservation and Immediacy” in Graham Harvey (ed.), The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (Routledge, 2013), p. 36. 8. The value of accommodating bioregional concerns has been extensively documented. See, for one example, Molly Scott Cato’s The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness (Routledge, 2013). 9. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Stephanie LeMenager, “Introduction,” PMLA, 131.2 (2016), p. 341. 10. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times, October 28, 1984, www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”; John O. Stark, Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information (Ohio University Press, 1980), p. 63. 14. Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” 15. Swanstrom, “The Peripheral Future,” n.p. 16. Daniel R. White, Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution, and Play (State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 206. 17. Hanjo Berressem, “Life on the Beach: The Natural Elements in Thomas Pynchon’s California Trilogy” in Scott McClintock and John Miller (eds.), Pynchon’s California (University of Iowa Press, 2014), p. 37. 18. See Urie Bronfenbrenner’s The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design (Harvard University Press, 2009). 19. Jason Siegel, “Meatspace Is Cyberspace: The Pynchonian Posthuman in Bleeding Edge,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4 (2016), p. 7. 20. Ibid., p. 8. 21. Daniel Punday, Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), p. 25. 22. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 56. 23. Alenda Chang, “Environmental Remediation,” electronic book review, July 6, 2015, https://archive.li/Nbv6y. 24. New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, “New York City Street Tree Map,” tree-map.nycgovparks.org/#speciesId-71298. 25. City of New York Parks and Recreation, “Street Trees for New York City,” http://www.nycgovparks.org/sub_your_park/trees_greenstreets/images/street_ trees_for_nyc.pdf. 26. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 16. 27. Loren J. Giesler, “Purple Seed Stain and Cercospora Blight,” Cropwatch, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, cropwatch.unl.edu/plantdisease/soybean/purple-seed-stain. 28. John Johnston, “Mediality in Vineland and Neuromancer,” in Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (eds.), Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology (Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 184.

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29. Peter L. Cooper, Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World (University of California Press, 1983), p. 87. 30. Chang, “Environmental Remediation,” n.p. 31. Stacey Olster, The Trash Phenomenon: Contemporary Literature, Popular Culture, and the Making of the American Century (University of Georgia Press, 2003). 32. David Cowart, “‘Down on the Barroom Floor of History’: Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge,” Postmodern Culture, 24 (2013), para. 16. 33. The Callery pear tree is eminently suitable in terms of New York’s traumas. As the 9/11 memorial website explains: “A Callery pear tree became known as the ‘Survivor Tree’ after enduring the September 11, 2001 terror attacks [. . .]. [T]he tree was discovered at Ground Zero [. . .]. After its recovery and rehabilitation, [. . .] [n]ew, smooth limbs extended from the gnarled stumps, creating a visible demarcation between the tree’s past and present”; see “The Survivor Tree,” 9/11 Memorial and Museum, www.911memorial.org/s urvivor-tree.

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chapter 9

Pynchon and New Political Activisms Michael O’Bryan

Though widely recognized as a historical novelist from the outset of his career, critical assessments of Thomas Pynchon as a politically engaged author were rare for much of the last century. Recent developments in critical theory and changes in global political activism have led to some treatments of Pynchon’s politics,1 but substantial work remains to be done, which must address two problems. First, Pynchon’s identifiably anarchist politics often do not register as politics within a literary academy steeped in Marxian historiography that has elided the practical and theoretical contributions of anarchism to twentieth-century radicalism. Second, complicating this problem, his politics evolve over the course of his career in response to world-historical shifts in leftist activism. To understand Pynchon’s politics, then, we must establish a baseline of the oftenunrecognized anarchist politics operative through all of his novels and then track the changes in this political outlook across his career. As the early novels show a fraught enthusiasm for the frail possibilities of the New Left, the collapse of leftist radicalism in the 1970s corresponds to a lengthy dearth of published material from the author. Pynchon’s first novel after this silence, Vineland (1990), anatomizes the collapse of the New Left and attributes it to factional infighting between an anarchist counterculture and Leninist organizations, but it ends on a hopeful note regarding the potential for the resurgence of anarchist resistance in a new radical generation. Anarchist resistance movements rapidly proliferated in the United States and globally in the two decades after that novel through the “anti-globalization movement,” organizing horizontally through network structures and making use of new internet and digital media technologies in their activities. Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013) bookend one of the most substantial periods of growth for this trend – the emergence in 2011 of the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and Occupy Wall Street. While the former novel looks with more hope than ever before toward the liberatory potential of anarchist radicalism, particularly in the 141

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digital age, the latter, which follows the collapse or mutation of anarchism’s 2011 manifestations, cautions against utopian faith in the staying power of such movements. Over the course of his career, Pynchon maintains his commitment to the philosophical grounds for anarchist organization while also grasping their inherent vice, promoting a historical vision where radical politics will spontaneously emerge in cyclical bursts, leaving the world changed but ultimately disappearing, always poised to reemerge in another world-historical moment.

Jacques Rancière and the Problem of Political Power To do what many critics have not and recognize Pynchon’s politics as politics, it is helpful to examine the work of Jacques Rancière, who theorizes “a form of democracy which does not comply with representative democracy.”2 A coauthor with Louis Althusser of the original French version of Reading Capital (1965) and a participant in the May 1968 student uprising in France, Rancière fell out with the academic left after 1968 largely over the implications of his unique definition of politics, by which he means “something other than the organization of bodies as a community and the management of places, powers, and functions,”3 managerial practices that he opposes to “politics” under the rubric of “the police.” For Rancière, politics are “more precisely the name of a singular disruption of this order of distribution of bodies.”4 In other words, politics manifest from the disagreement between a party who seeks something and a party who denies it, and thus by definition cannot exist in a stable system, being inherently disruptive and destabilizing. All true politics are revolutionary. This specialized definition of “politics” leads to one of the central insights of Rancière’s work, that “[p]olitics occurs because [. . .] the natural order of the shepherd kings, the warlords, or property owners is interrupted by a freedom that crops up and makes real the ultimate equality on which any social order rests.”5 But if revolutions are held together only by the rebels’ shared dispossession by the dominant order and their assertion of a right to speak against it, then the solidarity of revolutions rests only on the negative definition of a shared lack of power: “[f]or freedom – which is merely the position of those who have absolutely no other, no merit, no wealth – is counted at the same time as being common virtue.”6 This negative self-definition points to a fundamental problem for the dispossessed individuals in any political struggle, one with which Pynchon grapples for his entire career, and which raises for Rancière what is, according to his translator, “a question that would continue to preoccupy

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him in his later work: from what position do we speak and in the name of what or whom?”7 That is, if the revolting class of a political struggle manifests solidarity only through the shared dispossession of its members, from where does the revolutionary leader or cadre derive the moral authority, or even the empirical capability, to speak for all of the individuals in that class, with all the eccentricities, unique subject positions, and differing experiences between them? Revolutionary politics seeks justice for the dispossessed as a class, but for an individual or cadre to speak on behalf of a plural class, “we women,” “we workers,” and so forth, “reduce[s] this third person enunciated by a first person [. . .] to some kind of deceptive identification with an impossible or missing collective body.”8 Rancière’s expression of this problem forms one of the major reasons for his contemporary critical ascendance in the English-speaking academy, later than the post-Marxist colleagues from whom he diverged in the 1970s. He anticipates more recent theoretical accounts of resistance in the era of late capitalism, including such influential work as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, who observe that “[t]he fact that under the category of proletariat we understand all those exploited by and subject to capitalist domination should not indicate that the proletariat is a homogenous or undifferentiated unit. It is indeed cut through in various directions by differences and stratifications” (italics in original) of citizenship, relative class, gender, race, profession, and so on.9 From this consideration, Hardt and Negri come to a historical narrative anticipated by Pynchon and Rancière, where for the vertically organized hierarchies of state Marxism in the early twentieth century, “the idea of ‘the people’ has played a fundamental role [. . .] in establishing the authority of the organization and legitimating its use of violence. [. . .] This ambiguous relationship between the people and sovereignty accounts for [. . .] the recognition that the forms of domination and authority we are fighting against continually reappear in the resistance movements themselves.”10 On grounds such as these, Pynchon’s early-career enthusiasm for the New Left stemmed from its tendency toward horizontally networked grassroots movements around varied causes (prominently: campus free speech, antiwar protests, and black liberation) over the top-down organizational hierarchies inherent to Old Left institutions oriented toward state Marxism. The affinity is so strong, especially in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), that Pynchon criticism often has treated him as a primary theorist and spokesperson for the counterculture, with all the baggage that entails. Yet Pynchon was already thirty in the Summer of Love, his youth spent in Beat circles on the Greenwich Village scene of the

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1950s,11 and he more properly belongs to the constellation of half-distanced literary observers of the 1960s in which we include the likes of Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Joan Didion. Pynchon’s affinities for the New Left hardly require repetition at this point, but the trend to identify him too closely with the 1960s means that the early novels’ cautionary grappling with the problems of revolutionary power rehearsed by Rancière or Hardt and Negri are often overlooked. For instance in “The Counterforce,” the final section of Gravity’s Rainbow, whose title itself evokes the notion of a revolutionary power replicating the structure of what it fights, we see a burgeoning resistance to the transnational cartels dividing the globe after the World War II, which bears more than a few symbolic resemblances to the counterculture of the novel’s own moment.12 The Counterforce has rallied around the cause of locating and saving the protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, who they take as a symbol of “the Preterite,” the global dispossessed, and yet while they presume to speak for his needs, they displace the concerns of the actual individual in favor of an abstract symbol; “[w]e were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop,” a Counterforce leader says in a convivial interview with the capitalist-cheerleading Wall Street Journal decades later (738). Understanding the theoretical concern that revolutionary leaders tend to suppress the concerns of those they would liberate is thus a necessary context to understanding the novel’s frequently quoted statement that “[t]he Man has a branch office in each of our brains” (712). Because revolutionary leaders are as prone to the will to power as the oppressive state structures they would overthrow, The Crying of Lot 49 models a mode of resistance grounded only in the embrace of dispossession that Rancière locates as the basis for political action. Oedipa Maas uncovers a subversive network of loosely affiliated communities, who eschew intervention into the mechanisms of state power in favor of “a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery” (124), coordinated through an underground communication network whose acronym, WASTE, announces the participants’ solidarity as society’s dispossessed and whose full meaning, We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire, renounces the impetus to speak on behalf of others. Pynchon’s enthusiasm for 1960s radicalism rests on how closely it hews to Jesús Arrabal’s “anarchist miracle,” where “revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself” (120). Miraculous, surely, but also a miracle to which Pynchon and Rancière both felt they bore witness in the late 1960s, when historical forces converged in a perfect storm to

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quickly produce a horizontal and nonhierarchical revolutionary movement engaged in Rancière’s specialized notion of politics.

Vineland, Old Failures, and New Hopes As clearly as the New Left contributed to concrete gains in American life – the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the mainstreaming of feminism – counterculture as life practice faded post-1960s. While the Nixon administration’s reactionary stance toward activists and the civil rights violations of the FBI’s COINTELPRO cannot be ignored for their contribution to the New Left’s collapse, there was no shortage of self-sabotage in the movement. Long-growing fissures ruptured at the disastrous 1969 national convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), where several factions adherent to various subsets of Marxism-Leninism, a theoretically unaligned counterculture, and coalitions formed around various identity politics all fought over the question of who has the right to speak for whom and how. As the main organization of youth radicalism disintegrated in the fallout in the early 1970s and the Weather Underground lost public support by becoming increasingly violent, the ongoing life of the era’s activism by the late 1970s consisted predominantly of postmodern theorists in the academy and the second wave of feminism.13 After publishing Gravity’s Rainbow in the same year that his old college friend Kirkpatrick Sale published his postmortem of the New Left, SDS, Pynchon printed little for seventeen years, only bolstering the critical identification of his career with 1960s radicalism. When Vineland broke the silence, Pynchon began what would become a new period of literary productivity by anatomizing the causes of the New Left’s collapse. Set in 1984, no doubt for the year’s Orwellian overtones, nearly half of the novel comprises flashbacks to 1969–1970, inviting consideration of how the Reagan era was historically possible in the wake of 1960s radicalism. COINTELPRO and what the novel repeatedly calls the “Nixonian reaction” come under heavy scrutiny, but Vineland focuses equally on betrayal within the movement. While much of the criticism on the novel that addresses its relationship with political radicalism focuses on how the counterculture sold out to commercial excess and media saturation, just as the radical filmmaker Frenesi Gates buys in to state power by becoming an undercover agent, scant attention has been paid to the central drama of a fictional student uprising typical of its real-world counterparts, where a factional power struggle undoes the movement. Two figures emerge at the forefront of the uprising at the College of the Surf:

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Weed Atman, who “ambled into celebrity” rather than consciously seeking leadership and who “preach[es] humane revolution” practiced through open dialogue and teach-ins (205, 229), and Rex Snuvvle, a member of a fictional Leninist cadre focused on armed insurrection against state power (229–31). The philosophical friction between Weed’s anarchism and Rex’s Marxism-Leninism intensifies over the course of the uprising, providing federal prosecutor Brock Vond the stress point he needs to subvert the movement.14 Vond manipulates Rex into believing Weed is a traitor to the movement and sets the stage for him to murder Weed in reprisal, and Rex follows the script set for him by an agent of state power. The chaos that ensues from the murder allows a federal incursion into the College of the Surf, and “[a] common feeling, reported in interviews later, was of a clear break just ahead with everything they’d known. Some said ‘end,’ others ‘transition,’ but they could all feel it approaching” (244). Though Vineland attributes the collapse of the New Left at least in part to the power games Rancière warns against whenever revolutionary leaders suppress the individual perspectives of those they presume to represent, the novel gestures toward a possible resurgence of radical politics. It concludes in the narrative present with a ritualistic multigenerational gathering of revolutionaries with a history that both precedes and outlives the 1960s. “Political family,” Zoyd remarks as he observes a routine where, “[o]ne by one, as other voices joined in, the names began – some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia – Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger” (371–72). Though this cacophony of aggressive dissent may immediately seem a scene of dysfunctional family dynamics or democratic decay away from consensus, it in fact represents Rancière’s vision of a properly functioning politics. “According to the reigning idyll,” he writes, “consensus democracy is a reasonable agreement between individuals and social groups,” which presupposes “the disappearance of any gap between a party to a dispute and a part of society.”15 By obscuring the distinction between a representative party and the mass it stands for, consensus becomes the mechanism by which managerial functions we colloquially assign to “politics,” but which Rancière assigns to “the police,” can accommodate dissent without alleviating the injustice that caused the dissent. “The good regime is one that takes on the appearance of an oligarchy for the oligarchs and democracy for the demos,”16 but such duality only benefits those already in power.

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In Rancière’s vision of a true – rather than apparent – democracy, the dispossessed express their grievances rather than lose them to the half measures of representational politics, so that “[t]here is democracy if there is a specific sphere where the people appear [. . .,] if there are specific political performers who are neither agents of the state apparatus nor parts of society [. . .,] if there is a dispute conducted by a nonidentary subject on the stage where the people emerge.”17 By designating a physical space for revolutionaries to meet in recognition of their mutual dispossession and express their views without coalescing into a single identary subject such as “the people,” the Traverse-Becker reunion enacts what Rancière would call dissensus, an attempt to resolve, as Hardt and Negri put it, “the challenge posed [. . .] to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different.”18 Vineland’s final pages feature Prairie Wheeler, teenage punk dissident, standing on the physical periphery of this space, saying “[t]ake me anyplace you want” to an absent (and, unbeknownst to her, dead) Vond (384), who may be her father. The symbolism is clear.19 In his early career, Pynchon was enthusiastic about the anarchist energies of the New Left akin to Rancière’s vision of true politics. Dispirited by the movement’s failure to maintain solidarity while respecting difference, he began the second half of his career in the late twentieth century by presenting young radicals poised on the cusp of a choice between the statist power games common to Rex and Vond on one side and, on the other, a spirit of dissensus that passed with the late 1960s but may yet have its day.

Inherent Vice and the New Radicalism Pynchon criticism has historically overlooked the author’s overt politics at least in part because an academy steeped in Marxist historiography does not recognize such calls for a horizontally organized decentralism as politics and has erased the historical contributions of such anarchist movements to global radicalism.20 Prior to the recent political turn in Pynchon studies, when Pynchon’s visions of radically democratic decentralism were recognized as attempts at political theory, they were generally dismissed as poorly theorized magical thinking.21 But these scholastic pronouncements run contrary to the unfolding of current events. As John McClure has noted of Vineland’s conclusion, “[i]t was, of course, in just such communities, up and down the coast from Northern California to Washington, that the grassroots American antiglobalization movement was born.”22 Anthropologist and prominent organizer David Graeber concurs in McClure’s attribution of the

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antiglobalization movement to a late-century resurgence of grassroots horizontalism (though he objects to the term antiglobalization), but also notes that the trend goes far further than the Battle of Seattle, extending to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, antiausterity movements across Europe, and the post-9/11 antiwar movement in the United States: “[M]any of those who would like to see revolutionary change might not feel entirely happy about having to accept that most of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism.”23 It begs the question to dismiss these twenty-first-century activist movements as apolitical because of their rejection of leadership hierarchies and their hesitance to engage in parliamentary maneuvering, since, as Rancière has theorized, challenging reigning definitions of politics is exactly the point of such organization. As Graeber notes, anarchism “is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks [. . .] based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy” (italics in original),24 by which he means something close to what Rancière would call “dissensus.” While Graeber and Pynchon make frequent reference to anarchism specifically, Rancière, Hardt, and Negri are less likely to do so; this is perhaps due to a recognition that reducing the multitude to an identary subject can inhibit identification with any “ism,” even anarchism. Yet all of their theorizations reflect on the underlying structures of the most prominent global activist movements of the twenty-first century, which, despite their many differences, also manifest shared doctrinal positions. Foremost is the preference for decentralized grassroots networks that Graeber identifies. Second, from Tahrir Square in the Arab Spring to Zucotti Park in Occupy Wall Street to freeway shutdowns in Black Lives Matter, as Rancière has put it in an interview about contemporary activism, is “the fact of people occupying a space and their mode of occupying it without being the expression of any specific group, any specific organization, any specific class.”25 Third, stemming from antihierarchical network structures, is a resistance to designating any formal spokespeople in favor of general assemblies rooted in an “equality through horizontality [. . .] [as] an instrument of radical inclusion and of decision making,”26 extending an “invitation to everyone to affiliate and participate – on the basis of a respectful contact with one another.”27 Finally, these structures go beyond mere strategic tactics, as “participants [are] consciously prefiguring the kind of society they want to live in” (italics in original).28 These features of contemporary leftist activism leave much more at stake in understanding Pynchon’s anarchism than a proper interpretive matrix for his early career –

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missing his politics means missing that he anticipated world-historical developments in twenty-first-century radicalism. The proliferation of anarchism in the two decades between Vineland and Inherent Vice registers in how the latter novel returns to the themes of the former, deepening the cynicism of its portrait of the 1960s even while increasing the optimism of its prolepses to the twenty-first century. The novel is set in 1970, after the disintegration of the New Left portrayed in Vineland, when it has become clear that “everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch” (IV 129–30), when the Manson Family trials (a thematic obsession in the book) have brought on the “[e]nd of a certain kind of innocence” (38), and, quite uncharacteristically for Pynchon, the realistic outcomes of hard-drug abuse manifest through several heroin-addicted characters who have gone from “[f]lower child to wasted derelict, zap, like magic” (36). Despite its single temporal setting, though, the novel is also riddled with dramatic ironies that gesture forward to the political challenges of its post-2008 publication, as the end of the Bush administration and the global financial crisis were reenergizing an already ascendant era of anarchist activism. The police brutality scandal of the LAPD’s Rampart Division is forecast by the activities of “a little private militia the LAPD uses whenever they don’t want to look bad in the papers” (195); climate change is evoked as Doc has several visions of a future where Los Angeles drowns under “all this karmic waterscape connecting together, as the rain went on falling and the land vanished” (166); and the seeds of the housing-market collapse are planted by the predatory land developer Mickey Wolfmann, who displaces the indigent classes across South Los Angeles for his planned communities (17), while middle-class home buyers are presented not as “new money exactly [. . .] more like new debt” (90). Inherent Vice presents the legacy of the 1960s with a gloomy pessimism symbolized by the recurrent motif of fog banks obscuring Doc’s view of events, but the proleptic references to the novel’s time of publication suggest that if “th[e] regional dream of enlightenment [. . .] might one day turn out to be a false dawn” (207), it is also true that “you can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you’ve got to get back up onto the freeway again” (40). This latter quote from early in the novel foreshadows the conclusion, where Doc drives onto a freeway shrouded in a fog representing the dark future of the nation, hoping “[f]or the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead” (369). As he participates in a spontaneous LA ritual where drivers chain

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together, headlights’ distance apart, to guide each other through the weather, Doc has a strange reverie in which he supposes that “[s]omeday [. . .] there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories [. . .] to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog” (368). This ending with a vision of the future where computers help organize “temporary communes” only avoids non sequitur in the context of the novel’s peppered references to ARPAnet, the Department of Defense–funded experiment at networking computer labs at a handful of universities across the United States that would provide the architectural map for the internet. Though it was funded by military budgets, Doc’s detective mentor suggests that the state has created something it does not fully understand, generating subversive potential: “[I]t’s government money, and those fuckers don’t care what they spend, and we’ve had some useful surprises already” (54). ARPAnet functions as a deus ex machina at several key points in the plot, providing crucial insights that advance Doc’s investigation.29 Much of what we learn about the shadowy international plot behind the kidnappings that Doc investigates comes from hacked “countersubversive files” documenting COINTELPRO activity (94–96), and hacking also later locates Shasta, the victim whose kidnapping has initiated the entire case (258). ARPAnet, one character muses, will someday become akin to what LSD was for the counterculture, “a channel to somethin they didn’t want us to see” (195). By weaving this thematic thread through a novel that conjoins lament for the collapse of 1960s radicalism with hopeful gestures to new community-building in the present, Inherent Vice elaborates another key feature of horizontal activism in the twenty-first century: online presence and social-media organizing.

Bleeding Edge and Network Anarchism While the causes of the paradigm shift toward horizontally organized anarchism in twenty-first-century radicalism are sufficiently complex to warrant their own monograph, it is uncontroversial that the growth of the internet made it considerably easier for dispersed grassroots movements to quickly organize networks of affinity that could coordinate solidarity actions. As Hardt and Negri have it, if contemporary activist movements understand that “[t]he multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity,” then “a distributed network such as the Internet is a good initial image or model

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for the multitude because, first, the various nodes remain different but are all connected in the Web, and, second, the external boundaries of the network are open such that new nodes and new relationships can always be added.”30 For this reason, the vast array of resistance movements across the globe that they survey “[n]ot only [. . .] employ technologies such as the Internet as organizing tools, they also begin to adopt these technologies as models for their own organizational structures.”31 The dual sense of internet as organizational tool and philosophical model certainly holds for Occupy, a small grassroots action in Pynchon’s native New York that blossomed into a months-long series of protests in at least twenty US cities with the aid of no leadership hierarchy or institutional infrastructure. This “combination of hi-tech networking and notech gathering,”32 as SDS veteran Todd Gitlin reports, “converge[d], remarkably, in that zeitgeisty way in which people who don’t know one another sometimes get more or less the same idea at the same time.”33 At least three discrete, small protest groups separately resolved to occupy public space near Wall Street at various points over the Summer of 2011, finally managing to trigger the mass occupation of Zuccotti Park in the fall after using their combined social-media networks to call allies to their direct action. As each new member built the organization’s platform by adding their own social-media network to the cause, “people with quiet fantasies of a revolution and a communal lifestyle [. . .] [were] stunned by the rapture of learning there were others who felt the same way, a discovery that only happened because of the rise of Internet social networking.”34 As Hardt and Negri observed in other movements, the internet became both a tool of and a metaphor for the movement, with one organizer saying in an interview that Occupy’s online livestream was “the central nervous system of the entire operation [. . .,] a big part of how we disseminate our information, raise the money, everything.”35 Only two years after Inherent Vice predicted that computer networks might help future radicals build temporary communes, it appeared the internet might enable the dispersed networks of affinity Oedipa chased in The Crying of Lot 49. With the so-called Arab Spring and the Indignados antiausterity movement rising in the same year as Occupy, organized and enacted upon similar structural models, 2011 could seem like the year of the “anarchist miracle,” where “revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless.” It is thus impossible, or at least unwise, to read 2013’s Bleeding Edge without considering how the history of these protest movements informs a novel about visionary computer programmers scrabbling through the turn-of-the-century techbubble collapse and grappling with the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.

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These programmers believe that “the vast undefined anarchism of cyberspace” is the path to reshaping the world (327), leading the veteran leftist organizer March Kelleher to exclaim: “Their idealism [. . .] I haven’t seen anything like it since the sixties. These kids are out to change the world” (116). Much of the plot revolves around the fate of the highly experimental, “widely coveted yet ill-defined” program DeepArcher (68), one of whose inventors, in a case of art imitating life imitating art, shares a first name with Justin Frankel, real-life inventor of a darknet file-sharing program named WASTE, after the system of underground communication in The Crying of Lot 49. DeepArcher represents Deep Web information searches through images of traveling in physical space, creating “a virtual sanctuary to escape to from the many varieties of real-word discomfort. A grand-scale motel for the afflicted, a destination reachable by virtual midnight express from anyplace with a keyboard” (74). Recognizing the importance of shared public space to democratic resistance movements, Pynchon metaphorically presents Deep Web internet usage sans corporate-engineered browsers and search engines as a physical space in which all the variously dispossessed across the world can voluntarily associate. In this space, “the visuals you think you’re seeing are being contributed by users all over the world. All for free. Hacker ethic. Each one doing their piece of it, then just vanishing uncredited” (69). The virtual anarchist space of DeepArcher is built much as movements like Occupy are, emerging from a leaderless voluntary association, changing and adapting to the perspectives of each new member, growing horizontally across geographical lines as only networks can do. But despite how “the Internet kept evolving, away from military into civilian [. . .,] empowering all these billions of people, the promise, the freedom” (420), all the old problems of self-betrayal identified in Pynchon’s early writing still manifest. Each of the programmers in the book is continually challenged by the “[s]ame old satanic pact, only more of it” (47), wondering if in the wake of the tech collapse they should take corporate programming jobs, which will almost inevitably involve service to the security apparatus of the state or the transnational flow of capital into the hands of the global elite. DeepArcher’s programmers, Justin and Lucas, evade this devil’s bargain, deciding instead to open-source the code for the program so it can become a true space of radical inclusion (356). Still, though they make this decision at the novel’s climax and much of the plot has revolved around this drama, surprisingly few meaningful consequences emerge from the decision in the novel’s conclusion. Though the book is full of coded references to chatter among underground communities that forecasted 9/11, Maxine is unable to unravel the mystery, and no

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one can stop the attacks. Perhaps more damning, we can infer from our position of reading a history that has already unfolded that the underground communities of DeepArcher will be unable to stop the intrusive surveillance or imperial military invasions that we in the present know are coming. Instead, as DeepArcher becomes open to an increasingly wider coalition of views, “every day [it has] more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to” (432). If Bleeding Edge likens Occupy’s network anarchism to the disintegrating optimism of the tech crash, the comparison is not exactly flattering. After all, “[h]ow is a business plan that depends on faith in ‘network effects’ kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme?” (71–72).

Conclusion: The Limitations of Network Anarchism In hindsight, of course, the Arab Spring was bound to metastasize into ambivalent political situations at best, and Occupy to disintegrate as a movement – graffiti that was already on the wall as Pynchon was composing Bleeding Edge. So this late novel retains the concerns of the earlier books while adding new ones. If anarchist emergence is always threatened by the co-optation of would-be leaders from within and without, as Pynchon has always thought, in this post-Occupy novel, anarchist revolution is also threatened by its own inherent vices – a tendency to disintegration and lack of focus that are inborn to leaderless decentralism. Network organization responds poorly to the concentrated violence of a centrally organized state apparatus, as we have seen with the retrenchment of military dictatorships in the Middle East and the dissolution of Occupy at the hands of a nationally coordinated effort between nineteen police departments to evict occupations across the country.36 The refusal of the revolting order to speak for itself as a unit also presents several difficulties. It obstructs efforts to achieve concrete goals; Occupy notoriously refused to articulate demands for some time, and when it tried to evolve mechanisms to do so, the stress of factional infighting threatened the coherence of the movement.37 But even if goals emerge, in an organization based only on voluntary affinity, there is little guarantee they will be productive; we must remember that the Occupy-aligned anarchist hacking collective Anonymous and the alt-right troll networks that mainstreamed conspiracy theory in the 2016 US election both emerged from the discussion boards of 4chan. And even if these difficulties can be tactically overcome, perhaps the greatest challenge is whether it is sustainable to

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constantly live a pre-figurative politics that upend the most fundamental axioms of citizenship and community under modernity. “The GAs [general assemblies] empower you,” an Occupy organizer told Gitlin, “but they have no permanence [. . .] You can’t keep this up. You burn out.”38 These are, of course, the most common criticisms of network activism in the twenty-first century, and Pynchon seems to be well aware of them, as Doc forecasts a “temporary commune” and Jesús hopes for an “anarchist miracle.” However it is a mistake to reject Pynchon’s politics as politics on the grounds of their failure to project a liberatory permanence. Contrary to the commonplace rejection of network anarchism as unrealistically utopian, Rancière would posit his definition of politics as a rejection of the utopian impulses he finds shared in state Marxist and liberal democratic visions of historical fulfillment.39 “Politics,” he claims, “is rare. It is always local and occasional. Its actual eclipse is perfectly real and no political science exists that could map its future.”40 If revolutionary theorists must grapple with network anarchism’s tendency to dissolve, this does not obviate the need to consider the problems of power outlined by Rancière and Pynchon, to which Hardt and Negri, in classical anarchist tradition, attribute the tendency of vertically organized revolutionary hierarchies to reproduce the oppression of the state. The way forward presented by Pynchon’s oeuvre is for revolutionary movements to release the impetus to futurity and focus on the ethically sound practices of anarchist organizing – his politics are process, not product. With a career that spans the rise and fall of the New Left, and the subsequent rise of a global anarchism that now may be in retreat again, Pynchon has constructed a vision of the constant ebb and flow of radical energy, always likely to be co-opted by either the will to power or the dissolution of its purpose, always poised to spontaneously emerge again. And if this vision offers no static future of total equality, it is also the case that no revolutionary moment leaves the world unchanged – as the Civil Rights Act, feminist theory, and the queer rights movement find their origins in the now-old New Left, so now are income inequality and lopsided global wealth distribution bywords in mainstream media discourse in a way they had not been before Occupy. And so, Pynchon’s career would seem to indicate that small-scale liberations can continue to happen, in fits and starts, with setbacks and resurgences: “What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ’nother song” (IV 334).

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Notes 1. Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon (University of Georgia Press, 2017); Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Samuel Thomas, Pynchon and the Political (Routledge, 2007). 2. Isabell Lorey, “The 2011 Occupy Movements: Rancière and the Crisis of Democracy,” Theory, Culture & Society, 31.7/8 (2014), p. 46. 3. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement (1995), trans. by Julie Rose (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 99. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 16. 6. Ibid., p. 9. 7. Gabriel Rockhill, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum, 2004), p. 2. 8. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 48. 9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 53. 10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (Penguin, 2004), p. 79. 11. David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (Picador, 2001). 12. For further exploration of Pynchon’s Counterforce as critique of 1960s radicalism, see Jeffrey S. Baker, “A Democratic Pynchon: Counterculture, Counterforce, and Participatory Democracy,” Pynchon Notes, 32–33 (1993), pp. 107–12. 13. Among the many studies that rehearse this narrative, widely accepted in its broad contours, the mainstays are Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987); James A. Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987); Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (Random House, 1973). 14. For more detailed discussion of the historical basis for the novel’s portrayal of differences between anarchism and Leninism in the New Left, see Michael O’Bryan, “In Defense of Vineland: Pynchon, Anarchism, and the New Left,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 62.1 (March 2016), pp. 1–31. 15. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 102. 16. Ibid., p. 74. 17. Ibid., p. 100. 18. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. xiv. 19. For further discussion of the family reunion through the lens of Hardt and Negri, see Carswell, Occupy Pynchon, pp. 11–13, 39–44, where the inviting comparisons to Occupy Wall Street’s organizational structure are also observed. 20. For the recuperated significance of anarchism in two centuries of radical history, see Andrew Cornell, Unruly Equality: US Anarchism in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2016); Peter Marshall,

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

michael o’bryan Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (PM Press, 1992); and George Woodcock, Anarchism (Toronto, 2004). For recent treatments of anarchist politics in Pynchon’s work, see Graham Benton, Unruly Narratives: The Anarchist Dimension in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (LAP Lambert Press, 2012); Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture, pp. 65–101; Seán Molloy, “Escaping the Politics of Irredeemable Earth: Anarchy and Transcendence in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon,” Theory & Event, 13.3 (2010), n.p.; and Henry Veggian, “Thomas Pynchon Against the Day,” boundary 2, 35.1 (2008), pp. 197–215. George Levine, “Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon’s Fiction,” in George Levine and David Leverenz (eds.), Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 113–36; Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, “Do You Believe in Magic?: Literary Thinking after the New Left,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 18.2 (2005); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 6–10. John McClure, “Do They Believe in Magic? Politics and Postmodern Literature,” boundary 2, 36.2 (2009), p. 136. David Graeber, “The New Anarchists,” New Left Review, 13 (January/ February 2002), pp. 61–62. Ibid., p. 70. Charles Esche, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Jacques Rancière, “Assemblies in Art and Politics: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” Theory, Culture & Society, 31.7/8 (2014), pp. 34–35. Lorey, “Occupy Movements,” p. 46. Ibid., p. 47. Jonathan Smucker, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (AK Press, 2017), p. 56. Christopher K. Coffman also discusses this quality of ARPAnet in his chapter in this collection. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, pp. xiv-xv. Ibid., p. 82. Anthony Barnett quoted in Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (Itbooks, 2012), p. 4. Ibid., p. 13. Will Bunch, October 1, 2011: The Battle of Brooklyn Bridge, Kindle, location 88. John Heilemann, “2012 = 1968?,” New York Magazine, November 27, 2011, nymag.com/news/politics/occupy-wall-street-2011–12/. Gitlin, Occupy, p. 40. Ibid., pp. 109–12. Ibid., p. 137. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 113. Ibid., p. 139.

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chapter 10

Threat and Crisis in Twenty-First-Century Pynchon Hanjo Berressem

Prelude At least since the mid-twentieth century, the Western world has considered itself to be in a state of permanent crisis that afflicts the cultural no less than the political, economic, and social spheres. Following 9/11, this feeling has further intensified. With terrorist attacks having shifted from vast, convoluted high-tech plots to almost every-day terrorist events perpetrated by small groups or individuals with the help of low-tech weapons, such as knives, axes, or vehicles, citizens are in a constant state of fear and insecurity. The financial sector is stressed by the corrosive effects of deregulated, out-of-control financial markets, the social contribution of which tends to be measured solely by the stock-market situation rather than by putting this virtual and fluid economy into relation with its reallife effects. These effects include the global growth in precarious modes of life and, through finance’s increasing influence on health-care systems, a contribution to the growing insecurity of the weak, the ailing, and the aged. The medial background rumble to this state of permanent crisis, which plays itself out amid the new indiscernibility of the political and the economic that defines Donald Trump’s presidency, is made up of the ubiquitous noise of sensationalist media and Twitter feeds that show a blatant disrespect for what one in the past would have called responsible, fact-based reporting. Everywhere, spin doctors and politicians are in control of the dissemination of alternative facts.

A State of Permanent Crisis Tracing Pynchon’s take on crisis in his early work, as well as his take on terrorist crisis in Bleeding Edge (2013), this chapter examines Pynchon’s atfirst-sight counterintuitive approach to the issue. Rather than argue against 157

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the proliferation of crises, Pynchon, in the light of the implementation of new systems of control and surveillance that have emerged in the pervasive, deeply toxic atmosphere of and belief in an “infinite capitalism,” argues along the lines of “the more crisis, the better.” In very general terms, a crisis is a point of bifurcation that determines the overall parameters within which future events will play themselves out. In physics, such a turning point is defined as a moment of instability at which a given system might or might not topple – catastrophically, as mathematician Réne Thom famously describes it in Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Outline of a General Theory of Models (1976) – from one force field or, more precisely, from one “attractor,” to another. Outside of the neutrality of physics, where all catastrophic shifts, whether detrimental or helpful to specific systems, are considered as moments of crisis, such exceptional moments of systemic instability within an overall noncritical landscape are by default considered as detrimental to the system undergoing crisis, and it is difficult to conceptually disengage the notion of crisis from this negative bias. What, however, if one were to entertain the somewhat counterintuitive idea that the world is quite literally laced, always and everywhere, with moments of bifurcation and thus with moments of crisis. Of these, some microscopically small ones blossom, by way of positive feedback loops, into macroscopic, human-scale crises; others, which are too vast for humans to perceive, such as cosmic crises that play themselves out in the vast depths of other nebulae, are registered by highly sensitive technological machines of capture, or when they have direct effects on the human scale. In the middle of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin diagnosed a shift from considering crises as exceptional to a “critical ontology” in which a continuous state of crisis underlies the overall state of things. How, he asked, can contemporary lyric poetry “have as its basis an experience [eine Erfahrung] for which the shock experience [Chockerlebnis] has become the norm.”1 In other words, how can lyrical poetry be written in a state of permanent and all-pervasive crisis? Benjamin’s take on the notion of crisis points to a fundamental reversal. Rather than having to deal with singular crises that shake up a “normally” stable situation, we have been living, at least since the mid-twentieth century, in a permanent state of crisis that makes up the very ground on which culture, as well as the world at large, operates. The background to Benjamin’s conceit is not so much a scientific theory or a philosophical axiom but the increasing speed, intensity, and violence of modern life, which he conceptualizes on the basis of Sigmund Freud’s

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notion of trauma, understood as the unpredictable and violent disruption of a living system’s physical or psychic integrity. While one result of a constant state of crisis is, as it is for Benjamin, the normalization of shock and trauma, crises also allow for shifts to states of newness in that they release the potentiality that resides in moments of instability. In fact, if the world is a ceaseless bringing about of moments of crisis and every moment harbors multiple, to-a-large-degree-imperceptible crises, the question is no longer so much about how to evade crises, but rather about how to conceptually and pragmatically manage their ceaseless occurrence. In other words, how to administer a landscape of events that is, at every moment, inherently critical? How to live in and with constant crises? Pynchon’s work proposes an approach to critical scenarios that shares Benjamin’s assumption of the pervasiveness rather than the exceptionality of crisis. At the same time, the framework within which crises play themselves out in his work changes. In his early work up to and including Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the difficulty, if not the impossibility of administering critical systems – in terms of the scientific field of nonlinear dynamics, these are systems that, such as the “system of history,” are sensitive to initial conditions – is generally described as inherently problematic or even tragic. Even while Pynchon’s work is aware of the openness and complexity of the “system of history,” characters tend to see this openness as detrimental to their attempts to create historical order. Brigadier Pudding’s attempt to list all historical bifurcations that might come to define the next epoch in a work-in-progress titled “Things That Can Happen in European Politics” is doomed to fail because of what Deleuze and Guattari call the “contingent, singular,” and thus incomputable structure of historical time2: “‘Never make it,’ he found himself muttering at the beginning of each day’s work – ‘it’s changing out from under me. Oh, dodgy – very dodgy’” (GR 77). Similarly, in V. (1963), Father Fairing had mused about the same impossibility of measuring the critical potential of an event in his paper “The Situation as an N-Dimensional Mishmash” (470). Between Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon (1997), Pynchon’s theoretical references shift from entropy and the inevitability of the increase of disorder to those of deterministic chaos and dissipative systems and thus to a logic of crisis considered from within the registers of open rather than closed systems. This shift can be felt, for instance, in the humorous image, in Mason & Dixon, of a river reaching a critical threshold at which point it catastrophically changes its course. Here Pynchon makes an almost direct reference to Edward Lorenz’s image of a chaotic trajectory,

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which Lorenz illustrates by a ski’s route down a slope and the vast changes that are caused by a minimally different starting position (another image would be the trajectory of a ball in a pachinko machine): Mr. Knockwood, the landlord, [. . .] spends hours every day not with Earth Fortifications, but studying rather the passage of Water across his land, and constructing elaborate works to divert its flow [. . .] “You don’t smoak how it is,” he argues, “ – all that has to happen is some Beaver, miles upstream from here, moves a single Pebble, – suddenly, down here, everything’s changed! The creek’s a mile away, running through the Horse Barn! Acres of Forest no longer exist! And that Beaver don’t even know what he’s done! (364)

In his mid-career work, in fact, Pynchon comes to fully embrace the logic that the causes for crises are infinitely complex and thus impossible to ascertain, just as in Libra (1988) Don DeLillo comes to the conclusion that if the success or failure of the assassination of John F. Kennedy might come down to factors such as the weather during that day, the reasons for such massive crises as World War II are entirely inscrutable. While such a position undermines conspiracy theories and deep historical analyses, it opens up the perhaps more relevant and political question of who seizes a crisis. Who takes advantage of it? And what are the reasons for and the logic of such captures? If crises are the result of a dynamics that has brought a system to a critical cusp from where it might either return to stability or topple over into a new overall dynamics, the judgment on whether these crises are moments of either danger or potentiality depends on the position one takes in relation to the overall dynamics of the system. In terms of a political crisis, the powers in control of the system will by default attempt to maintain the status quo, while oppositional powers will work to exploit the situation and to increase the crisis. In these dynamics, Pynchon invariably opts for attempts to open up the potentiality of the unexpected and the new.

Crises and Technologies: Luddites, Looms, Computers The problematics of crisis and criticality enter Pynchon’s work early on. His early short story “Under the Rose,” published in 1961 in Noble Savage and later transmuted into chapter 3 of his 1963 novel V., is set on the eve and against the historical backdrop of the Fashoda crisis of 1898. This crisis brought France and Britain to the brink of war over imperial claims of ownership in Africa and is treated with a recognition that colonialism is

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ultimately nothing but a giant real-estate project that leads to what Pynchon in Vineland calls countless “tales of dispossession and betrayal” (172). The story uses the genre of the spy novel to stage what is its central focus: the historical transition from a cultural and political logic of individualism to a world suffused with and dissolved into bureaucracies, statistics, and mass organizations. “[H]istory,” the narrator notes, focalizing Porpentine, “was being made no longer through the virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines” (SL 107). This general shift happens during what might have become a decisive political moment or, as Molly Hite puts it, “a point of historical discontinuity.”3 As with the fictional missed encounter of an American and a Russian battleship in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), however – the novel recounts that in 1864, the American Disgruntled and either the Russian Bogatir or the Gaidamak passed each other in the night without engaging in what would have been “the very first military confrontation between Russia and America” (49) – the instability of the political situation during the Fashoda crisis will turn out not to lead to a decisive political change. For Pynchon, however, it is an appropriate setting for a more imperceptible but very decisive moment of historical discontinuity. “Under the Rose” marks the critical point at which Western society begins to privilege the machinic over the traditionally human. As Pynchon notes in Slow Learner, the underlying question posed in the story is whether history is “personal or statistical” (18). Older spies like Porpentine are helpless against a new brand of spy who functions as an anonymous cog in a larger bureaucratic machine. Symptomatically, the new generation of spies are quite literally cyborgs, as becomes apparent when Bongo-Shaftsbury shows the wires that lead from his arm into his brain. He pushed back the sleeve of his coat to remove a cuff-link. He began to roll back the cuff of his shirt. [. . .] Shiny and black against the unsunned flesh was a miniature electric switch, single-pole, double-throw, sewn into the skin. Thin silver wires ran from its terminals up the arm, disappearing under the sleeve. [. . .] “The wires run up into my brain. When the switch is closed like this I act the way I do now. When it is thrown the other – [. . .] Everything works by electricity,” Bongo-Shaftsbury explained, soothing. “And it is simple, and clean.” (SL 121)

Already here, Pynchon sets up what will become, in his later work, a narrative pattern. Within a larger crisis that may or may not lead to

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a systemic change, another, less perceptible but ultimately more important crisis plays itself out. Throughout his work, Pynchon sets his narratives within moments of historical, cultural, and technological crisis. By way of Bongo-Shaftsbury’s embodiment of the shift from the human into the machinic, for instance, the story is linked not only to V., in which that shift is perhaps the most pervasive leitmotif, but also to Pynchon’s 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” whose argument unfolds in relation to the technological and social crisis brought about by the growing industrialization of the nineteenth century and to Luddism as a response to that industrialization.4 In that essay, Pynchon follows the Luddite sentiment first into the diegetic time of Gravity’s Rainbow, which is set during and shortly after World War II, although its epilogue, which describes the Rocket dropping onto the roof of San Francisco’s Orpheus Theater, projects the narrative into the 1973 real-time of the novel’s publication. As World War II draws to a close, Pynchon notes, the logic of industrialization has created the largest imaginable global crisis: By 1945, the factory system – which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution – had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz.5

Although the crisis of the Industrial Revolution has led to the horror of global warfare, Pynchon ends the essay, somewhat surprisingly, with what one might call a strong endorsement of rather than a warning about moments of crisis: If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.6

Pynchon’s vision of a sci-fi cyborg evokes a revolution that develops from within the technological field. Only a convergence of several technological developments, Pynchon argues, can bring the status quo to a crisis. If the Luddites’ destruction of machines from the position of an extratechnological outside is ultimately unsuccessful, the intervention of an unpredictable techno-trickster, Pynchon hopes, will catch the powers in control off guard and promise, perhaps, the opening up, from within the

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technological, of another “free Zone.” That, in turn, would open up the possibility of a revolution that Pynchon relates to the American revolution considered as a moment of crisis from which something amazing emerged. It is as if technology, somewhat like capitalism in Deleuze and Guattari, would create from within itself its own “lines of flight” and movements of deterritorialization. In Pynchon’s 1984 analysis, the focus shifts from a critique of technology per se to a critique of its uses, from lines of flight to what might be called, following Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, various “machines of capture.” As Pynchon notes, “it’s important to remember that the target even of the original assault of 1779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology . . . Ned Lud’s [sic] anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.”7 Rather, it was, as Gilbert Simondon would say, directed at the overall milieu: “What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.”8 As a vector directed into an undetermined future, technological change invariably brings with it a release of potentiality. That potentiality, however, can be captured for the better or the worse. Pynchon is very clear about two “multiplications of effect” that operated through the new technologies that the Luddites attacked and which resulted in these technologies being perceived as unfair and threatening: “One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work.”9 The implementation of technology by “an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing” leads to “open-eyed class war.”10 The crisis of Luddism, then, is a symptom not of a crisis of technology but rather of the meeting of technology with an out-of-control industrialization that operates in the name of the inherent logic of capital. Gravity’s Rainbow reveals the free Zone of the German state to be that era’s termination. Pynchon next moves to 1984, which is the essay’s real-time. In the latetwentieth-century digital dispositif, the computer has taken the place of the nineteenth century looms. In The Crying of Lot 49, set in the 1960s, computers were still giant, unwieldy machines owned by corporations and governments and thus part of “industrial anything” (51). Like the looms, they rendered workers redundant. Symptomatically, the founder of Inamorati Anonymous is a suicidal Yoyodyne executive who “found himself automated out of a job” (113). By 1984, however, computers had become personal nodes in the network – what Deleuze and Guattari would

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call the rhizome – of the internet. As such, they promised to have transmuted into a technology that might allow for real progress. For instance, they allowed massive amounts of data to travel freely in what Pynchon at that point in time imagines as a technologically supported digital democracy of freely distributed knowledge. “Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did?” Pynchon wonders, “I really doubt it.”11 In fact, it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody.12

Maybe the network of personal computers would undo the ravages brought about by industrial culture. Maybe it could “detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk.”13 Similarly to how in Vineland the VCR, the TV remote control, and video technology promise to be escape routes from the one-way industrial logic of the TV image, in Pynchon’s 1984 article, the technology of personal computing promises to be inherently democratic. With the freedom of information predicted in 1984, limited access to data and thus the two-culture attitude, Pynchon argues, is no longer tenable: “Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen.”14 In 1984, the year which commemorates Big Brother’s surveillance state, Pynchon’s sentiments are weirdly hopeful. Although Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines [. . . and] there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, [. . .] because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.15

Some might remember this vision of an open, user-organized, and potentially rhizomatic internet from the early days of its introduction. Read in 2018, however, at a time of fake news gone wild, Pynchon’s faith in the information revolution sounds curiously and somewhat sadly optimistic. The computer might, he notes, “realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.”16 In the time between “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” and Bleeding Edge, computers are referenced a number of times in Pynchon’s work. In the portrayal of the 1960s in Vineland, whose narrative present is the 1984 of the publication of “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” the government uses

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computers to monitor the sad, inefficient, and co-opted leftovers of the 1960s counterculture. Part of the political inefficiency of the hippies lies in the fact that they are completely clueless about the new electronic age, which is why their more attuned kids find them untenably retro. In Inherent Vice (2009), which is set in 1970, some of the early military history of the internet is recounted and its potential for data retrieval and dissemination is mentioned in relation to the government and the military, but also, in relation to Doc’s mother Elmina Breeze, who is a real-estate agent, in the context of information about real estate. In Bleeding Edge’s 2001, Pynchon’s 1984 hope for a new digital democracy has completely evaporated. Yet another time we have, in the face of a new potentiality, chosen the wrong way. By the turn of the millennium, the new technology has been fully captured by forces that are the twentyfirst-century equivalent of those that captured the loom: a relentless, postindustrial cybercapitalism. Its adherent cybereconomy has generated a new class-warfare that produces more and more privileged and entitled modes of living, on the one hand, and more and more precarious ones, on the other. Fundamentally, nothing has changed from The Crying of Lot 49 to Bleeding Edge. In Pynchon’s fictional analysis, the Elect are still getting richer, while the Preterites are still forgotten and passed over. By 2001 the ARPAnet has developed into the global virtual reality of the internet. The potentiality of the internet is that in the best of its versions, this virtual world is not yet as surveyed and controlled as the actual world is. In fact, Pynchon describes it in terms of a not-yet-industrialized America, a virtual “open range” or prairie before barbed wire came to divide it into sharply bordered and strictly allocated parcels of property. At the same time, on other levels, the mainframes have been fully capitalized. This time, however, they have not fallen under governmental control but into the entrepreneurial hands of cybercapitalists such as Gabriel Ice, the novel’s dark dot-com entrepreneur. In Bleeding Edge Pynchon again zooms into an invisible crisis that plays itself out within a more visible one. Again, the question is about the capture of technology, about potentialities and choices being made. The official, visible crisis is of course 9/11 and its well-known political and cultural ramifications. The official story is constructed around familiar tales of trauma and retaliation. An evil force from the outside threatens the system’s status quo, which leads to a “just” response directed at that outside and steps to secure the status quo on the inside. According to this official narrative, in fact, the crisis did not happen. There was a critical, catastrophic moment, but the system was not changed catastrophically.

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Rather, the crisis was immediately absorbed in that the event led to an instant and relentless reinforcement of the system’s status quo. Once more, however, Pynchon wonders about the potentiality that was inherent in the event. Might the crisis we call Ground Zero have heralded the potentiality of a new start? Might the event have been a moment of revelation? Or a moment of hope, as he notes at the end of Inherent Vice, for “the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead” (369)? In other words, might the destruction of the World Trade Center have brought about a change in America’s overall political and cultural attitude? Could hope for a change toward something good have emerged from the ruins? Pynchon’s earlier work had argued that the chances for such a positive change are slim, because throughout its history America has, at each moment of critical potentiality, invariably made the “wrong” choice. As Oedipa had wondered at the end of her night journey in The Crying of Lot 49 – a journey that foreshadows Maxine’s journey through DeepArcher in Bleeding Edge – “how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?” (181). From postwar economy and politics in Gravity’s Rainbow to Vineland’s portrayal of the hippie revolution in 1968, Pynchon has not stopped chronicling these missed opportunities and wrong choices. In Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon called William Slothrop – the anti-Winthrop who wrote a tract On Preterition and was subsequently forced to return to England – a “fork in the road America never took, [a] [. . .] singular point she jumped the wrong way from” (556). In Bleeding Edge September 11th is the latest of such critical moments and their lost potentialities. Why didn’t America, rather than revel in the role of the innocent victim seeking revenge, see the moment of September 11th as an opportunity for self-reflection and for both cultural and political change? The slate literally wiped clean, why was the fall of the towers not “a reset button for the city, the real-estate business, Wall Street, a chance for it all to start over clean” (BE 387)? In Gravity’s Rainbow’s ruined German Zone, “maybe for a little while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the whole space of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the waste of it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect, without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up” (556). Similarly, might one have found in the ruins of the Twin Towers “a single set of coordinates from which to proceed”? Already shortly after the event, however, “Ground Zero” has been reduced from being the site of such a potential reversal to a real-estate controversy and

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opportunity: “The atrocity site, which one would have expected to become sacred or at least inspire a little respect, swiftly becomes occasion instead for open-ended sagas of wheeling and dealing, bickering and badmouthing over its future as real estate” (BE 328). When Maxine and Xiomara visit the site, they “gaze into what should be the aura surrounding a holy place but isn’t” (446). All around it, in an image that evokes that of money changers and merchants in the temple, “[t]here are vendors selling T-shirts, paperweights, key chains, mouse pads, coffee mugs” (446). In the shortest of times, the crisis has been seized by the powers of capital and real estate.

9/11 as a Real-Estate Disaster It might be considered horribly callous to consider 9/11 as a real-estate disaster. To do so, however, is not at all meant to detract from the deep tragedy of the event, but rather to point out that for Pynchon, it is, through the concept of real estate, deeply entangled with American crime and sin. In fact, if one persistent characteristic of Pynchon’s narratives is to zoom in to moments of historical crisis, another is his interest in the often violent modes of the allocation of property. This latter narrative thread runs from the evocation of the early suburbs in his 1959 short story “The Secret Integration” to the portrayal of the relentless colonization, commodification, and suburbanization of the cyberprairies in Bleeding Edge. Everywhere in Pynchon’s work, there is a deeply capitalist elite that traces itself back to the first explorers and founding fathers and that has an apparently inborn sense of entitlement that goes even beyond the sinister machinations of real-estate agents. While these do the business of buying and selling, the elite is made up of the owners. Quite cynically, Inherent Vice’s Crocker Fenway – in a hijacking of New Deal rhetoric that anticipates Trump’s hijacking of leftist sentiments – uses the language of ecology to implement his vision of cultural cleanliness. It is “residential owners like me against developers like Brother Wolfmann. People with a decent respect for preserving the environment against high-density tenement scum without the first idea of how to clean up after themselves” (347). No wonder that Bleeding Edge also abounds with references to real estate and the sins of city planning, such as Rudy Giuliani’s Disneyfication of Times Square (51), or Montauk, “the history of Republican sin forever unremitted, the relentless suburbanizing, miles of mowed yards, contractor hardpan, beaverboard and asphalt shingling” (191). As J. G. Ballard notes in a 1987 interview, the contemporary world is defined by a relentless “suburbanization of the soul.”17

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Crunching Numbers Perhaps the most revealing moment in Bleeding Edge comes when, at some point post September 11th, Maxine Tarnow, the novel’s heroine, meets an acquaintance in the street. As the narrator notes with bitter irony, “[i]t seems accidental, but there may be no accidents anymore” because “the Patriot Act may have outlawed them along with everything else” (341). Indeed, something seems to have happened that implies that, perhaps once and for all, the chaotic potentiality of the future has been abolished. In the future, there will be no more crises because everything will be completely under control. While the increased real-life surveillance and control in the aftermath of September 11th, from airport security to data mining, has operated very much in the public eye, Pynchon once more traces, within the real-life event, a less visible and more technological moment of crisis. In the novel, which is set in the economic and cultural milieu of start-ups and dot-coms, the ceaseless production of critical moments that grounds the unpredictability of the future is embodied by the string of random numbers that underlies the programming of DeepArcher, a site on the internet that constructs a virtual version of America. As the two programmers Justin and Lucas note, at the time of the collapse of the World Trade Center, a virtual tremor went through the internet that might have been a reverberation of the implementation of a universal system of control of the virtual. As Vyrva tells us, Justin and Lucas “are freaking out. Something about this random-number source they’ve been hacking into suddenly going nonrandom” (315). For that moment, the virtual world is no longer defined by a chaotic ungroundedness but by an unknown algorithm that allows the tracking of real-life movements and “developments” in virtual America. The shift into the nonrandom is critical because, as Justin notes in conversation with Maxine, the string of random numbers that were coming from the real-life website of the “Global Consciousness Project,” situated in Princeton, ensured the structural freedom of and in DeepArcher: “These folks maintain a network of thirty to forty random-event generators all around the world, whose outputs all flow into the Princeton site 24/7 and get mixed together to produce this random-number string” (341). In DeepArcher, this string was used to “set up a switching pattern” between a global “set of virtual nodes on volunteer computers. Each node only exists long enough to receive and resend, and then it’s gone” (341). As such, these random numbers

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ensured that DeepArcher had no memory and that movements in it could not be traced. But then, the night of September 10th, “suddenly these numbers [. . .] began to depart from randomness, I mean really abruptly, drastically, no explanation” (341–42). This “kept on that way through the 11th and a few days after. Then just as mysteriously everything went back to near-perfect random again” (342). Although the intrusion is no longer detectable, there is a possibility that a seed has been planted. Consciously sidestepping the well-recorded ruins of the Twin Towers and the equally well-recorded political capture of their destruction – somewhat like he sidestepped the Holocaust in Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon zooms in on this more imperceptible crisis: the moment when the virtual America of DeepArcher turns from open-range to barb-wired property, and thus from communal to private. Another range is being fenced in, capitalized, and “suburbanized faster than you can say ‘late capitalism’” (BE 241).

Critical Lessons Beyond its real-life effects, in Bleeding Edge September 11th marks the intrusion of political and economic control into the virtual world considered as the last potentially Free Zone, and thus the marriage of actual, real-life terror and the virtual-life change from open cyber-range to cybercolonization and cybereconomy. For Pynchon, this logic is frighteningly familiar, and, as I noted, his work has invariably chronicled how well it has worked before. A crisis is either created – a “faux crisis” such as a fake insurgence that is generated by a regime – or it is immediately captured by a regime to reinforce its power. A capitalist regime, for instance, might exploit a crisis to implement more markets, more surveillance, and more control. Within this context, Pynchon addresses three questions to the reader: how did the crisis come about, who profits from it, and what is the mode of profit? Toward the end of the novel, Justin and Lucas decide to go open source rather than sell their domain to Gabriel Ice or the highest bidder: “We finally decided to go open source. Just sent the tarball out.” “Meaning . . . anybody . . . ?” “Anybody with the patience to get through it, they want it, they got it. There’s already a Linux translation on the way, which should bring the amateurs in in droves.” “So the big bucks . . .”

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We should remember, however, that the tremor during the crisis might have permanently compromised the site. Also, Gabriel Ice is not planning to take revenge on the two for not selling to him. As Vyrva notes, “Hell no, he’s delighted, means he’s got it for free, saves him a purchase price that could have put Fiona, Justin, and me in any twelve-room penthouse in town.” “Oh?” Real estate, now there’s a return to mental health. “You guys’ve been looking?” (400)

In conclusion, let me return to the beginning. If the world is indeed in a state of constant and infinite crisis, one of the most important questions, for both individuals and cultures, is how to administer this inherently critical landscape. What are the most sane and viable ways to channel the infinity of crises taking place at each moment into livable realities? The lure of systems that favor and work for stability, stasis, and control is that they promise to keep away potentially catastrophic forces and situations. But then these systems create our often unlivable realities in the first place in that they force any unstable diversity into cemented channels rather than accepting and adapting to our world’s given instabilities. In Inherent Vice such an approach is embodied by the L.A. river, which is channeled into a completely engineered canal in order to keep it from flooding the areas around it and, more particularly, the businesses situated in these areas. Similarly, beneath the assumed freedom of what we like to think of as our “free world” are the stable currents of capitalism that keep us firmly channeled. This is why an economic deregulation of the markets is the very opposite of what it claims to be. By uncoupling the markets from both the social and the political milieu, deregulation in fact ensures the markets’ full hegemony and control. But then, an unleashed and unregulated capitalism also carries in itself the potential of forcing the overall milieu into a crisis. The question, therefore, is whether today’s cybercapitalism, defined very abstractly as the way money and property are administered and distributed in the digital world, can overcome the damaging structural and individual logics encoded in it, such as growth on the structural and addiction on the individual side. Maybe there will be an implosion like the industrial one of 1945. Or the figure of Gabriel Ice, the young computer entrepreneur and husband of Tallis, might be the emblem of what is in store in the future.

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Maybe the capitalist dilemma can be read within ecological parameters. Whenever one species or plant takes over a complete ecosystem and thus reduces the diversity of relations that used to define that system, something is seriously wrong. The system falls into what might be called an ecological fascism. Pynchon’s narratives imply that such takeovers have to do with both the desire for and idealism of stasis and control. In its violent repression of criticality, such an artificially static system loses its elasticity and its potentiality to change in unexpected and new ways. Although both cybercapitalism and cybereconomy seem to allow for freedom, “under” that appearance of freedom they implement very strict regimes that deny precisely that critical freedom. How to construct a culture, then – a diverse cultural ecology, perhaps – that allows its citizens to embrace and administer the crises that are inherent in every moment of our personal and communal lives? It would have to be an ecology that allows us to embrace change simply for what it is, and allows for, as Pynchon notes in Gravity’s Rainbow, “ad hoc arrangements” (620). As one of the “Resolutions of the Gross Suckling Conference” states in that novel, “[t]he dearest nation of all is one that will survive no longer than you and I, a common movement at the mercy of death and time: the ad hoc adventure” (706). Symptomatically, in Vineland a student group at the College of the Surf uses the acronym “ADHOC” (208) (“All Damned Heat Off Campus”). It might sound hopelessly idealistic to state that, paradoxically, a real crisis might play itself out and things might become better once the logic of capital is modified in such a way that it stops being capitalistic. Whether such an internal systemic change is possible, or whether we are moving toward another global crisis that is not a real crisis but an event carefully engineered to strengthen the logic of the status quo is an open question. And perhaps there will be another incarnation of King Ludd, bringing about a real crisis that will be, perhaps, even more unpredictable than the ones we have lived through in the past. That might be one of the things to look forward to. However these things will play themselves out, let’s hope that anything can still happen.

*** Heinz von Foerster, the father of cybernetics, once set up a very general and abstract ethical law: to “act always so as to increase the total number of choices”18 (Understanding, 282). One might, perhaps, construct from this a provisional ethics of crisis: act always so that the possibility of “a crisis to come” remains open.

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Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, Volume IV, 1938–40 (Belknap, 2006), p. 318. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Continuum, 2004), p. 154. 3. Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 159. 4. In 1995 Kirkpatrick Sale, with whom Pynchon collaborated in writing the libretto for Minstrel Island, would write a history of Luddism: Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution. For the link between “Under the Rose” and Luddism, see also E. C. Link, “Luddism in ‘Under the Rose,’” Pynchon Notes, 30–31 (1992), pp. 157–64. 5. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” New York Times, October 28, 1984, www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. J. G. Ballard and Jonathan Cott, “The Strange Visions of J. G. Ballard,” Rolling Stone, November 19, 1987, www.rollingstone.com. 18. Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (Springer, 2003), p. 282.

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chapter 11

Digital Readings Katie Muth

What do we stand to learn from observing that Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) contains 15,983 instances of the letter “k”? That its longest sentence contains some 357 words but that the average sentence length is just 14.6 words?1 The text of the novel scores a 71.5 on the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease test, and a 9.9 on the SMOG Index, for an average reading grade of 8.9 across eight distinct readability tests.2 In a book of long words, does it help us to know that Gravity’s Rainbow’s longest word isn’t a word at all, but rather the composite “swirlinggrainoftreelikefrozensmoke” (76). Average word length in the book is just 4.5 characters. There are about a hundred thousand nouns in the novel, making up not quite a full third of the text.3 Like Roger Mexico totaling up his time with Jessica Swanlake, we might wonder whether “the statistician can make these figures mean anything” (GR 121). Let’s refine a set of observations and start again. Though the novel has a reputation for linguistic difficulty, its word length is generally comfortably short, and the average sentence length is eminently readable by just about any standard. At the same time, Gravity’s Rainbow is overly dense with nouns, as in the novel’s longest sentence, that whopper Steven Weisenburger calls a “rubble of words.”4 Additionally, the book is light on personal pronouns for fiction, and its points of view shift frequently, both among its many characters and among its many temporal and spatial locations. Gravity’s Rainbow is full of what Bernard Duyfhuizen describes as “time and place traps,” in which temporal and geographical markers within the text do not correspond mimetically to the unfolding of narrative time.5 Its narrative voices are idiosyncratic, and on occasion the novel is orthographically strange, as in “swirlinggrainoftreelikefrozensmoke.” Can digital tools provide insight into some of these textual features? Using computational methods, can we visualize anew how the novel’s polyphonic linguistic forms relate to narrative episodes? By estranging ourselves from the text digitally, can we gain new insight into the novel’s 175

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global structure? Its local registers? Does seeing Gravity’s Rainbow outside linear novel-time – that is to say, without being tied to the linearity of the material book – help us to unravel the novel’s labyrinthine temporalities? Reading a novel like Gravity’s Rainbow “by the numbers” might seem particularly perverse given Pynchon’s robust skepticism about technomania, but it’s compelling, nevertheless, to consider that new ways of reading Pynchon might emerge from not reading Pynchon at all.6 In what follows, I’ll give a brief summary of what digital work has been done on Pynchon to date, proposing some goals and constraints for the present essay. Then I’ll offer a series of computationally derived graphic visualizations of Gravity’s Rainbow, arguing that we can leverage the idiosyncrasies of the text – specifically its unstable tenses – to manipulate our visualizations. In the end, I argue that by deforming the text, in Stephen Ramsay’s sense, we can indeed uncover new ways of understanding old questions about Pynchon’s most notoriously difficult text.7 Specifically, my visualizations bring to light a systemic relationship between tense and theme within the novel, underscoring how past-tense narration tends to correlate with some of the novel’s weightiest historical materials. By mapping tense across Gravity’s Rainbow, we make legible the logic behind the novel’s uneven deployment of tense. While many critics have noticed the novel’s apparent dialectic between historical awareness and something like mindfulness in the present, we can trace as well how the novel’s grammatical modes shift from a present tense focused on Slothrop’s wanderings to a past tense focused on the Nazi science that informs the book’s moral core.

What Should a Digital Reading Do? Contemporary digital humanities is a sprawling set of methods and practices self-consciously “bound up,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum once put it, “with [technical] infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally accustomed to.”8 Digital humanists might produce electronic editions of texts, such as Jerome McGann’s Rossetti Archive or, more recently, Amanda Visconti’s Infinite Ulysses. They might digitize large bodies of text or particular collections, like those compiling the HathiTrust Digital Library or like the Smithsonian’s Digital Volunteers. They might aim to produce new models for literary history, the goal of Andrew Piper’s multiinstitutional NovelTM initiative. Or they might explore new methods for analyzing smaller bodies of work, as in J. F. Burrows’s famous study of Jane Austen’s function words.9

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Computational work on Pynchon has tended toward analysis of single texts, focusing on either demonstrating the precision of, say, machinelearning algorithms in categorizing critically accepted narratological analysis or on quantitative description of qualitative thematics.10 More recently, there’s been interest in visualizing Pynchon’s texts, in producing character networks and topic models, and in stylometric analysis of Pynchon’s nonfiction.11 Pynchon is also the subject of Tim Ware’s Pynchon Wiki, a born-digital crowdsourcing effort to annotate all of Pynchon’s novels, and Ware’s project has garnered sustained critical attention as an object of digital analysis in itself.12 That said, computational assessments of Pynchon’s work remain somewhat provisional and exploratory, highlighting the usefulness (or not) of certain tools and methods but stopping short of broad claims to discovery. On the one hand, some digital readings of Pynchon suffer from a lack of context in framing what are essentially formalist stylometric observations, which means that interpretive conclusions might seem unprincipled or arbitrary.13 On the other hand, some methods demand a steep technological learning curve, and can be seen to emphasize mastery of technique over interpretive argument.14 An example of the former is David Letzler’s observation that the word “is” appears with disproportionate frequency in Gravity’s Rainbow relative to the fiction subset of the Brown University Standard Corpus of PresentDay American English.15 Interpreting this observation in the context of critical discourse, we might wonder if the verb’s overabundance is a proxy for the novel’s oft-noted emphasis on “the moment,” to borrow George Levine’s phrase.16 But as Letzler rightly notes, the novel is also written, for the most part, in the present tense, unlike its contemporaries in the Brown corpus, so it’s hard to tell from the evidence to hand what the prevalence of “is” really means. An example of the latter is Christos Iraklis Tsatsoulis’s unsupervised machine-learning experiment with V. (1963), which he readily admits is not for the benefit of literary scholars, except insofar as they might come to view computational methods with less suspicion. The purpose of the study, Tsatsoulis says, is to show that machinelearning techniques can distinguish the two dominant narrative threads in V., or that computational techniques “converge to the already known answer.”17 Hence, two common critiques of work in the digital humanities: one, that interpretive insights are too weakly supported by evidence and, two, that digital humanists privilege technological expertise at the expense of humanistic knowledge. Neither critique is wholly justified (not in general

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or in the specific examples I mention). Both are instructive, however, in that they help us to define our aims in conducting something labeled a “digital reading,” especially when that reading is focused on a single text. A digital reading has to make meaningful interpretive claims without falling prey to the charge of arbitrariness. And a digital reading should go beyond demonstration of method; it should answer a research question about the text.

Deforming Gravity’s Rainbow In Machine Readings: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (2011), Stephen Ramsay argues that digital reading allows us to “employ the rigid, inexorable, uncompromising logic of algorithmic transformation as the constraint under which critical vision may flourish.”18 Following Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann, Ramsay asks us to consider computational analysis as a sort of critical Oulipo operation, a method by which to expose “areas of the poetic and artifactual media that usually escape our scrutiny.”19 In other words, computational analysis can change our view of a text, opening creative critical possibilities. It can expose features of a text obscured within the linearity of the printed book. It can untether the eye from the codex. In this vein, we might think to deform the text of Gravity’s Rainbow. Specifically, I’m interested in manipulating the text along the lines suggested by David McClure when he proposes using probability density to produce something like a “diagram of the idea of a text.”20 McClure’s notion is appealingly uncomplicated. If you think of the length of the text as an x-axis – for Gravity’s Rainbow, that’s 328,552 words – you can then plot the occurrence of any given word along that axis.21 As McClure explains, this gives us a word-dispersion plot in what Matthew Jockers has called “novelistic time.”22 We then divide the x-axis into segments, count the number of occurrences in each, and end up with a series of integer values tracking occurrences of our given word from the start of the book to its end. Figure 1 shows occurrences of the word “is,” plotted as integer points, for every 1,000 words of Gravity’s Rainbow. We can smooth our graph by turning the points into kernel density functions, as in Figure 2.23 Now we have a fairly intelligible, “non-noisy” estimation of how the word “is” disperses across novel time in Gravity’s Rainbow. McClure’s idea, then, is to plot a given number of words across the novelistic time of a book and to compare those plots to see which words tend to appear together and where.24 We can then visualize word

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28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0 0

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Figure 1 Occurrences–of the word “is” per every 1000 words of Gravity’s Rainbow plotted as integer points “is” Number of occurrences

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Figure 2 Kernel density estimate of “is” across Gravity’s Rainbow, 2000-word bandwidth

correspondences as a network graph, which gives us a way to view globally how words “hang together” in a text. It’s a remarkably straightforward implementation of word distribution that results in what McClure calls a simple “intra-document” topic model.25 Figure 3 shows a network graph of the 1,000 most frequently appearing words in Gravity’s Rainbow, not counting high-frequency words, such as determiners, auxiliary verbs, and pronouns.26 The network maps how likely words are to appear near one another across the length of the novel. Words appearing near the center of the graph are well connected. That is, they are very high frequency and are likely to appear near many other words. Words appearing at the periphery of the text occur with lower frequency – most proper nouns appear here,

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Words dispersed throughout the novel

Figure 3 Textplot mapping of Gravity’s Rainbow with details of a Slothrop word cluster and a central word cluster

for example – and are less well connected. Words that are peculiar to individual plotlines appear near one another and tend to cluster on the periphery. Incidentally, reading the periphery of the graph counterclockwise in this orientation roughly tracks with the linear development of the text.27

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This plot does a good job visualizing a few key features of the text. As Martin Eve noted when he tested McClure’s Textplot software on Gravity’s Rainbow, characters who belong together cluster on the map as do words we intuitively associate with one another (e.g., “Slothrop” and “sez,” or “Weissmann” and “SS”).28 We also get a sense from this visualization of important episodes in the novel. Slothrop rescues Katje from Grigori at Casino Hermann Goering in the upper-left quadrant, for example, accompanied by “Bloat,” “Tantivy,” “shirt,” “beach,” and “bottle.” He dons his Rocketman getup in the mid-right sector, not far from “Bodine,” “Säure,” “dope,” “cape,” “helmet,” “boots,” and “Berlin.” Broadly speaking, the top-right quadrant belongs to Slothrop, his cohorts, and his escapades. The bottom right belongs to the Nazis, the Anubis, and the rocket. The bottom left, to Pointsman, Mexico, and England. The top left to Katje, feeling, and fucking. As we move toward the interior of the map, we see more abstract words, verbs, and descriptive terms. The center of the map is dominated by a few heavily weighted words – words that appear frequently throughout the novel and that, thus, correspond strongly with many other words in the text. Some of the most highly connected of these are “back,” “day,” “long,” “time,” “face,” “eyes,” “inside,” “night,” “feel,” “head,” and “find,” and perhaps with the exception of “back” (which Letzler argues is overrepresented in the novel generally, relative to contemporaneous fiction), this set is not terribly surprising for a novel stripped of common stop words.29 In short, McClure’s Textplot produces a legible visualization of Gravity’s Rainbow that jibes with our sense of the overall contents of the book. What’s novel about this kind of visualization is that it strips the text from the linear confines of the codex. Compared to textual summaries of the novel, our Textplot visualization provides a wealth of information simultaneously. It’s more navigable than conventional plot maps because regions are defined by textual nearness, and unlike a print or hypertext companion (e.g., the Pynchon Wiki), it’s not organized by arbitrary alphabetical or numerical indices. We’ve deformed the novel through a process of textbased analysis that retains something of its original thematic, conceptual, and lexical structures. While close reading Textplot mappings might be entertaining, in isolation it’s not, as McClure himself admits, interpretively rich.30 It’s not clear that we get different results from reading the defamiliarized text than we get from reading the novel itself. Changing the appearance of the text, however – reordering it and rendering it afresh – is only part of the deformative project as Ramsay imagines it. If we are serious in taking our inspiration from the likes of Georges Perec, we need to consider the

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algorithm as a constraint.31 When we think of the algorithm as constraint, we are asking how we might manipulate its parameters and arguments to produce novel critical observations. By leaning into computational constraints, we begin to think critically about how we might leverage their limitations to reveal something new. McClure introduces an important caveat with respect to method in the Textplot project, and that caveat points to a feature of the program we can exploit. Looking at a “scrambled, less differentiated” map of Leaves of Grass (1855), McClure wonders if by bluntly selecting the first 1,000 most frequent words in a text (minus stop words), he’s distorting his maps by failing to cull words that are not common enough to make a universal stop word list but that are too common to an individual text to clearly cluster with one conceptual topic or another.32 In other words, does the Textplot method undermine its efficacy as a topic model by failing to filter the “noise” of globally common words within a given text? For Gravity’s Rainbow, these globally common words are the ones inhabiting the center of the map – words such as “back,” “day,” “long,” “time,” “face,” and “eyes,” which I’ve already suggested aren’t very interesting if we’re looking to highlight episodes, characters, and concepts. In fact, several appear frequently not just in Gravity’s Rainbow, but in a number of novels. In comparing our map of Gravity’s Rainbow with seven other fairly disparate novels – Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moby Dick (1851), Great Expectations (1861), Sister Carrie (1900), Ulysses (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) – we find that eight terms central to Gravity’s Rainbow – “back,” “day,” “long,” “time,” “face,” “eyes,” “head,” and “find” – are also central to one or more of the other novels. “Time” is central to all of them. Evenly distributed terms might not just muddy the waters of individual maps, as McClure surmises; they might also inject red-herring terms, or terms that seem thematically relevant but probably aren’t. We can quickly test McClure’s suspicion by running the program with an empty stop-word file. When we don’t remove stop words from the text at all, our map indeed collapses around a center of “to,” “in,” “a,” “and,” “of,” and “the.” “Back,” previously the most powerful word in our network, falls down to somewhere around fortieth in the list (depending on how you measure node importance), and we lose much of the specificity of our conceptual regions, as the map flattens to an oval with two poles – one dealing broadly with Slothropian themes and the other dealing broadly with everyone else. By not removing stop words, we ensure that we’re catching terms that, as McClure puts it, “aren’t ‘typical’ of any topic.”33

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The zero stop-word plot seems to show that Gravity’s Rainbow, like just about any narrative in English, unfolds around a core set of function words. We can use this methodological limitation to our advantage. Not all high-frequency words are distributed equally throughout Gravity’s Rainbow. Most notably, tense – marked in some cases by the presence of past- rather than present-tense auxiliary verbs – is unevenly distributed throughout the novel. While Gravity’s Rainbow is for the most part narrated in the present tense, it occasionally shifts to past tense, often to provide historical background – as in the description of Dog Vanya’s vivisection or Brigadier Pudding’s interwar backstory (78, 77–78). Relatively nondisruptive breaks like these are fairly common, as the present-tense narrator relates facts and events that have already happened. Occasionally, though, Pynchon indulges in more sustained shifts in tense. The most often remarked of these is Franz Pökler’s story in episode eleven of “In the Zone.” Though we open the episode in the present tense – “ . . . yes, bitch – yes, little bitch – poor helpless bitch you’re coming can’t stop yourself now” – we quickly shift to the past tense, as it becomes clear that Pökler’s just been reliving the night of Ilse’s conception (397, italics in original). “Only later did he try to pin down the time” (397), Pynchon writes, establishing that we’ve just briefly inhabited a flashback. Two paragraphs later, he situates us in Pökler’s present: “He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche, listening to the sea” (398). But the episode does not remain thus situated for long, descending into the “cinematic flashback” in which we learn of the dissolution of Pökler’s family, his early obsession with rocketry, his work at Peenemünde and the Mittelwerke, his visits to Zwölfkinder, and his eventual discovery of Mittelbau-Dora, the subcamp of Buchenwald which funneled slave laborers to the rocket program at the Mittelwerke. Pökler’s story is the most sustained example of past-tense narration in the novel, and, at just under 17,000 words, it is the longest single episode. It is also, as Inger Dalsgaard, Bernard Duyfhuizen, Robert McLaughlin, Khachig Tololyn, Steven Weisenburger, and others have suggested, a center of moral gravity.34 The Pökler episode figures a character’s direct confrontation with his own complicity in genocide. In our first Textplot map, in which we removed a default set of stop words from the text before generating graph coordinates, Pökler’s story is visible at the bottom right of the diagram (Figure 4). While we see several concepts in the story represented here – “child,” “return,” “moon,” “dream,” “engine,” “fuel,” “assembly,” “material,” “SS,” “Peenemünde,” “tunnel,” “Nordhausen” – we do not get a sense that the Pökler episode

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system power story

job

assembly

father

material fuel knew child

Peenemünde

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Figure 4 Detail of Pökler region with a few key words highlighted around the periphery

particularly stands out within the broader stylistic or thematic economies of the novel. But it does stand out, and in relation to both. Narrated predominantly in the past tense (it does occasionally break into present tense), the Pökler episode inverts the narrative style of the novel. If we manipulate our algorithmic constraint such that it recognizes tense, the relation of moral weight with the past – here literally illustrated by the grammatical past tense – becomes uncontestably clear. We can get Textplot to recognize tense by eliminating high-frequency verbs – “have,” “be,” “is,” “was,” et cetera – from our stop-word list. In other words, we add to our mapping auxiliary verbs, verbs of being, modals, and so on. What emerges is a rough charting of tense in the novel. Figure 5 compares the basic shapes of the three plots we’ve run so far. Unlike our zero stop-word plot, this graph maintains the episodic regions we observed in the first rendering. Here, however, the area dealing with Pökler’s story becomes more distinctly visible as a differentiated zone near the bottom of the image. The introduction of high-frequency verbs does not collapse our plot, but rather elongates it. What’s more, Gravity’s

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Default stop words removed

No stop words removed

High-frequency verbs included

Figure 5 Three Textplot visualizations of Gravity’s Rainbow using different stop word lists, Pökler region highlighted

Rainbow behaves oddly in this respect. Compared to the seven novels mentioned above, it’s the only one that distorts this noticeably upon the introduction of high-frequency verbs, as shown in Figure 6. This might be a useful deformation.

You Are Here (Reading the Map) The fact that Gravity’s Rainbow disperses rather than collapsing or remaining stable when we introduce high-frequency verbs into its network matrix points to something important about the book’s composition. There are some forty to fifty past-tense flashbacks in Gravity’s Rainbow, depending on what you count as a proper flashback. Some jumps to the past tense are too brief to count, as in the Dog Vanya example. Others are what we might call shallow – as when Slothrop recalls finding a small girl trapped in a Morrison shelter “yesterday,” or when we learn he’s recovered his harmonica somewhere in the Harz mountains (24, 737). Or, in the somewhat vaguer, but presumably recent, flashbacks to Roger and Jessica’s flirtation: “Once they met at a teashop,” for example (120). Yet others provide deeper texture. Thus we learn about Slothrop’s girls, Pirate Prentice’s first adenoid encounter, Leni’s frustration with Franz, Pudding’s interwar years, Tchitcherine and Enzian’s shared familial past, Margherita Erdmann’s encounter with Blicero, and so on. Still another layer provides historical anchors: Laszlo Jamf and IG Farben, Walther Rathenau, Roland Feldspath, the engineers Närrisch, Achtfaden, and Pökler, the testing stands at Peenemünde, the assembly tunnels at Mittelwerke, the Herero and Namaqua genocide, the camps at Mittelbau-Dora. A final

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Robinson Crusoe

Moby Dick

Great Expectations

Sister Carrie

Ulysses

The Great Gatsby

The Crying of Lot 49

Gravity’s Rainbow

Figure 6 Eight novels visualized with Textplot, high-frequency verbs removed (left) and all verbs included (right)

type is more abstract, as in Enzian’s methamphetamine-fueled rumination on the Zone as “Real Text” or Rocketman’s graffitied memorialization on the “wall of a public shithouse” (520–22, 623–24). These lapses into past tense, however, are not evenly distributed through the novel. By incorporating tense

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markers into a conceptual map of the text, we produce a visual record of how past-tense narration correlates with theme. Our deformative mapping of Gravity’s Rainbow doesn’t just visualize the conceptual and thematic contents of the novel; it visualizes the novel’s treatment of history and its complex handling of time. For just as we can read here character relations and narrative threads, we can also read a temporal allegory linking Slothrop’s wandering present to the historical gravity of Nazi science and industry. At the top of the map, in the region of Slothrop, Seaman Bodine, and company, we find, too, a range of words focused on the grubby bodily present – “shit,” “vomit,” “ass,” “beer,” “drunk,” “vomit,” “screaming,” “giggling,” “singing,” “clutching,” “shaking,” “sucking.” This is also the location of words indicating dialogue – “sez,” “a-and,” “huh,” “uh,” “yeah,” “hey.” Moving to the top left of the map, we encounter bodily imagery having to do with sex – “fucking,” “twisting,” “bare,” “frock,” “penis,” “cock,” “hair,” “cheek,” “sheets,” “bed,” “breasts,” “skin,” “kiss,” “tongue,” “warm,” “sigh,” “breath.” Below this, words of place and time, sense and emotion – “cold,” “pale,” “clouds,” “sky,” “blast,” “bomb,” “time,” “remember,” “feel,” “love,” “day,” “night,” “bright,” “dark,” “hour.” The level of abstraction increases as we move into a region having to do with human mortality – “life,” “death,” “dead,” “mortal,” “record,” “data,” “pattern,” “structure,” “government,” “truth,” “exist,” “reason,” “believe,” “world,” “possibilities,” “process,” and finally “history,” “story,” “dream.” We are also now in the vicinity of “rocket,” and squarely in a region of past-tense verbs – “were,” “was,” “wasn’t,” “would,” “could,” “began,” “saw,” “knew,” “allowed,” “found,” “had,” “hadn’t,” “made,” “came,” and so on. Moving counterclockwise around the interior of our map has taken us from a bodily present; to bodily connection; to setting, abstract time, and history; and finally to the Pökler narrative. Which is to say, to Peenemünde, which will lead us, with Franz, to Mittelbau-Dora. From there, continuing counterclockwise, our map dissolves into the Zone. The map’s polarity – bawdy immediacy versus historical weight – matches our general sense of the novel’s thematic hierarchies, or that, as David Leverenz has put it, “the novel’s undergraduate defenses against seriousness are themselves part of a more terrible seriousness.”35 What first appears as mindless play – “entropy with a vengeance,” Gore Vidal sniped irritably – finds its justification in the historical density of the rocket’s psychosexual semiotics.36 Decoding the mystery of Slothrop’s penis is not just the doomed central quest of an unresolving narrative but also a figure for our own interpretive enterprises, for our own “pornographies of deduction” (GR 155) as we plumb the depths of Pynchon’s historical allusions to

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unravel the sense behind the scat, the systems of meaning underpinning the novel’s apparent logorrhea.37 Our digital analysis makes intelligible the novel’s opposition of presentand past-tense grammars as key to understanding the novel’s argumentative force and its interpretive procedures. As our map moves from bodily to abstract, from the penis Slothrop thought was his own to the material history of the V-2, so the novel unspools its own materials, drawing on historical documents and memoir to capture what must have been the lived texture of Peenemünde and the Mittelwerke. These particulars appear often in the past tense, as when Pökler recalls the A3 “christened not with champagne, but with flasks of liquid oxygen by the playful technicians” or how “[t]hermometers and barometers were sealed in a watertight compartment with a movie camera” (406). Details such as these are borrowed, as Weisenburger notes, from the Nazi scientist Walter Dornberger, who writes, of the first tests at Peenemünde, “[w]e baptized our missiles with liquid oxygen” and that “a watertight compartment contained a barograph, a thermograph, and a small cine-camera for photographing these two instruments during flight.”38 While it’s not universally the case that citations of historical materials coincide with past-tense narration, the Pökler episode is especially rife with both, linguistically tied to its documentary intertexts. In addition, the Mittelwerke itself is associated thematically with the historical past elsewhere in the novel. As Slothrop descends into the tunnels beneath the Kohnstein – the structural design of which is another “symbol belonging to the Rocket” (299) – we are treated to a Pynchonian flight of epic proportions. Part list, part reverie, part invocation, the passage traverses concrete description of the Works to the “bureaucracy of mass absence” haunting the Zone, by way of the following miniature analepsis: Entrances to cross-tunnels slip by like tuned pipes with an airflow at their mouths . . . once upon a time lathes did screech, playful machinists had shootouts with little brass squirt cans of cutting oil . . . knuckles were bloodied against grinding wheels, pores, creases and quicks were stabbed by the fine splinters of steel . . . tubeworks of alloy and glass contracted tinkling in air that felt like the dead of winter, and amber light raced in phalanx among the small neon bulbs. Once, all this did happen. It is hard down here in the Mittelwerke to live in the present for very long. (303)

This moment in the passage is remarkable for the brilliance of its semiotic layering – the entrances like “tuned pipes” evoking, for example, the

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whistling of airflow through instruments as well as the eerie whine of rocket exhaust. But it is also remarkable for its flexibility with tense. Entrances “slip” for a moment, but then “once upon a time lathes did screech,” “machinists had shootouts,” “knuckles were bloodied,” and “pores, creases and quicks were stabbed.” The narrative swerves from Slothrop’s immediate present into an unspecified past in which workers – wide-scale exploitation of concentration-camp labor in the rocket program began early in 1943 – inhabit the tunnels.39 Subtly but unmistakably, Pynchon evokes in the “tinkling of air that felt like the dead of winter” the historical winter of 1943–1944, which claimed the lives of nearly 6,000 prisoners.40 “It is hard down here in the Mittelwerke,” he says “to live in the present for very long.” Pynchon’s explicit association of the Mittelwerke with both the historical and the narratological past implies self-consciousness about the coincidence of past-tense grammatical structures and their thematic content. In “The Counterforce,” the novel’s past tense diminishes. That is to say, when Slothrop scatters, the novel moves into a more sustained present tense (a fact underscored by the noticeable climb of “is” in Figures 1 and 2). As Kurt Mondaugen would have it, “‘Personal density’ [. . .] is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth. [. . .] [T]he narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are” (GR 509). More precisely, as the novel moves away from Pökler’s story and from the documentary materials that underwrite it, Slothrop comes to more fully inhabit a tense in which present and past are less narratologically distinguished. The novel’s organized use of tense begins to break down. “[N]ow, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad,” Pynchon writes, “after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying” (626). It takes some work to parse the tense of this sentence. “Now” occurs “later in the day he became,” which in turn occurred after something “he doesn’t recall,” the immediate “now” of which we are currently observing in the present tense. Delta-T, here the difference between past- and present-tense narrative, diminishes at the level of the sentence. Mondaugen’s Law, figuratively embodied in Slothrop, is literally embedded in the grammar of the novel, the “bandwidth” of which diminishes as we approach the last delta-T of the ballistic missile screaming toward the Orpheus Theatre. Gravity’s Rainbow’s earliest reviewers remarked the narrative’s tendency to “scatter” with Slothrop. “There is no question,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum for The Village Voice,

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katie muth that once Slothrop starts to disappear, the book becomes harder and harder to read. Jokes tend to stop being funny, the musical-comedy routines (a Pynchon specialty) grow tiresome, habitual flights of invention begin to seem more like compulsive word-chewing, and the twitching of the narrative from one apparently arbitrary center to another often appears itself like dispersions of random energy.41

Or, as Richard Locke put it in the New York Times, “the book is too long and dense; despite the cornucopia of brilliant details and grand themes, one’s dominant feelings in the last one to two hundred pages are a mounting restlessness, fatigue and frustration. The book doesn’t feel ‘together.’”42 Perhaps this scattering is more than an indulgent postmodern theme and more than the encyclopedic impulse run amok. The jumbling of tense in “The Counterforce” breaks down the tidy opposition of present mindlessness (or mindfulness, as the case may be) and historicity, unmooring Slothrop’s narrative from the historicized revelations that give it meaning. Our deformed mapping of Gravity’s Rainbow offers a bird’s-eye view of how tense organizes some of the book’s most important themes. Episodes dealing with the present time of the novel float together at the top of the map, while episodes dealing with the novel’s historical reference points tend to hang toward the bottom, where they are loosely correlated with more frequent use of the past tense. The map also allows us to see how abstractions – concepts such as “history,” “reason,” “process,” and “structure” – fit into the narrative’s broader conceptual matrices. Abstract concepts relating to how we narrate the past cluster near the bottom of the map, again, roughly coinciding with more frequent use of past-tense verbs. We can trace instances of past-tense narration, then, through the text itself, following how Pynchon uses shifts in tense to underscore a conceptual argument often remarked in the criticism. Namely, that historical context consolidates identity and narrative itself. Past tense, unevenly distributed over Gravity’s Rainbow’s novelistic time, clusters around Pökler’s narrative – itself an allegory of complicity with historical atrocity – as well as with words such as “pattern,” “structure,” “truth,” and “history.” Structurally and at the level of the sentence, the novel manipulates tense as argument, setting the thematics of presence and the present tense against the thematics of historicity and third-person past-tense narration. Visualizing the novel by mapping its most important terms alongside tense markers makes legible the logic of the novel’s uneven temporal modes.

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It’s appropriate, perhaps, that the novel’s last foray into history in the grammatical past tense is a little lesson on the origins of countdowns, devised, we are told, by Fritz Lang as a dramatic device for the film Die Frau im Mond, “to heighten the suspense” (GR 753). Likewise, Pynchon’s manipulation of tense in the novel works to heighten the novel’s rather rarefied argument about history and presence, the systematic deployment of which we can read, ironically, in a probability mapping of correspondences among words. Another of his damned “touches” (753).

Notes 1. The longest sentence, excluding passages strung together with ellipses, is “Volksdeutsch from across the Oder [. . .] ‘Potatoes we could have been eating, alcohol we could have been drinking. It’s unbelievable’” (549–50). Depending on how you handle the dialogue embedded in the sentence, it is between 335 and 370 words long. I’ve counted to the first closing dialogue tag coincident with a full stop, which gives 357 words. 2. These data come from Readable.io, a search-engine–optimization application that scores text on a number of readability tests, text analytics, and composition statistics to help writers improve the accessibility of their texts to the general public. The metrics mentioned here are scaled to US grade levels, so at a ninthgrade reading level, Gravity’s Rainbow should be easily legible to readers aged fourteen to fifteen. For comparison, when Ben Marcus sampled Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) for an ironic aside in his 2005 critique of “Mr. Difficult,” the book scored a 12.4 on the Fog Index. Ben Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2005, p. 47. 3. The distribution of nouns in Gravity’s Rainbow, at approximately 29,649 per one hundred thousand words (~29%), is about 1.31 times that of most fiction (~222,000 words per million), falling much nearer to noun distribution in academic prose (~291,000 words per million) according to the corpus-based Longman Grammar. Douglas Biber et al., Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Pearson, 1999), p. 235. 4. Steven Weisenburger, “In the Zone: Sovereignty and Bare Life in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Pynchon Notes, 56–57 (Spring–Fall 2009), p. 101. 5. Bernard Duyfhuizen, “From Potsdam to Putzi’s: Can Slothrop Get There in Time? And, in Time for What?,” Pynchon Notes, 51–52 (September 2002), p. 53. 6. Eric Bulson, “Ulysses by the Numbers,” Representations, 127.1 (Summer 2014), pp. 1–32. 7. Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 2011).

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8. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?,” ADE Bulletin, 150 (2010), p. 6. 9. J. F. Burrows, Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and An Experiment in Method (Clarendon, 1987). 10. Christos Iraklis Tsatsoulis, “Unsupervised Text Mining Methods for Literature Analysis: A Case Study for Thomas Pynchon’s V.,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 1.2 (2013), pp. 1–34; Luc Herman, Robert Hogenraad, and Wim Van Mierlo, “Pynchon, Postmodernism, and Quantification: An Empirical Content Analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Language and Literature, 12.1 (2003), pp. 27–41. 11. Martin Paul Eve, “Visualizing Gravity’s Rainbow,” Martin Paul Eve, June 7, 2015, www.martineve.com/2015/06/07/visualizing-gravitys-rainbow/; David Letzler, “A Phenomenology of the Present: Toward a Digital Understanding of Gravity’s Rainbow,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4.2 (2016), pp. 1–32; Katie Muth, “The Grammars of the System: Thomas Pynchon at Boeing,” in Joanna Freer and Doug Haynes (eds.), “Pynchonomics,” special issue, Textual Practice (forthcoming). 12. Ralph Schroeder and Matthijs L. den Besten, “Literary Sleuths Online: e-Research Collaboration on the Pynchon Wiki,” Information, Communication & Society, 11.2 (January 2008), pp. 25–45; Simon Peter Rowberry, “Reassessing the Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon Wiki: A New Research Paradigm?,” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 1.1 (2012), pp. 1–25. 13. In 2012 Stanley Fish published a series of opinion pieces against digitalhumanities scholarship, reviving a much older critique of computational stylometry as essentially arbitrary with respect to interpretation. Of a great many cogent responses by digital humanists, Stephen Ramsay’s reminder that arbitrariness with respect to interpretation is an occupational hazard for any literary scholar stands out in its pithiness. The arbitrariness introduced by computational methods isn’t that different from the apparent arbitrariness of close reading, and “risks need to be taken in both cases,” he reminds us. See Stanley Fish, “Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation,” New York Times, January 23, 2012; and Stephen Ramsay, “Stanley and Me,” Stephen Ramsay, November 8, 2012, http://web .archive.org/web/20170517223144/http://stephenramsay.us/text/2012/11/08/ stanley-and-me. For Fish’s original critique of Louis Milic, see “What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?,” in Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 68–96. 14. Proof of method as argumentative (and institutional) end is the target of Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia’s forceful assertion in the Los Angeles Review of Books that digital-humanities scholarship is handmaiden to a neoliberal university that redefines “technical expertise as a form [. . .] of humanist knowledge.” Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia, “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

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of Digital Humanities,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 1, 2016, lareviewof books.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humani ties/. Letzler, “Phenomenology,” p. 6. George Levine, “Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon’s Fiction,” in George Levine and David Leverenz (eds.), Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 113–36. Tsatsoulis, “Unsupervised Text Mining,” p. 2. Ramsay, Reading Machines, p. 32. Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann, “Deformance and Interpretation,” New Literary History, 30.1 (Winter 1999), p. 36, qtd. in Ramsay, Reading Machines, p. 33. Oulipo’s productive use of writing constraints to, as Georges Perec once put it, “examine the old, old patterns that were at work in all novels and poetry and all things” in order to “find new, new ways [. . .] to stimulate” here becomes a model for an algorithmic criticism that uses the strict logics of computation not only to reveal linguistic and semantic structures within texts but also to stimulate critical novelty. Georges Perec and Kaye Mortley, “The Doing of Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 29.1 (Spring 2009), p. 96. David McClure, “(Mental) Maps of Texts,” DM, September 24, 2014, dclure .org/essays/mental-maps-of-texts/. Including epigraphs and numerals, but excluding punctuation. Matthew L. Jockers, Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature (Springer International, 2014), pp. 29–31. See Fabian Pedregosa et al., “Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python,” JMLR, 12 (2011), pp. 2825–30. Documentation specific to kernel density estimation (KDE) is available at scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/density .html. McClure uses Bray-Curtis dissimilarity to assess the extent to which two words are likely to appear near one another in the text. See J. Roger Bray and J. T. Curtis, “An Ordination of the Upland Forest Communities of Southern Wisconsin,” Ecological Monographs, 27.4 (October 1957), pp. 325–49. McClure, “(Mental) Maps,” n.p. McClure’s comparison to topic models is illustrative rather than strictly literal. Topic modeling in literary humanities research, generally speaking, uses machine learning to discover associated groups of words – “topics” – empirically in (often very) large corpora. Textplot, on the other hand, discovers words that are likely to occur near one another in a particular text. For a helpful introduction to humanities topic modeling, see the various essays on the subject in Elijah Meeks and Scott Weingart (eds.), special issue, Journal of Digital Humanities, 2.1 (Winter 2012). The graph is too dense to be legible in print, though the general shape will matter later. For full-resolution images, see the project repository at krmuth .github.io/plot-gr/. Textplot takes a number of parameters that can

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27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

katie muth substantially alter the shape of output. I ran all tests cited here, with two exceptions, across 10,000 sample points at a bandwidth of 2,000 words. For shorter novels such as The Great Gatsby and The Crying of Lot 49, I ran 1,000 samples, with a smoothing bandwidth of 500 words. On setting Textplot parameters, see David McClure, “Literary MRIs (or, Tuning Textplot),” DM, May 20, 2015, dclure.org/logs/tuning-textplot/. The orientation of the graph is arbitrary, though the word groupings are not. For comparison’s sake, I fed Textplot’s output graph data into the networkvisualization application Gephi and ran iterations of a Force Atlas 2 plot to get stable representations of the data that roughly matched one another in orientation. See Eve, “Visualizing Gravity’s Rainbow,” n.p. Stop words are high-frequency words usually scrubbed from a data set for natural-language processing to avoid trivial results. Common stop words in English include function words like “a,” “an,” “the,” “and,” “or,” “but,” “is,” “was,” “be,” “been,” “she,” “he,” “it,” and so on. Stop-word lists can vary quite significantly from application to application. For McClure’s original stop-word list, see github.com/davidmcclure/textplot/blob/master/textplot/ data/stopwords.txt. McClure is interested in large sets of texts, not in individual interpretive maneuvers. See David McClure, “Distributions of Words across Narrative Time in 27,266 Novels,” DM, July 8, 2017, dclure.org/labs/distributions-ofwords-27k-novels/. Ironically, Perec himself imagined computer-assisted poetic analysis in a 1968 German radio play, The Machine, in which a series of processors “read” Goethe’s poem “Wanderers Nachleid II” by performing five “protocols” on the text. See Georges Perec, The Machine, trans. by Ulrich Schönherr, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 29.1 (Spring 2009), pp. 33–93. McClure, “(Mental) Maps,” n.p. Ibid. See Inger H. Dalsgaard, “Gravity’s Rainbow: ‘A Historical Novel of a Whole New Sort,’” Pynchon Notes, 50–51 (Spring–Fall 2002), pp. 35–50; Bernard Duyfhuizen, “‘A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt’: The Reader-trap of Bianca in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Postmodern Culture, 1.2 (September 1991), n.p.; Robert L. McLaughlin, “Franz Pökler’s Anti-story: Narrative and Self in Gravity’s Rainbow, ” Pynchon Notes, 40–41 (Spring–Fall 1997), pp. 159–75; Khachig Tololyan, “War as Background in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Charles Clerc (ed.), Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow (Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 31–67; and Weisenburger, “In the Zone.” David Leverenz, “On Trying to Read Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Levine and Levernz (eds.), Mindful Pleasures, p. 230. Gore Vidal, “American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 1974, p. 38. Timothy Melley, Empires of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 94.

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38. Walter Dornberger, V2, trans. by James Cleugh and Geoffrey Halliday (Hurst and Blackett, 1954), pp. 53, 54; Steven Weisenburger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel (University of Georgia Press, 2011), p. 238. 39. Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 167–95. 40. See Neufeld, Rocket and the Reich, pp. 209–13. 41. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “One Man’s Meat Is Another Man’s Poisson,” Village Voice, March 29, 1973, www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1973/03/one-mans-me at-is-another-mans-poisson/. 42. Richard Locke, “One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years,” New York Times, March 11, 1973, https://archive.nytimes.com/ www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html?_r=2.

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chapter 12

Reading Pynchon in and on the Digital Age Luc Herman

In his 2003 introduction to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Pynchon writes that “[m]emory is relatively easy to deal with, from the totalitarian point of view,” since governments are eminently capable of “debas[ing] history, triviali[zing] truth and annihilat[ing] the past on a daily basis.”1 Memory, the faculty to retain and reactivate information, thoughts, and impressions, is also an important element in the act of reading. We need to remember a lot of what we have read, or else we have a hard time making sense of the text being processed. At first sight, this kind of memory is perhaps less political, but it is definitely also involved in the management of the (immediate) past. One wonders, therefore, how to relate to Pynchon’s statement in the introduction to Orwell’s novel the demands that his own longer historical fictions, with their convoluted, multistrand narratives, place on the reader’s memories. Pynchon’s most exemplary offering in this regard, Against the Day (2006), is almost eleven hundred pages long and contains scores of characters. How to consider the difficulties of reading such a novel? Are Pynchon’s demands on our physical and mental capabilities as readers subversive, undermining (totalitarian) governments’ work to manipulate and sabotage memory, or are they so huge that the reader’s engagement with Pynchon’s evocation of the past ultimately results in an indifference that may indeed be similar to the ignorance and acquiescence produced by the totalitarian approach? The contemporary answer to these questions must reckon with the effects of the digital age on the individual’s powers of concentration. As many commentators have noted,2 short attention spans seem to have become the norm as reading habits adapt to digital media, and one wonders almost helplessly what the future implications of the growing incapacity to focus for long stretches of time may be. In 2007 N. Katherine Hayles conceived of a generational shift in cognitive styles from deep attention to hyper attention. Whereas the former was “characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), 196

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ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times,” the latter meant “switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.”3 Now that the development from deep to hyper attention has become much more noticeable, I am not sure the relative disappearance of deep attention is limited to the younger generation. What is more, this evolution definitely began before the dawn of the digital revolution. Pynchon already addresses the issue of hyper attention through a focus on television in Vineland (1990), and he returns to it in Bleeding Edge (2013) with an elaborate thematization of the internet. I will deal with these two novels in some detail in the central part of this essay, but I will forego a discussion of the well-rehearsed connection between Pynchon’s 1984 essay on Luddism4 and the stance on technology in his fiction.5 Since the loss of readerly attention and its effect on memory also involve the specifics of the text that is being read, an answer to the questions above first needs to take into account the issue of ‘tellability,’ a notion first developed “in conversational storytelling analysis, but which then proved extensible to all kinds of narrative, referring to features that make a story worth telling.”6 Are Pynchon’s long and difficult historical fictions (and Against the Day in particular) “tellable” – in other words, are they interesting enough to keep the reader’s attention, even in the digital age? This preliminary question leads to another that is even more fundamental. Is tellability a property of the text, or is it really a construction of the reader that somehow turns into fact? Bart Vervaeck and I have argued that it is a good idea to consider tellability as the result of a negotiation – to think of it as the result of a process, in other words, and to analyze this process with reference to four components: topics, assets, field, and audience.7

Tellability and Against the Day A negotiation always involves a topic or subject. For instance, if a minority group negotiates with the state about its rights, these rights are the topic. A settlement involves the recognition of the topic (which is the aim of the minority group) and, in turn, the satisfaction of demands coming from the other party (which is the aim of the state). In the case of a literary text, topics can include the relevance of a certain theme or the importance of a character. Of course, the negotiation with a literary text doesn’t always succeed, which may result in a bad review or, for nonprofessional readers,

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the decision to stop reading. Apart from a topic, a negotiation also involves assets and liabilities, or strengths and weaknesses. In the case of tellability, assets exist on all levels of narrative. On the level of action, they may consist of the interesting and perhaps weird elements that come up in negotiation as a means to convince the reader of the story’s value. If one follows MarieLaure Ryan, “themes of absolute interest” such as sex, danger, and death, are substantial assets for any storyteller.8 With assets like these, a narrator might find it easier to come up with a tellable story, but that does not automatically lead to success. Conversely, a narrator who uses dull elements that have no newsworthiness, no absolute interest, and no complexity, may still succeed in producing a story that impresses his or her audience. Indeed, other assets may well come into play, such as a brilliant style, a convincing rhetoric, or a close relation with the audience. The third component of the negotiation is field. Negotiation takes on a different form in different fields, defined loosely as organized domains of society.9 Literary tellability may be vastly different from tellability in the domain of the news media or the domain of history. For the news media, tellability will obviously depend on newsworthiness, and less on style or rhetoric. Finally, there is audience, which is where you and I come in. A reader fond of postmodern rewriting, parody, and pastiche may well be swept off his or her feet by a detective novel that uses elements from the romance of chivalry and from myth, whereas a more conventional reader might find the same book simply uninteresting. Under audience, we can also include the physical strengths and limitations that determine the act of reading. Needless to say, the combination of the four components that constitute a story’s tellability amounts to an individual experience, but that doesn’t prevent groups of people from having similar reactions to a book. Already at this point, it should indeed be clear that the sky is not the limit when it comes to the continuation of interest in a literary text. There is no such thing as a reading that is entirely out of the box; as readers, we are all determined by factors that are impossible to overcome. Diminished attention spans may well constitute one such factor. How does all this play out in practice? In my personal experience, the initial topic of my negotiation with Against the Day was its value as a new Pynchon novel. I had looked forward to the book for a long time and I was going to review it for a Flemish newspaper. What I had always considered Pynchon’s immense tellability was largely grounded in his widely accepted capacity to turn extreme and hilarious story material into the more or less logical parts of a narrative that is extremely relevant to the present day. In the terms I have been using

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so far, this would amount to saying that what I imagined to be Pynchon’s assets had a clear social dimension. Against the Day definitely displays a similar social relevance to that of his previous novels, in that Pynchon addresses at least one issue that is highly important to the fashioning of our contemporary experience – terrorism. Using, among others, the genre of the western,10 Pynchon challenges the contemporary semantics of terrorism by evoking one of its older embodiments (anarchism in the United States) and linking it up with 9/11 through the narration of a disaster set on the island of Manhattan. In this way, terrorism for me became essential to the negotiating process. Because of the degree of sophistication with which it is evoked, it turned into a highly tellable property, it became a real asset. The fact that Pynchon generally does not allow for easy consumption only added, for me, to the author’s perceived tellability when I started reading Against the Day. As long as the subversion of regular unproblematic storytelling produces a degree of intellectual satisfaction on the part of the reader, a complex or difficult narrative can indeed be considered highly tellable. Against the Day presented challenges to sustaining such intellectual satisfaction, however. A major part of the problem seemed to be a lack of measure, especially in the western sections set in Colorado. It diminished the negotiability of the novel and invalidated what for me were its recognizable assets to such an extent that they became much less valuable. Lack of measure became a liability, which probably goes to show that, despite my self-definition as a reader interested in the undermining of traditional narrative, I was quite conventional in my refusal to accept what appeared to me as useless overkill. However, my specific role in the field of literature when reading Against the Day for the first time called for extra measures. As a reviewer, I was ready to explain the problem away by motivating the overkill as an aspect of form illustrating an aspect of the novel’s content, but what I could come up with in this connection – the necessity of a special experience of time on the part of the reader that matches the description of the notion of time in the book – was not yet precise enough to satisfy me. Also, the kind of connection I made (between form and content) again unmasked me as a conventional critic schooled in hermeneutics. The latter is of course an unending undertaking, but for me it was strongly hampered by the simple fact that in Against the Day Pynchon positively refused to meet one of my basic demands for interesting narration: a degree of concision. I finished the novel the first time around only because I had to review it.

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Attention in Vineland and Bleeding Edge In his recent book on the mega-novel, David Letzler has argued that cruft in books like this, “superfluous junk” though it might be, “helps us develop our abilities to modulate attention when processing information,” not just in the act of reading them, but generally.11 This is certainly a possibility, but it didn’t turn out that way for me with my first reading of Against the Day. The book left me numb, probably also because of my diminishing stamina as a reader. In this respect, and despite my specialization in literature, I resemble those whose attention span has become shorter on account of information overload. As Sven Birkerts puts it in a recent collection of essays on art and attention in the digital age, “[c]oncentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for.”12 But according to him, literature can help: “There are still ambitious authors who have not heard the news.”13 So Birkerts is hopeful, but what about Pynchon? Does his work make a point at all about the possibility of fiction to counteract the growing impact of (social) media? Can his novels do more than warn readers of the dangers of this change? Media certainly play a substantial role in Pynchon’s work. In Gravity’s Rainbow’s 1940s, the double mention of “the nation of starers” (374, 429) already indicates that watching without really taking anything in is definitely part of how Pynchon imagines the movie-theater experience. The narrator’s famous description of Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake’s first encounter as “what Hollywood likes to call a ‘cute meet,’” (38) also suggests that film determines elements of the story-world. However, I would argue that his concerns about the negative effects of contemporary media do not really structure his fiction until Vineland, where television, often called “the Tube,” pervades the plot.14 The novel is set in 1984 and often looks back to the sixties in an effort to retrace the dynamic of that decade. Early on in the book, Dennis Deeply of the “National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation” is trying to catch Hector Zuñiga, a drug-enforcement officer whose “Tubal abuse” apparently needs to be cured (33). Hector has crossed a line, and even ex-hippie protagonist Zoyd Wheeler uses the officer’s bad viewing habits to admonish his daughter Prairie: “You’re tubed out worse ’n Hector if you think your mom and me’ll ever get back together” (53). While these mere two examples by no means prove a general propensity for characters in Vineland to be affected by watching a lot of television, they do suggest it can have serious negative consequences. DL Chastain is a female ninja and a former close friend of Prairie’s mother Frenesi Gates. When she returns to the Kunoichi Retreat in California, DL sneaks “into the Regression

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Room and watche[s] old movies on the Tube” (153). The “Regression” in question must be a figurative step backward in the development toward a deeper and more sensitive existence held out as a goal by the “Attentive staff” : “Paying attention [. . .] ’s the whole point, DL-san” (153, 154). Here, watching the Tube is a distraction, for DL, from what has already been a “reckless” lapse from her training in “paying attention, taking the time, getting prepared” (154) – a lapse that has resulted in her giving the Ninja Death Touch to Takeshi rather than the villain, Brock Vond. While the Kunoichi Retreat and DL’s ninjitsu training promotes concentrated, deep attention, the Tube only offers the blankness of unfocused hyper attention. Watching a lot of television seems to make some characters pay less attention to people and the world than might apparently be good for them. At the same time, paying a lot of attention can seem paranoid: DL’s partner Takeshi Fumimoto “had come to value and watch closely in the world for signs and symptoms, messages from beyond, and even discounting the effects of drug abuse, nothing about the city seemed quite right tonight” (147–48). At least for Takeshi himself, this recurring feeling doesn’t seem to be a problem, but he does worry about the impact of television. The livingdead Thanatoids in the story-world of Vineland also watch a lot of television, and Takeshi surmises this prevents them from realizing they are in fact dead: “[W]ith its history of picking away at the topic [of death] with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, [television] had trivialized the Big D itself” (218). The novel’s fascist villain Brock Vond understands the superficiality of TV as well: “While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep [. . .] need only to stay children forever” (269). Apparently the TV’s frippery encourages the refusal of adult awareness and responsibility, and as such it also impinges on the revolutionary potential of youth. A conversation between Zoyd and “Mucho” Maas (already a character in The Crying of Lot 49) provides the most explicit indictment of the medium; what was “found out” in the sixties will not last: “They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it’s what the Tube is for” (314). Forgetting comes about through an orchestrated lowering of attention. This opinion is echoed later on in the novel, when Prairie’s boyfriend Isaiah reproaches Zoyd’s generation for not having opposed television’s deadly sway: “[Y]ou believed in your Revolution [. . .] but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks, that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato” (373). In Vineland television appears as the opium of the (revolutionary) masses,

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and its overwhelming success in taking away what the book seems to promote as deep attention through the evocation of the Kunoichi Retreat is an important aspect of why the revolutionary impulses of the sixties disappeared. At the same time, the story-world is replete with references to both real and invented television shows, demonstrating that even the narrator hasn’t been able to develop a worldview that is not inflected by the medium. As Hanjo Berressem has said about the difficulty of reading Pynchon, “if one starts with the notion of an infinitely complex world, Pynchon’s habit is to not unduly reduce this complexity.”15 In Vineland, however, Pynchon’s attitude toward television seems quite clear. The medium constantly diverts the attention away from what really matters, and in doing so it contributes to the manipulation and neutralization of the past. Since Pynchon also addresses the revolutionary potential of film (as embodied in the militant movie collective, 24fps), television does not make up the entire media landscape in the novel, but its effect on the story-world is so big that there does not seem to be any hope of resistance. Bleeding Edge deals with a more current media ecology, and it may therefore shed even more light on the topic of manipulated attention than Vineland. The protagonist in Bleeding Edge, Maxine Tarnow, is a fraud investigator in New York, and the year is 2001. She obviously has to pay attention in order to solve her cases, but fortunately she is blessed with “antennas for the unspoken” (4) that make her job just a little bit easier: “Among Maxine’s more useful sensors is her bladder. When she’s out of range of information she needs, she can go whole days without any particular interest in pissing, but when phone numbers, koans, or stock tips from which she’s likely to profit are close by, the gotta-go alarm has reliably steered her to enough significant restroom walls that she’s learned to pay attention” (84). The humor of the preceding quotation already indicates that Bleeding Edge delights in spoofing the crime genre, including the private investigator’s need to establish meaningful connections. No wonder then that Pynchon’s trademark paranoia attaches itself to Maxine, whose “antennas for the unspoken” trigger the attention she needs to establish them. This paranoia, then, is not in itself a form of deep attention, and although its presence can provoke a degree of such attention in Maxine, its results are mixed. In the down-to-earth spirit that also characterizes Pynchon’s pastiche, the connections she makes occasionally lead to more work: “Something today strikes her as odd. One of those nagging patterns that’s not always welcome because it means uncompensated overtime, but what else is new” (172). Still in the same spirit, her

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paranoia occasionally doesn’t lead anywhere. When she “is once again [. . .] visited by a strong hint of secret intention” (158) as a character suddenly disappears from the Korean karaoke night to which she has been invited, the rest of the episode doesn’t lead to any revelations at all. Pynchon’s evenly distributed attention to a talent for attention becomes still funnier when he ups the ante by introducing Ross Conkling, a “freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy” (201). One of his associates is even “proösmic – she can foresmell things that’re going to happen” (236). The talent for attention mostly appears as a gift, but training still helps. “After some time in fraud work, you learn to read phone silences” (216), the narrator says, and about the “consciously seedy look” of a building, he adds that “Maxine has learned to associate [it] with frequent changes of ownership” (267). The motif of attention connects with Pynchon’s clear interest in the internet, whose historical roots in ARPAnet (courtesy of the American Department of Defense) he already brings up in Inherent Vice (IV 53, 195). The evocation of the internet in Bleeding Edge resembles that of television in Vineland, but with one important difference. Whereas television’s distractions thwart any systemic changes for the good coming from outside the medium, the internet ultimately recuperates its own apparent potential, often leaving its users to their misplaced illusions concerning its role in today’s society. Rather than merely promoting hyper attention against the energies of social change, the internet channels those energies toward a hyperattentive dead end. The software program DeepArcher is a Deep Web “sanctuary” (74) from the real world. Developed by Maxine’s acquaintances Justin and Lucas, it looks like a digital commune of the kind iconically promoted in the sixties, since “users all over the world” (69) contribute to it. However, the spirit of socialism does not remain dominant in this environment for long. Justin may have envisioned it as existing out of time, but Maxine knows better: “Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends” (167). So contrary to Michael Jarvis, I do not think that DeepArcher is “a space that exceeds the rational and allows glimpses of capitalism’s unimaginable other.”16 Even so, Maxine keeps visiting, “settl[ing] in among the throngs, invisible and at ease” (426), hoping to find signs of a deceased lover who may have been involved in 9/11.

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After the terrorist attacks take place (316), Bleeding Edge becomes much more explicit. Pynchon largely drops his crime spoof in order to deliver social commentary and reinforce the melodrama issuing from Maxine’s family situation. There are still glimpses of the fun Pynchon readers have come to expect (such as a zany half page on the “never-distributed Marx Brothers version of Don Giovanni” [418]), but his familiar engine almost grinds to a disappointing halt. While I would prefer to explain this turn as a wish on the author’s part to illustrate what fiction is going be like if we give up on irony – itself a sudden theme (335) – rather than concede that he is going soft, the overall seriousness means that the narrator doesn’t hesitate to let us in on a number of truths, including those that pertain to the internet. After 9/11, its proportions have become truly daunting: “The Internet has erupted into a Mardi Gras for paranoids and trolls, a pandemonium of commentary there may not be time in the projected age of the universe to read all the way through” (388–89). How does this overload compare to that of television as described in Vineland? Perhaps because it is such a crucial element in that novel, Bleeding Edge does not make too many comments about television early on in the novel, but many characters still watch it, and there are quite a few television references among the countless cultural details evoking the period. When a conversation turns to fatherhood, for instance, one character’s nightmare scenario draws a familiar response: “Too much family television, bad for your brain, watch the after-midnight cartoons instead” (60); but elsewhere either the narrator or Maxine sees a spiritual benefit in what Vineland might have seen as a symptom of loss: “Maxine rewinds [the videocassette], ejects, and, returning to realworld television programming, begins idly to channel-surf. A form of meditating” (180). The paradox seems to be enhanced by the fact that the home screen (television or video) offers family members a degree of cozy togetherness, which they especially come to cherish after the attacks. In a frank conversation after 9/11 with her father Ernie, however, Maxine rehearses the point about television in Vineland and sets the bad medium off against its more contemporary counterpart: “Maybe TV back then was brainwashing, but it could never happen today. Nobody’s in control of the Internet” (419). Ernie quickly explains the origins of the internet in the Cold War (“the real original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets” [419]), and when Maxine suggests that the World Wide Web, despite getting somewhat “commercialized,” is essentially “empowering all these billions of people, the promise, the freedom,” he lashes out:

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Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law. (420)

Maxine relativizes this statement by identifying her father as the source of her own paranoia, but post-9/11 nonironic Pynchon hammers home the point only a dozen pages later when Eric Redfield, a computer nerd, tells Maxine that the internet has evolved into an environment for “what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage [. . .] We’re being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed” (432). If even all of these statements do not raise Maxine’s consciousness or prevent her from returning to DeepArcher, the addiction must be strong indeed, and attention will be devoted to all the wrong issues. As the ultimate distractor in Pynchon’s fiction, the internet creates a form of hyper attention that masquerades as freedom but really reinforces the status quo. If Maxine’s attention helps her to translate her intuitions into connections that may well be meaningful to solve her cases, all in all it can only appear as a remnant of the deep attention the internet is now about to destroy forever.

Reading Pynchon as Distraction? In Cognitive Fictions (2002), Joseph Tabbi candidly considers the difficulty of reading Pynchon: “It is certain that no one reader could hold in mind the embedded and multilevel narratives, the richly textured connections, or the epistemological reversals” of Gravity’s Rainbow (and, I hasten to add, Against the Day).17 Tabbi grants Pynchon studies the possibility of a collective understanding of the author that somehow manages to overcome the risks of totalization inherent in individual criticism. There is no reason to dismiss this idea, but it strikes me that most readings of Pynchon’s difficult novels are still done alone. So my original question still stands: how does our current limited attention span in the face of such books relate to the negative distraction by media the author has evoked in Vineland and Bleeding Edge? Pynchon does not say so himself, but these novels make a point about attention that could be developed into a reproach when reading Against the Day or Gravity’s Rainbow. Just like Pynchon’s television and the internet, these books constantly give us too

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much to do, and the suggestion that this kind of distraction would be less addictive, less repressive, and thus more valuable might therefore merely amount to a romantic form of belief in the continuing relevance of literature when it comes to a critical, subversive take on society. For many readers, no doubt, just such a belief could turn into an asset when negotiating Pynchon’s complex fictions, and indeed it might also reinforce a feeling of belonging to the literary field. The reverse idea that Pynchon’s difficult books would be just as negatively distracting as the media he analyzes in his fiction might even turn him into a hypocrite few of his readers might want him to be. But if we are being “played” (BE 432) on the internet, why wouldn’t Pynchon (inadvertently perhaps) be playing his addicts as well? At the end of my presentation of tellability as a form of negotiation, I suggested that reading is bound by a number of individual factors we cannot possibly escape. In that respect, it resembles social media. Dominic Pettman explains that social media are characterized by a combination of “hypermodulation” (the fact that distraction can now be digitally attuned to precise individual needs and wishes) and “hypersynchronization” (the fact that this very individualism increases our bondage to the system).18 Between these two tendencies, there is hardly any room to maneuver, and the result, in Pettman’s channeling of Bernard Stiegler, is “a loss of libido, a forfeit of joie de vivre, a disenchantment with world and self.”19 How can we keep thinking that reading Pynchon won’t have the same effect? How can we separate the effect of his practice from our daily experiences on the internet? When trying to consider the political relevance of Pynchon’s demands on our attention, I think we need to zoom in on the central role complexity plays at any given moment in the act of reading his difficult novels. To say the least, books such as Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day pose a constant mental challenge. The wish for a sustained engagement with complexity may certainly be an individual need (or indeed an individual obligation, if the reader is bound to the current demands of corporate academic existence); it may also be the communal need of an ingroup, as can be witnessed in what Tabbi (1998) has called the Pyndustry,20 which derives its relative coherence from the collective entanglement with the author’s work. When these needs and their satisfactions remain safely ensconced within the system, the engagement with Pynchon’s complexity may therefore definitely illustrate the synchronization Pettman associates with social media. We may intuitively feel that there is a qualitative difference between the two experiences, but they both turn out to be examples of recuperation by the system. The internet has sold out and

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holds its user captive to the illusion of individuality; reading Pynchon is not subversive either, since it basically caters to an experience of overwhelming complexity his readers will specifically want to find in his work. Yet there might be reading scenarios in which this recuperation does not apply. I do not think the general conditions of such positive engagement with Pynchon’s difficult fiction can be described – in fact if they could, that would undermine them – but I can think of at least one example, which is inevitably personal. Given my argument so far, I am sure its perceived positive effect risks being rejected as an illusion on my part, so I must hope the following account is strong enough for what I see as the subversive aspect of my reading experience to get across. Of course, unrecuperated acts of reading Pynchon may themselves lose their force quite easily, for example when a professor tells a group of students (in order for them to keep making the reading effort) that the complexity of Gravity’s Rainbow is worthwhile, or when Against the Day has challenged a reader so much he or she cannot stop twittering about it. Concluding an essay about reading Pynchon in the digital age with a personal reading report may at first seem untypical or even naive enough to avoid such a fate, but then the fact that this essay will become part of the academic economy immediately diminishes the power of what I am about to say. Still, I do not know of a better way to explain why reading Pynchon can matter at a time when deep attention is seriously challenged. When, shortly after the novel’s publication, I was asked to write an essay about Against the Day, I said yes immediately, partly because my first reading hadn’t been satisfactory, and partly because the requested text would help me meet my publication quota. Time constraints being what they are, I decided to focus on the sequence of chapters in the novel devoted to Belgium, which as a Belgian national I thought I would be able to do well, or at least better than a foreigner. The decision to work on a limited number of pages allowed me to forego a basic imperative in academic interpretation. I knew I wouldn’t be able to describe all the links between the Belgium chapters and the rest of the novel, so I hardly tried. Instead I created a density for the pages in question by developing my Belgian associations with various details in the text. For instance, when I anachronistically identified the section officer “de Decker” as Jean-Marie De Decker, a successful Belgian judo coach turned politician who left the (center right) Flemish liberal party (VLD) to form his own much more populist party in 2007, the relationship between this character in Against the Day and that of his boss, Piet Woevre (who is working for the Belgian police) easily became part of the intricate politics of the episode.

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The ensuing wealth of these pages redoubled the textual complexity I had expected and put me in a place I hadn’t been to yet as a Pynchon specialist. The resulting essay21 was too dense, but the investment in complexity on which it was based definitely helped to overcome the distraction and indifference I experienced when reading the novel for the purpose of reviewing it. This second act of reading did not do justice to the book, and yet it felt like fighting back against the loss of attention that is an integral part of the contemporary media experience and also a major risk when it comes to reading Pynchon’s complicated blockbusters. Needless to say, I do not offer this way of dealing with the overload of Against the Day as a recipe for deep attention; nor do I claim any political force for it. In my specific situation at the time, my reading experience of the chapters set in Belgium offered a release from professional constraints that was liberating.

Notes 1. Thomas Pynchon, “Introduction,” in George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin, 2003), p. xx. 2. For a recent example, see Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (MIT Press, 2016). Paul North in The Problem of Distraction (Stanford University Press, 2012) interestingly deconstructs the opposition between attention and its alleged counterpart, but I will simply assume a common-sense difference between attention and the lack of it. 3. N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Profession (2007), p. 188. 4. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times, October 28, 1984, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/ pynchon-luddite.html?. 5. See, for instance, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006); and Steven E. Jones, Against Technology: From the Luddites to NeoLuddism (Routledge, 2006). 6. Raphaël Baroni, “Tellability,” in Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology (De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 836–45. 7. Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck, “Narrative Interest as Cultural Negotiation,” Narrative, 17.1 (2009), pp. 111–29. 8. Marie-Laure Ryan, “Tellability,” in David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Routledge, 2005), p. 590. 9. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Polity Press, 1993).

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10. See Brian McHale, “Genre as History: Genre-Poaching in Against the Day,” Genre, 42.3–4 (2009), https://read.dukeupress.edu/genre/article-abstract/42/ 3-4/5/34480/Genre-as-History-Genre-Poaching-in-Against-the-Day?redirect edFrom=fulltext, pp. 5–20. 11. David Letzler, The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-novels and the Science of Paying Attention (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), pp. 5, 16. 12. Sven Birkerts, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (Graywolf Press, 2015), p. 155. 13. Ibid. 14. For an excellent early essay on this aspect of the novel, see Johan Callens, “Tubed Out and Movie Shot in Pynchon’s Vineland,” Pynchon Notes, 28–29 (1991), pp. 115–41. 15. Hanjo Berressem, “Coda: How to Read Pynchon,” in Inger Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 175. 16. Michael Jarvis, “Pynchon’s Deep Web,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 12, 2013, lareviewofbooks.org/article/pynchons-deep-web. 17. Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 37. 18. Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction: Paying Attention to Social Media (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 40–45. 19. Ibid., p. 42. 20. Joseph Tabbi, “The Pyndustry in Warwick,” Studies in the Novel, 30.3 (1998), pp. 438–43. 21. Luc Herman, “Storyworld and Historiographic Metafiction: Belgium in Against the Day,” in Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd and Gilles Chamerois, Thomas Pynchon (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013), pp. 173–91.

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chapter 13

Pynchon on Film Ralph Clare

Thomas Pynchon’s work has long demonstrated a deep investment in cinema, especially with the publication of the sweeping World War II novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), which entertains the possibility that “this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre” (521) and ends with a rocket descending upon a movie theater in which we, the audience, sit awaiting the show. The novel is bursting with allusions to the genre films and actors of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, as well as German expressionist cinema of the 1920s; it showcases Gerhardt von Göll, a fictional Nazi director whose films (propagandistic and otherwise) have perverse effects on the lives of both actors and viewers; and it ultimately makes the case that popular films unconsciously embody the collective dreams and myths, anxieties and fantasies of our culture. At the same time, the novel’s formal and stylistic devices mimic many filmic techniques, such as in the use of jump cuts and montage when Pynchon skips back and forth between different characters, events, and scenes (especially in the novel’s last fifty pages), and often employs filmic metaphors and the language of editing to describe the ways in which characters experience their “reality” through the medium of film.1 All told, Gravity’s Rainbow’s filmic intertextuality introduces a major theme that runs through Pynchon’s oeuvre: the blurring of the film reel with the “real” world. For as David Cowart writes, “Pynchon uses film as a critique of life, insisting that the one is not more or less real than the other.”2 Pynchon’s work demonstrates that film has become a permanent frame of reference to our past, present, and future. Yet the definition of film in Pynchon’s post-Gravity’s Rainbow work has expanded beyond movies shot on celluloid film stock as new forms of digital media have displaced celluloid film as a medium while continuing to draw from its techniques and modes of presentation. Such a change is notable in Vineland (1990), in which it is television and video, not cinema and the movies, that comprise the primary deleterious cultural force blurring 210

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the reel/real. Films still receive mention in the novel – including a critique via Frenesi Gates’s story of what Stacey Olster calls the “somewhat naïve” aesthetic of New Left documentary film that attempted to “objectively” capture raw footage to speak truth to power3 – but so do television shows and Pynchon’s own humorous made-for-television movies. Thus, Ernest Mathijs posits that Vineland traces the changing status of film and Hollywood through the generations of the Traverse family, reading Sasha Gates as representative of the 1940s and 1950s “cracks” in Hollywood hegemony as the political possibilities of popular movies became more evident, Frenesi Gates as representative of the rise of the 1960s documentary, and Prairie Gates as representative of the video and television generation.4 This essay will expand upon Mathijs’s earlier formulation of Pynchon’s evolving relationship to cinema history to consider the ways in which Bleeding Edge (2013) and both the novel and film Inherent Vice (2009 and 2014, respectively) comment upon the role and fate of film in what has been called the “post-celluloid era.”5 Pynchon’s historicization of film as an industry and as a medium means that one can detect film’s beginnings in the operettas, panoramas, radio, and strange inventions of Against the Day (2006), a novel in which most of the action pre-dates the film industry, but it also means that one can glimpse the “end” of traditional film – movies shot on actual celluloid film stock – in Bleeding Edge’s emphasis on the rise of digital technology and, in a different fashion, the film adaptation of Inherent Vice, which was notably shot by Paul Thomas Anderson on 35mm film. For the celluloid film reel is in danger of being permanently canned in the post-postmodern era in which film has morphed into a digital medium that has greatly affected its production, distribution, and reception. Celluloid film’s one-time cultural hegemony, which Vineland showed had already been challenged by television, finds itself under further assault as various forms of digital media, such as the internet, video games, virtual reality, and streaming video, have risen to prominence. Yet film and the filmic mode, of course, will continue to exist and be influential. As David N. Rodowick writes, “[w]hile film [as celluloid] may disappear, cinema nonetheless persists.”6 To be sure, Pynchon’s later work reveals that while traditional notions of cinema and the celluloid strips it once projected may be things of the past, filmic or cinematic ways of seeing and being continue to mediate “reality” and, in turn, keep alive the potential to manipulate and control a viewing or interfacing public. Ultimately, what is at stake for Pynchon is our ability to know and make history itself, which due to the troubling conflation of the reel/real has come to resemble a film. Pynchon’s

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novels, therefore, attempt to preserve both the history of film and, more importantly, history-as-film.

Bleeding Edge: Getting with the (Computer) Program At one level, Bleeding Edge continues Pynchon’s intertextual engagement with film in familiar fashion. The novel is packed with allusions to films of all kinds spanning eight decades – among them The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Lost Weekend (1945), Picnic (1956), Vertigo (1958), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Zorba the Greek (1964), Jaws (1975), Kundun (1997), and The Fast and the Furious (2001). As in earlier Pynchon works, his characters’ experience of reality is often filtered through film. The novel’s protagonist, the detective Maxine Turnow, for instance, dreams herself into a scene from Now, Voyager (1942), likens her ex-husband’s surprise shower visit to the most famous scene in Psycho (1960), and thinks at one point of the catchphrase from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), albeit via free indirect discourse (262, 92, 288). One character’s smile resembles a “Cary Grant beam” (65), one wears shark slippers that play the theme of Jaws (267), and another movie theme, this time from The Godfather (1972), is the tune of someone’s car horn (417). The novel’s thematic echoes of popular film come through references to the cyberfictional film Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and the anti–Cold War film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Finally, following Vineland’s turn to the small screen, Pynchon makes mention of television shows – from The Brady Bunch and The X-Files to Space Ghost Coast to Coast and Dragonball Z – as well as a number of fictional made-fortelevision movies. Pynchon also keeps with his penchant for creating fictional film directors in the figure of Reg Despard, who differs in telling ways from the dictatorial, Nazi propagandist von Göll of Gravity’s Rainbow and the documentarian Frenesi Gates of Vineland. Despard’s “career,” for instance, begins by pirating movies. His terrible technique is heralded by an NYU film professor who claims that Despard is “ahead of the leading edge of this post-postmodern art form” (BE 9). Despard, who shoots on (handheld) video and not celluloid, does not go on to make avant-garde, feature, or documentary films but simply churns out commercial efforts that earn him a steady paycheck. This satirical poke at academia and avant-garde cinema suggests the instantaneous conflation of art and commerce in contemporary times, as well as the rise of the amateur video filmmaker. Free from such aspirations or illusions as to the quality or meaning of his work (as von Göll and Frenesi Gates are not), Despard is refreshingly honest as he tells

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Maxine, “[f]uture of film if you want to know – someday, more bandwidth, more video files up on the Internet, everybody’ll be shootin everything, way too much to look at, nothin will mean shit. Think of me as the prophet of that” (143). Through Reg Despard, then, Pynchon contemplates the transformation, and the possible end, of film as we know it. That this prediction should come from a supposedly cutting-edge “director” whose aesthetic is “I see something interesting, I shoot it is all” (143) – that is, he does not actually direct anything – speaks to the widespread, twenty-first-century dissemination of video, DVD, and various forms of media that appear to empower everyday people by making everyone the director of his or her life-movie. The novel, however, expresses little optimism for this kind of apparent democratization of media (one character says, “Call it freedom, it’s based on control” [420]), and one should recall its similarity to the vision of the Nazi director von Göll in Gravity’s Rainbow, who fantasizes that, “[s]omeday, when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people’s prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then . . . then . . . ” (527, italics in original). Then, of course, we would not be talking about film per se but of media and digital technology in the new millennium, exactly as Despard predicts: “[s]omeday there’ll be a Napster for videos, it’ll be routine to post anything and share it with anybody” (348). Bleeding Edge, published in 2013 but set in 2001, retroactively comments upon what is to come regarding “the future of film,” a future in which cell phones will be able to capture and instantly post any and everything. The fact that von Göll, a master manipulator and propagandist, relishes such a future speaks to the hidden mechanisms of control and the dangers that remain in such a digitized democracy. Indeed, the seeming liberation from Gravity’s Rainbow’s ominous “They” who write the script, direct the action, and run the projector actually indicates another intensification or, perhaps, the final conflation of the reel/real. Via Despard, Pynchon makes it clear that the word “film” should be used in a strictly metaphorical fashion. Film is simply moving images captured by any kind of recording device and later replayed on any size screen. As Anne Friedberg succinctly puts it: “Film is a ‘storage’ medium – variable in versions” and spectators are now interactive “users” who view content on a variety of “screens” that do not involve projection.7 Thus, while in Gravity’s Rainbow we sit in a theater awaiting the show, and in Vineland we follow Frenesi’s camera eye, in Bleeding Edge we watch, along with Maxine, videos either on DVD or uploaded online anywhere and available anytime Maxine chooses to view them. The one time

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physical, communal experience of going to the movies, which later shrinks to the quintessential family gathering around the living room TV, finally results in a decentralized network of isolated individuals interacting with and through various devices that privilege virtual ways of being over the material. Moreover, no overarching or centralized filmic apparatus or physical theater space in which film is projected need exist anymore. In the past, one could always hope to “storm the reality studio” as William S. Burroughs might have put it, or to employ a camera as a weapon to speak truth to power, but in Bleeding Edge film and video are radically decentralized and often contribute to a cacophony of information overload.8 A primary example of this occurs when the authenticity of the footage of the men armed with rockets on a Manhattan rooftop (which may be proof that 9/11 was an “inside job”) that Reg sends Maxine cannot be confirmed. Although Pynchon’s work has long advocated for a paranoid reading of history – especially in the form of counternarratives that challenge conventional history by drawing upon both facts excised from the official record and upon subjectively remembered history to form a collective “We” that claims its legitimacy from the bottom up – the construction of such narratives in Bleeding Edge no longer holds this wider subversive potential. After Maxine’s friend posts the mysterious video on her weblog, for instance, it simply becomes a part of an internet reveling in debased conspiracy theories of 9/11: “If you’re interested in counternarratives, however, click on this link to the video [. . .]. Check out theories and countertheories. Contribute your own” (388).9 The lack of an apparent director equals a lack of direction by individuals in the fashioning of collective narratives from any kind of “raw footage,” a difficulty already encountered by Frenesi and her collective in Vineland. A welter of individuals’ commentary and speculation does not actively construct a “We” counterforce. Instead, a kind of “personalization” of counternarratives kicks in, and “[o]ut in the vast undefined anarchism of cyberspace, among the billions of self-resonant fantasies, dark possibilities are beginning to emerge” (BE 327). All of this is clearly a harbinger of the soon-to-be “postfactual” age in which the already ontologically unstable reel/real binary will be shamelessly exploited by the creation of “alternative facts” – “facts” that gain their traction in the mediasphere-as-film, not only by providing nodes for individuals to invest their fantasies, desires, and fears into, just as film always has allowed, but by urging them to join in and actively create such nodes.

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The reality behind this elevation of spectator to director is that the reel/ real is even more hopelessly blurred than ever. Nor does it matter whether this is evidenced in the latest sensational Twitter feed or (fake) news story or in representing moments of national crisis or tragedy. In Bleeding Edge Watergate, for instance, is referred to as a “movie” (268) and the destruction of the World Trade Center has “for much of the city [. . .] come to them mediated, mostly by television” (327). As Maxine remarks, “they [the terrorists] blew it to pixels” (446). Refusing to back away from the postmodern position that “reality” is always already mediated by technology, Pynchon doubles down on his critique of the reel/real with respect to 9/11: “Everybody is still walking around stunned, having spent the previous day sitting or standing in front of television screens, at home, in bars, at work, staring like zombies, unable in any case to process what they were seeing. A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumbstruck, undefended, scared shitless” (321). Here we find not just traumatized people but viewers without a script to follow, and it is perhaps notable that there are few references to film or television for the fifty pages or so after this passage. Indeed, what becomes clear is that for all the supposed autonomy of the individual spectator-as-director, the lack of collective “direction” means that all the while, “forces in whose interests it compellingly lies to seize control of the narrative as quickly as possible come into play and dependable history shrinks to a dismal perimeter centered on ‘Ground Zero’” (327–28). The script, it turns out, is always being written, even when those users supposedly providing “content” are silent. Bleeding Edge, moreover, expands on the reel/real theme in its exploration of how both televised images and the internet co-mingle to create an updated filmic reality, thus pointing to the ways in which emergent forms of media take from and transform film and what the resulting cultural effects might be. This occurs primarily through the novel’s consideration of virtual reality and video games, which today draw heavily from the cinematic in terms of their elaborate stories/scripts, character creation, employment of camera angles and techniques, and even in the use of famous actors’ voices for characters. Developments in video gaming thus receive a fair amount of attention in Bleeding Edge, from consoles such as Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Game Boy, and Xbox to games such as HALO, Doom, Final Fantasy, and Tomb Raider. So culturally central are video games that Maxine’s ex-husband, Horst, takes their children on a road trip focused on learning about gaming history (290). Bleeding Edge’s mention of the video games Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy, each of which spawned wildly successful media franchises and

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were adapted into movies, underscores the way in which recent video games have adopted filmic modes of presentation. Vineland heralded the rise of video and turned the word “film” into merely a metaphor; Bleeding Edge does the same with the rise of a new generation of video games and a gaming industry (which now rivals the yearly revenue of the movie industry) that succeed in part because of their ability to mimic the cinematic experience, which is further amplified by being accessible online and allowing for multiplayer interactive gaming. Keenly aware of this trend, Pynchon combines new media’s filmic modes – the online video game and the internet – in the virtual reality world of Deep Archer that, when Maxine first encounters it, prompts her to say, “Whoa, Cinerama here” (74). Accordingly, Pynchon describes DeepArcher cinematically at times: “Movements are blurless, every pixel doing its job, the radiation from above triggering colors too unsafe for hex code, a sound track of groundlevel desert wind” (403). What makes Pynchon’s DeepArcher not simply a rehash of earlier filmic imaginings of cyberspace is his work’s tracing and historicizing of cinema history and film technology as an influence on such “new” media. For Pynchon, virtual reality does not appear ex nihilo and therefore does not mark a clean break from the past or past technologies; rather it is technology built upon earlier technologies that results in an intensification of the reel/real ontological slippage that his critique of film (and, according to Against the Day, even theater, radio, and the panorama) has long considered. The “new” media, then, means much of the same “old” repression, for even in the wilds of the Deep Net, as one hacker puts it, there exists a “hidden code of behavior you have to learn and obey” (226). Pynchon therefore suggests a kind of continuity that exists under surface discontinuities. Not surprisingly, as the novel progresses Maxine’s detective work and “digging around” increasingly includes going online as an avatar in the DeepArcher virtual world, thereby echoing Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft and her video game/virtual “archeological” adventures, and once again confusing the reel/real so that “there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face” (429). Consequently, at one point the “real” NYC becomes “one of those firstperson-shooter towns” and its “only humanity visible are virtual extras in the distance” (412). Later it becomes “harder to tell ‘real’ NYC” from the virtual world, such as when Maxine watches the plastic top of a take-out container rolling impossibly down the street one day and has to ask herself, “Real? Computer-animated?” (429, 430). Thus, the virtual world functions

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just as film and television have functioned in the past. The cinematic techniques incorporated by virtual reality have essentially made it into the new “film” or filmic mode whereby “reality” is experienced – and even ontologically questioned. Film has shed its celluloid skin and evolved into something composed of digital pixels and bytes. Slowly buying into this virtual world, Maxine invests DeepArcher with her most profound fantasies and existential fears as she “interacts” with other avatars, even though she often has no idea as to the identity of the user (411 and 426–27). In fact, DeepArcher is depicted as a virtual underworld, in which spirit-avatars roam in life-in-digital-death (Pynchon’s longtime ones and zeros metaphor now virtually come into digitalhuman-being). The use of avatars (Bleeding Edge notes that “avatar” is the Hindu word for “incarnation”) reaffirms this sense of an underworld or afterlife – at least to Maxine, who wonders, “[W]hen you pass from this side of the screen over into virtual reality, is that like dying and being reincarnated?” (70). The hacker’s answer that an avatar is just a couple computer geeks’ code that “something hypermutated out of” (70) does not quell Maxine’s metaphysical speculation, which shares something with Oedipa Maas’s grappling with, and projections onto, the Trystero in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). Maxine’s technometaphysics, which she acknowledges is wishful thinking at best (426), is largely a response to her anxiety in a post-9/11 world and desire to reverse history. Eventually, her virtual world becomes that of the past, after her “boys [. . .] located graphics files for a version of NYC as it was before 11 September 2001 [. . .] reformatted now as the personal city of Zigotisopolis” (428). For Maxine, this becomes a place [. . .] where you dowse across an empty screen, clicking on tiny invisible links, and there’s something waiting out there, [. . .] maybe a sacred city all in pixels waiting to be reassembled, as if disasters could be run in reverse, the towers rise out of black ruin, the bits and pieces and lives, no matter how finely vaporized, become whole again . . . (446)

For Maxine, the computer’s pixels of data and bytes of information may be filled with a deeper meaning, as “dowsing,” a word referring to the use of a divining rod to find water, suggests. Yet the desire to “reverse” 9/11 is somewhat different here from rewinding it, as one does with a film. Maxine may think in filmic terms here, but she eventually learns that in the virtual world of DeepArcher there is no “time” as such, no fast forward or rewind, for the pixels are always already discrete, fragmented “bits and pieces.” Nothing is reassembled in cyberspace but only produced virtually. Indeed,

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the virtual world of DeepArcher exists as an eternal present and shares similarities with the strange place that Vineland’s Thanatoids (those “mediated deaths” [218]) and Weed Atman’s ghost inhabit, seemingly “safe in some time-free zone” (90). Such a zone is illusory, of course, and Bleeding Edge’s references to Tomb Raider and The Mummy suggest that the DeepArcher virtual/digital underworld is a kind of “tombworld” that tries to freeze time and preserve the present as only the digital image can. Unlike the digital, life and history are subject to lived time, tragedy, and death. In the novel’s final scene, Maxine compares the worry she feels watching over her sons as they head out into the city to the security they seemingly had in her recreated DeepArcher virtual world of Zigotisopolis. Her acceptance of the precariousness of lived existence is suggested by her willingness to let them leave, but her recollection of the virtual world speaks to the influence that this new filmic mode of “reality” still holds over her. Pynchon, then, while he forecasts the end of film-as-cinema and the rise of the digital/virtual filmic reality in Bleeding Edge, leaves the outcome of this new intensification of the reel/real collapse fairly ambiguous. Through Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Inherent Vice, however, he will offer an intriguing response to this situation.

I Can (Still) See the Light: Inherent Vice as Film Preservation Curiously, it was just as the digital revolution in film had essentially been won that a Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice, was finally adapted for the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson. One way to read the interface of Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film is as an indirect response to the digital/virtual conundrum raised in Bleeding Edge. In fact, it is fitting that it would take a film adaptation in the digital age to provide perhaps Pynchon’s final statement on the metaphorical importance of celluloid film in a virtual, computer-driven age.10 Taken together the Inherent Vice film/text interface comprises a sort of archive that works to preserve both film-as-history and the history-of-film. Inherent Vice the novel, published in 2009, adheres to Pynchon’s wellestablished use of film. It boasts references and allusions to a number of films and actors – including Freaks (1932), Black Narcissus (1947), Fort Apache (1948), Godzilla (1954), Dr. No (1963), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967), German Expressionist films, Cheech and Chong, and W. C. Fields, among others. Of particular relevance are several noir films starring John Garfield, such as Out of the Fog (1941), Sea Wolf (1941), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and Force of Evil (1948).

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Garfield’s real-life blacklisting for refusing to “name names” to HUAC, along with some of the films’ gangster elements, resonates with a number of the novel’s subplots and themes. Set in the early 1970s, Inherent Vice also extends television’s hegemonic challenge to film further back than Vineland’s 1984 setting allows, as Doc Sportello and other characters watch and discuss television, such as Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Jetsons, and particularly the influence of courtroom dramas and police shows, such as Adam-12 and The Mod Squad, on real-life policing and the public’s understanding of it (97). Characters again reference and experience their “reality” through film and television. Doc Sportello, for instance, does impressions of (then governor and one-time actor) Ronald Reagan (73) and Moe from The Three Stooges (73), unconsciously acts out a scene from The Sea Wolf (356), sometimes views scenery in cinematic “Technicolor” (189) or “like backdrop art in old sci-fi movies” (250), and imagines some surfers as actors stuck in an endlessly looping film (73). The blurring of the reel/real reaches a much more serious level after Sportello drifts off to sleep during a Garfield film and awakes to see Garfield’s character seemingly “die for real” (254). This takes place in a motel specializing in cable television (a harbinger of cable in the 1990s) that indiscriminately mixes entertainment and actual events, broadcasting “Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle” (254). The later staging of a “protest” during a televised Nixon speech speaks to other troubling aspects of this reel/real conflation (122). All the while, the novel also reveals its own cinematic aesthetic, as evidenced in a slapstick scene in which motorcycles crash after riding over slippery vomit (98), a cheesy scene in which Doc almost kills his enemy, which appears to mirror a 1940s gangster-style Garfield film (327–30), as well as the mention of the filmic lighting of Sportello’s friend Sloane (58), and the use of camera techniques (flashback and montage) and the language of film editing (25, 163–67, 261, 318). Although Inherent Vice retroactively calls attention to the beginning of the internet in the early development of ARPAnet (195, 365), the novel’s early 1970s setting does not allow it to consider the end of film and the rise of video and the digital in the explicit fashion of Bleeding Edge. Anderson’s fairly faithful adaptation, however, adds a new dimension to thinking the film/text interface in Pynchon. In the first place, it is telling that Pynchon would consent to Anderson’s adaptation.11 Anderson, of course, is an

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“indie” film director whose work hearkens back to the American filmmakers of the New Hollywood era of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Robert Altman. Anderson’s ability to uphold high artistic and production standards in the face of mainstream Hollywood dictates and financing models follows in the tradition of many New Hollywood “auteur” directors. Secondly, of all the possible “indie auteur” filmmakers to film Pynchon, Anderson is perhaps the most apt. Unlike the films of the genre-mashing and self-aware Quentin Tarantino, for instance, Anderson’s careful evocations of the past in There Will Be Blood (2007) (his adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! [1927]), as well as in The Master (2012) and especially in Boogie Nights (1997), offer a more cautious, respectful, and sometimes nostalgic (and hence Pynchonian) view of history, instead of reducing it merely to the history of film. Boogie Nights’ sympathetic treatment of the porn industry (in which the industry’s changeover from film to video and the resulting upheaval is emphasized) showed Anderson’s ability to invest even seemingly superficial characters with depth, to join sometimes slapstick humor with pathos. Pynchon’s work is chock-full of such characters, some of whom remain purely cartoonish but some of whom – such as Oedipa Maas, Maxine Tarnow, Doc Sportello, and others – can join in on the hijinks yet still display a depth of feeling and character. Thus, while Anderson makes a rather straightforward adaptation of Inherent Vice, he nevertheless does so through a post-postmodernist lens that emphasizes the more sentimental or warmer side of Pynchon, which could be said to have been growing in the author’s focus on families in his more recent work (consider, for instance, the growing Traverse family tree in Against the Day and Vineland, as well as Bleeding Edge and Vineland’s home-and-hearth endings, against Oedipa’s broken marriage in The Crying of Lot 49 and the numerous questing individuals in V. [1963] and Gravity’s Rainbow – even Doc’s parents show up in Inherent Vice, hardly a good look for the hard-boiled private eye [113]).12 Anderson thus shows us and advocates for a more fleshed-out, affective Pynchon than his madcap, cartoonish, postmodernist reputation might otherwise allow. The film’s opening scenes, for instance, establish a calmly paced, realistdramatic tone to the film, not a zany, postmodernist one. Close-ups of characters’ faces abound in the film too, such as when Shasta (Katherine Waterston) comes to Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) for help. These shots reveal the intimacy still lingering between the two, despite their time apart and her leaving him. Set against the dark, moody interior of Doc’s shabby and lonely apartment, the scene resonates with unspoken feeling. Anderson

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also enlarges Sortilège’s (Joanna Newsom) role as friend and “spiritual advisor” to the often confused, comical, and stoned Doc. The inclusion of her voiceover both reproduces some of Pynchon’s text aurally and acknowledges noir film history while simultaneously recontextualizing that history and Pynchon’s story by filtering it through a woman’s point of view. As a result, Doc becomes more humanized than the average noir detective. Newsom’s unique voice, which is at once caring, empathic, and yearning, unlike the usual hard-edged, terse, world-weary noir-style of narration, helps to realize his character sympathetically through a subjective point of view. Anderson also tones down the pop-culture references to film and TV. Characters do not “speak” in the language of film and television to the extent that they do (and the narrator does) in Pynchon’s novel. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pynchon allows Anderson to add a kind of “Hollywood ending.” Contrary to the book’s lonely ending in which Doc goes driving off into the fog alone, the film provides a slightly happier one as Doc “gets the girl” (albeit ambivalently, as the eerie music and Shasta’s comment that they are not back together are set against Doc’s final smile), and he and Shasta go “driving off into the sunset” (or perhaps the fog-set). This scene, punctuated with light, does not appear to be an imaginative projection or drug-fueled hallucination of Doc’s. There is no irony at work here. A similar light frames the film’s first shot of Gordita Beach and its subsequent capturing of Sortilège, softly backlit as the sunlight intermittently flashes on the screen. Indeed, light functions aesthetically throughout the film to bring a tonal “warmth,” softness, or glow to certain scenes, such as when Doc meets Coy’s wife and child, during Coy’s rescue, and often in scenes in which windows are present (such as in both Bigfoot’s and Doc’s offices). Thus, Anderson’s “warming up” of Pynchon is also connected to his use of warm light throughout the film. In fact, it is Anderson’s treatment of light that calls attention to the final significance of the interface between his film and Pynchon’s text and provides Pynchon’s answer to the problem of film and history in the digital/virtual world. For Anderson has been one of a number of directors, along with Tarantino, Scorsese, and Christopher Nolan, to decry the “death of cinema” (which is somewhat exaggerated13) in the digital age and who continue to shoot on celluloid film. In short, at a time when most filmmakers have switched to digital means of recording, Anderson has persisted in recording on actual film. Inherent Vice is no exception, as it was shot on 35mm film stock. Pynchon, in effect, knew that his adapted novel would be filmed and “preserved” on celluloid.

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Nor is this some retro gimmick or act of simple nostalgia on Anderson’s (or Pynchon’s) part. Anderson and other film preservationists argue that the difference between film and digital is evidenced in a film’s “feeling” of depth and “warmth,” especially in regard to its recording of light, versus digital’s flattening, pixelated video that, in their account, turns the film screen into a giant television.14 Anderson’s emphasis on light, then, calls attention to the materiality of film – its “filmness.” Further, light is not only chemically captured on celluloid in ways that can later make for surprising, random, and unexpected results, but celluloid also holds a special relationship with light and time that the digital does not. As Markos Hadjioannou writes in From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema, on “a clearly technical basis, celluloid cinema is a photochemical means of recording and projecting images that are both analogous to the material relations of the original source and are transcribed directly as material traces onto the filmstrip. Digital cinema, on the other hand, is a means of registering images as binary relations and algorithmic calculations, which are rendered in graphically visual images by a computer to be humanly perceptible” (italics in original).15 Celluloid and analog recording, as opposed to digital and binary recording, “capture blocks of duration in a uniform and continuous causality effecting physical transformations in the recording medium.”16 For this reason, film, the material celluloid strip that runs at twenty-four frames per second, is materially and metaphysically associated with lived time, change, deterioration, and death. As Vivian Sobchack puts it, “the cinematic with its specific form of temporality [. . .] is intimately bound to a structure not of possession, loss, pastness, and nostalgia, but of accumulation, ephemerality, and anticipation – to a ‘presence’ in the present informed by its connection to a collective past and to a future.”17 And while a filmstrip can be edited, cut, run backward, and looped back to its beginnings, it is always in a state of decay and subject to entropy as a physical object. Ironically, then, as Paolo Cherchi Usai writes in The Death of Cinema, “[c]inema is the art of destroying moving images,” as what it brings into becoming must also pass away.18 The digital image with its pixels of compressed information, however, is not subject to this kind of deterioration or entropy and, therefore, to this existential and material connection to movement and decay, and, metaphorically, life and death. The virtual-cinematic world, as we have seen in Maxine’s experience in DeepArcher, is a space in which identity, memory, and history can be (re)created but no longer have any relationship to the object to which the virtual images supposedly correlate. It is unlike film, in which

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images are indexically connected to reality (however problematically), and the process of exposure of light and time-as-duration leaves an actual impression upon a filmstrip. The virtual is closer to Pynchon’s “tombworld” in Bleeding Edge or what André Bazin declared was the result of photography: “change mummified.”19 Celluloid film, by distinction, reveals change and duration and exposes the processes of historical becoming. It is therefore not that Pynchon is necessarily against digital cinema, but if history is analogous to a filmstrip as his work has long suggested, then the (cinematic) link with the past is problematic in the digital/virtual world. The digital/virtual world is, for Pynchon, not unlike official textbook, cause-and-effect, or “binary” history, which compresses information such that it loses certain nuances or grains. It does not have the potential, in its ever-presentness, to change, evolve, or suffer the possibility of its own extinction – it need not be “preserved” by memory, for its form of preservation is, as in photography or Maxine’s pre-9/11 virtual New York City, to “embalm time.”20 It has literally not “seen the light” or recorded, unconsciously and analogically, its ghostly presences or Manichean “negatives” that may one day return from the past (to which they are materially/ historically linked) to corrupt or transform the seemingly perfect (historical) image of the present. Frenesi Gates imagines her “return” to the world and history in Vineland, for instance, in terms of a developing photograph or celluloid filmstrip: “[t]aken down, she understood, from all the silver and light she’d known and been, brought back to the world like silver recalled grain by grain from the Invisible to form images of what then went on to grow old, go away, get broken or contaminated” (287). In Pynchon, history, like film, continues to develop and to deteriorate, and it contains, as it cannot in its digital-binary form, a messianic component – not something that is metaphysically “deeper” or “other than” the film/history that is at hand (such as when Maxine idealizes the virtual afterlife) but something that holds within it a grain of redemption, as reflected in Walter Benjamin’s statement (remarkably filmic in its description) that “[t]he true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again,” for “[t]o articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was (Ranke).’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”21 Pynchon’s work has always “seized” such memories in its recording of history by filmic analog(y). Through its dialogical relationship with

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Anderson’s adaptation, which “preserves” film, celluloid, and analog recording, Pynchon’s Inherent Vice can be seen to preserve the analogy between history and film that, despite the virtual conflation of the reel/real, holds forth the promise that lived and recorded experience is never fully developed, that the past is not past but is always developing in the present. If Gravity’s Rainbow acts as an archive for forgotten history and the history of the marginalized, then the combined Inherent Vice film/novel intertext is also an archive of sorts, one that responds to what Bleeding Edge reveals are the false freedoms of the virtual and digital age. Like all of Pynchon’s work, it acts to counter binary history, in theory and practice, by seizing upon and preserving the “little parenthes[e]s of light” (254) that Doc and Pynchon fear the 1960s has been reduced to – and which might describe any messianic moment in history – that can later help to guide our way through dark times.

Notes 1. For the foundational work on Pynchon and film in Gravity’s Rainbow, see Charles Clerc’s exhaustive take in “Film in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Approaches to Teaching Gravity’s Rainbow (Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 103–50; David Cowart’s Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Southern Illinois University Press, 1980); Scott Simmon’s “Beyond the Theater of War: Gravity’s Rainbow as Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 6 (1978), pp. 347–63; and Thomas Moore’s “Gravity’s Rainbow as the Incredible Moving Film,” in The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon (University of Missouri Press, 1987), pp. 30–62. A Lacanian reading appears in Hanjo Berressem’s “Gravity’s Rainbow: Text as Film – Film as Text,” in Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text (University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 151–90. 2. Cowart, Art of Allusion, p. 32. 3. Stacey Olster, “When You’re a (Nin)jette, You’re a (Nin)jette All the Way – or Are You?: Female Filmmaking in Vineland,” in Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (eds.), The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel (Dalkey Archive, 1994), p. 121. 4. Ernest Mathijs, “Reel to Real: Film History in Pynchon’s Vineland,” Literature/ Film Quarterly, 29.1 (2001), p. 62. 5. Robert Stam, “Introduction,” in Robert Stam and Alessandro Raengo (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005), p. 11. 6. David N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 30.

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7. Anne Friedberg, “The End of Cinema: Multimedia and Technological Change,” in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds.), Reinventing Film Studies (Arnold, 2000), p. 440. 8. As well as leading to the “hyper attention” that Luc Herman addresses in his essay in this volume. 9. This is in line with Pynchon’s evolving use of paranoia as a theme. See Ali Chetwynd’s chapter in this volume for more regarding Pynchon’s “postparanoid” work. 10. Tore Rye Andersen’s essay in this volume explores Pynchon’s “softening” toward the digital in terms of paratexts and marketing, which can be held separate from his views on digital culture and film. 11. See Tore Rye Andersen’s essay in this volume for more on Pynchon’s implicit consent to Anderson’s adaptation (236). 12. See Nicholas Frangipane’s “Freeways and Fog: The Shift in Attitude between Postmodern and Post-Postmodernism from The Crying of Lot 49 to Inherent Vice,” in Critique, 57.5 (2016), pp. 521–32, though I would question its optimistic take on the nature of digital afterlife. 13. Considering the changing technology of film and its relation to other technologies, film is not exactly the autonomous object that it once appeared to be. Thus while an earlier conception of “film” as “dead” makes sense, “film” in the metaphorical sense, as Pynchon uses it, lives on. See Friedberg, “End of Cinema,” pp. 441–48; Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, pp. 2–99; and Markos Hadjioannou, From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 1–37. 14. See Wheeler Winston Dixon’s “The Celluloid Backlash: Film versus Digital Once More,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 33.2 (2016), pp. 122–30. 15. Hadjioannou, From Light to Byte, p. 30. 16. Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, p. 116. 17. Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic Presence,” in Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (eds.), Materialities of Communication (Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 98. 18. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (British Film Institute, 2001), p. 7. 19. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. by Hugh Gray, Film Quarterly, 13.4 (Summer, 1960), p. 8. 20. Ibid. 21. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (Schocken, 1968), p. 255.

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chapter 14

Pynchon’s Twenty-First-Century Paratexts Tore Rye Andersen

In his 1997 introduction to Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction, Thomas Pynchon describes an incident where a policeman addresses the driver of a civilian car after having obtained his name from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite. Pynchon goes on to discuss how our lives have been “tainted, coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control, usually digital in nature,” and to reflect on the analog sphere as a still viable but ever-dwindling refuge “beyond the reach of the digital.”1 These reflections are in many ways representative of Pynchon’s entire body of work. His novels are often concerned with the latest developments in digital media (computers make an early appearance in The Crying of Lot 49 [1966], just as Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge [2013], explores the limits of virtual reality), but this interest in digital technology has consistently been balanced by an equally pronounced skepticism. Early examples of this skepticism appear in The Crying of Lot 49, where a man considers suicide after being “automated out of a job” (113) by an IBM 7094 and where Oedipa Maas in the closing pages of the novel feels trapped “among matrices of a great digital computer” (181). The nightmare of being caught in the restrictive binary logic of a computer recurs in Vineland (1990) (90–91), and the fear of entrapment in the digital sphere likewise informs Bleeding Edge, where Maxine’s father warns her that the internet is turning into “a total Web of surveillance, inescapable” (420).2 An implicit statement in all of Pynchon’s novels seems to be that it is OK to be a Luddite. Pynchon’s wariness of the digital has also been traceable outside of his novels. He opted out of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement (an ambitious plan to gather millions of digitized books into a vast searchable database), and for a number of years he resisted the publication of his novels as e-books.3 And his reservations are not entirely groundless: through sophisticated data-mining software, Amazon harvests information about our digital reading patterns, and the company knows exactly when readers grind to a halt in a Kindle edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. To use Ted 226

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Striphas’s phrase, we live in an era of “controlled consumption” where digital media allow cultural producers unprecedented access to our consumption habits.4 At the same time, the digital revolution has affected the literary field in less dystopian ways. Various digital tools have made authors’ research and word processing much easier, just as the internet has provided publishers with new, efficient means of distribution. As a reflection of these obvious advantages, Pynchon himself seems to have softened his antidigital stance somewhat in recent years. In 2012 he finally allowed the publication of his novels as e-books, and in the marketing of his latest works he has embraced some of the paratextual possibilities offered by new media. Starting with a discussion of the function of paratexts in the current publishing landscape, in this chapter I analyze selected examples of Pynchon’s twenty-first-century paratexts. I will place particular emphasis on the various paratexts surrounding the publication of Inherent Vice (2009), since the marketing of that particular novel goes further in its experimentation with other media forms than the marketing of the author’s other recent novels. My analysis will show how Pynchon’s new digital paratexts intersect with his more traditional printed paratexts, and I will discuss how these multimedia paratextual strategies complicate our ideas of the borders of his literary works and seem to modify his relationship with institutions of publicity and publication.

Analog and Digital Paratexts Paratexts – those textual and visual elements that according to Gérard Genette surround a literary text to enable it “to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers”5 – have always preoccupied Pynchon. When his debut novel V. was published in 1963, he suggested (without success) that the publisher use a particular painting by Giorgio de Chirico for the cover image, and he has likewise been involved in the cover designs for Mason & Dixon (1997) and Inherent Vice.6 Genette has described paratexts as thresholds of interpretation or, employing Philippe Lejeune’s phrase, as “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text,” and Pynchon’s consistent involvement in the paratexts of his novels indicates that he is fully aware of their significant influence on our perception of the texts they enclose.7 In a recent essay, Dorothee Birke and Birte Christ attempt to refine Genette’s concept by describing paratexts as an interplay between an interpretive function (suggesting a specific way of understanding the

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text), a commercial function (advertising the text), and a navigational function (allowing readers to orient themselves in the text).8 My analysis of Pynchon’s recent paratexts will address all three functions and show how they overlap, but to qualify my discussion of just how they intersect in the multimedia marketing of Pynchon’s work, it is first necessary to address the relation between analog and digital paratexts. Genette’s original concept of paratexts is closely connected to the physical object of the book, but digital texts and paratexts are no less reliant on materiality than printed ones. As N. Katherine Hayles reminds us, “texts must always be embodied to exist in the world,” and this embodiment – whether as ink on paper, pixels on a screen or recorded soundwaves – invariably infuses texts with a body language that affects our reading in certain ways. Even though their materiality naturally differs from that of the printed book, then, digital artifacts do have a body language, which becomes evident in the paratexts to the e-book versions of Pynchon’s novels. When readers pick up a physical book, they have to navigate past paratextual elements, such as cover illustrations, title pages, copyright pages, and dedications, before reaching the main body of the text, but upon opening a Kindle edition of Inherent Vice for the first time, readers are taken directly to the opening page of the novel and actively have to navigate back if they wish to see the title page or the cover illustration. Furthermore, readers of the e-book have the choice between different typefaces and point sizes, whereas readers of a printed edition are stuck with the layout chosen by the publisher. The director of Penguin Press, Ann Godoff, has stated that the digital formatting of Pynchon’s novels was a challenge due to the complicated page layouts (including song lyrics and visual symbols) of the printed editions, but in the digital conversion these layouts become mutable.9 The fluid nature of the e-book versions is strengthened by their many embedded links to sites such as Wikipedia, dictionaries, Amazon, and the website of the publisher. In an attempt to update Genette’s notion of paratexts for the digital age, Ellen McCracken has suggested that much digitally distributed literature is characterized by a tension between centripetal and centrifugal paratexts.10 The spatial metaphors employed by Genette in his typology of paratextual functions (inside, outside, thresholds, etc.) are no longer adequate in a digital publishing landscape, where the demarcation line between text and paratext is more blurred than ever, and McCracken consequently suggests an alternative set of metaphors more geared toward describing the various functions of paratexts surrounding or interwoven with digitized literature. Navigational paratexts,

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such as clickable chapter headings and word searching, “move readers on a centripetal vector into the book,” whereas paratexts like digital links to Wikipedia or the publisher constitute centrifugal trajectories out of the literary text.11 Birke and Christ go even further in their discussion of the changed nature of digital paratexts, suggesting that the concept of paratext loses its analytic value at the moment when, on the World Wide Web, context (or the universe of texts) moves so close to the text that “thresholds,” paratextual elements that negotiate the space between text and context, become increasingly difficult to isolate and identify [. . .]. At that point, the concept loses its force of distinction.12

Even in Genette’s original formulation, the distinction between text and paratext was not always clear. Genette describes paratexts as an “undefined zone” between the inside and the outside: “a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text).”13 While I agree with Birke and Christ that the undefined zone between inside and outside becomes even less defined in digital culture, I would not so readily dismiss the analytic value of the concept of paratext. The spatial aspect is only one of five paratextual characteristics proposed by Genette (the others being the “temporal, substantial, pragmatic, and functional characteristics”).14 If we focus on the purely spatial characteristics of digital paratexts, the distinction between inside and outside does indeed become difficult to uphold. If, on the other hand, we direct our attention to their pragmatic (communicative) and functional dimensions, we will find that digital paratexts still function as a frame that simultaneously delimits the work from and opens it up to a context beyond itself. This double movement has always characterized paratexts, and if – like Birke and Christ – we place too much emphasis on the fluid nature of digital paratexts, we run the risk of obscuring their similarities to the equally fluid paratexts of print literature. In the following I shall try to address some of these similarities by analyzing how the book trailer and other digital paratexts to Inherent Vice intersect with its printed paratexts in a complex paratextual nexus that straddles the divide between the analog and the digital.

The Transmedial Paratexts of Inherent Vice Even though we live in a supposedly digital age, printed books are still the primary delivery channel for literary fiction, and recent statistics indicate

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that e-book sales have reached a temporary plateau.15 A chapter on Pynchon’s twenty-first-century paratexts will therefore necessarily have to discuss how his digital paratexts relate to the printed paratexts surrounding those tangible books the paratexts are primarily meant to peddle. Inherent Vice was first published in the United States on August 4, 2009 (and two days later in the United Kingdom). The first edition of the novel was clad in a dust jacket designed by Tal Goretsky and Darren Haggar and adorned with an image Pynchon himself had found on the internet – a good example of digital media becoming an important tool for authors today.16 The illustration was created by the artist Darshan Zenith on the island of Maui and shows a repurposed Cadillac hearse in front of a surf shop on the beach. Like the cover illustrations on the first editions of V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, the image on the cover of Inherent Vice expresses an ambiguity concerning the time of the day. The sun sits just below the ocean’s horizon, but is it dawn or dusk? The title of Zenith’s original work is “Eternal Summer: A ‘Retired’ Caddy Hearse Greets Daybreak at a Beach Surf Shop” and thus provides a conclusive answer, but the mood of hopeful expectancy created by the title and the image itself is gainsaid by the setting and themes of the novel. In the western state of California, a sun standing just below the ocean’s horizon will always imply sunset, and in the plot of Inherent Vice the sun is figuratively setting over the not-so-eternal summer of the sixties. It is therefore an almost necessary omission that the hopeful title of Zenith’s painting is not printed on the dust jacket of Pynchon’s disillusioned novel. The title of the novel and the name of the author are embossed on the front cover in an upward-slanting version of the typeface Drescher Grotesk, which has been manipulated to look like bent neon tubes in Pynchon’s signature color combination: “the psychedelic favorites green and magenta” (IV 14). Since Gravity’s Rainbow this color combination has appeared numerous times in Pynchon’s novels, always associated with the counterculture, and its presence on the cover of Inherent Vice sends a clear signal of this major theme in the novel. The back cover of the novel repeats the motif of the rising/setting sun from the front cover, but otherwise it is Spartanically cleansed of information (apart from the mandatory barcode).17 Back covers of modern American hardcover novels are usually graced with blurbs, author photos, or plot descriptions, but in keeping with Pynchon’s usual paratextual restraint, there are no such thresholds of interpretation on the back cover of Inherent Vice.18 The front inner flap of the dust jacket does, however, contain a plot description, whose informal prose style and deployment of favorite Pynchon tropes (e.g., the

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enumeration of a motley cast of characters and the description of the story as a “yarn”) indicate that it has been written by the author himself. The first edition of Inherent Vice was not the first appearance of these paratexts. In November 2008 the title of the novel, as well as an early version of its cover, were released along with the plot description and an excerpt from the novel in Penguin Press’s summer 2009 catalogue, so readers had known about the novel and its plot outline for nine months (a full pregnancy) before its appearance. A PDF version of the catalogue was quickly shared online and discussed by the press and Pynchon’s fan community, but it did not reverberate as widely as the short book trailer uploaded by Penguin Press on their website the day before the novel’s release. Book trailers are among the many new phenomena that have emerged as a result of the digitalization of the publishing business.19 While the traditional channels for movie trailers have been the cinema and TV, the primary platform for book trailers is the internet. It is much cheaper to upload a book trailer to an anonymous server than to purchase expensive advertising slots on TV, and book trailers and other online paratexts have a potentially global reach. At the same time, the internet is undoubtedly the best place to bury information. It is far from likely that potential readers will discover a book trailer on the World Wide Web, and even if they do locate it, there is no guarantee that it will fulfill its intended function: to sell a book. While an audiovisual medium such as a movie is easily presented through an equally audiovisual trailer, it lends itself less obviously to advertising a static print medium, and many examples of the fledgling book trailer genre still seem laughably inept. The trailer to Inherent Vice is among the more professional of its kind. It is just under three minutes long and consists of a dynamic montage of video clips and acid rock that weave in and out of the accompanying narration. The narrating voice belongs to the novel’s main character, the pot-smoking private eye Doc Sportello, and in combination with the images and music, it provides an appealing introduction to the setting (Los Angeles in 1970) and complicated crime plot of Inherent Vice. To employ Birke and Christ’s useful term, book trailers first and foremost have a commercial function, and the trailer to Pynchon’s novel by and large achieves its intended goal: to make the potential reader (and, not least, buyer) hungry for more. At the same time, as my analysis will show, the trailer supplements our understanding of Pynchon’s novel in various ways, and the commercial and interpretive functions of the paratext thus bleed into each other.

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Originally, the video was released on August 3rd on Penguin Press’s own website with no additional information about its origins, and a few days later it inevitably found its way onto YouTube. The trailer immediately attracted much attention, not so much because of its inherent artistic qualities or the product it advertised but because of the pressing question of whether it was Pynchon himself who had lent it his voice as the narrator. Pynchon is well known for his consistent absence from the public sphere, and even though the by-now eighty-year-old author in recent decades has begun to exhibit a more relaxed and self-ironical attitude toward his own self-inflicted exile, and has even appeared twice on The Simpsons (albeit with a brown paper bag over his head), the public is not used to revealing glimpses beneath the bag. When fans believed they recognized the voice in the book trailer from Pynchon’s appearances on The Simpsons, the discussion spread rapidly through the many branches of the internet, not least the pynchon-l, a web forum dedicated to Pynchon. The Wall Street Journal even consulted a voice identification expert in the matter,20 but before a consensus had been reached, Penguin Press closed the discussion by announcing that Pynchon had indeed both written and spoken the part in the trailer and had thereby taken an unprecedentedly active part in the marketing of his own work.21 But even though the trailer to Inherent Vice is first and foremost a marketing initiative designed to attract more attention to Pynchon’s novel, it is important to emphasize that the video, in spite of its primarily commercial function, not only affects the sale of the novel but also potentially influences the interpretation of it. The three paratextual functions listed by Birke and Christ – the commercial, the interpretive, and the navigational – tend to overlap, and the commercial paratext of the book trailer frames Inherent Vice in a way that guides our reading in a certain direction. This guiding mechanism is of course dependent on readers actually finding the video. The readers who purchased the hardcover edition of Inherent Vice on August 4th could hardly avoid seeing peritexts, such as the cover illustration or the plot description, whereas encounters with book trailers and other epitexts are far from guaranteed.22 In order to reach a large audience, online videos need to go viral, as the saying goes. The very phrase indicates that videos spread of their own accord, but in reality viral videos are of course deliberately shared by a number of individuals via social media.23 In such a distributional logic, the audience accordingly receives the relevant information from friends and acquaintances rather than faceless corporations. John B. Thompson and Claire Squires both argue that the most efficient form of literary marketing has always been

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word of mouth, and a link to a video from a Facebook friend is the digital equivalent thereof.24 As argued in a recent article by Padmini Ray Murray and Squires, the active sharing of information via digital social media thus often turns consumers into copromoters.25 The trailer to Inherent Vice begins with the title and Pynchon’s name fading in over the sound of a quivering electric guitar. Both elements are written in the same upward-slanting typeface as the front cover of the dust jacket, and the connection between the trailer and the book it presents is consolidated by this typographical echo. The title and name of the author are followed by the epigraph of the novel – “Under the paving-stones, the beach!” – and the promotional video thus leads off with some of the same paratexts that casual browsers will encounter upon picking up the book and turning to the first page. After this prelude, however, the music and images begin in earnest and the video comes into its own. The instrumental background music serves as a fitting introduction to a novel where music plays an important role: many of the characters, including the elusive Coy Harlingen, are musicians, and numerous songs are mentioned (and often reproduced verbally) throughout the novel. To underscore the centrality of music in Inherent Vice, a playlist of songs from the novel was released on Amazon upon its publication. In all likelihood, the playlist was created on Amazon’s own initiative, but since it was not eighty-sixed by Pynchon or his representatives and was thus at the very least authorized by negligence, it assumes the nature of a paratext.26 The video images accompanying the music are a rapidly cut impressionistic montage of scenes from Los Angeles. A recurring motif is the beach, which once again aligns it with the printed book, where the beach both appears on the cover illustration, in the epigraph, and of course in the novel itself. The musical and visual elements of the trailer are thus primarily employed to create a certain mood and deliberately avoid semantically loaded features such as song texts or human faces, which might have drawn our attention away from the crucial aspect of the trailer: Pynchon’s voice. Here is a full transcription of his narration: If you’re driving south from L.A. International it should take no more than a hit or two off of your favorite brand of cigarette before you’re right here, in Gordita Beach, California. Well, no, actually, this used to be the beach. Later on, all this is gonna go high-rise, high rent, high intensity. But right now, back in 1970, what it is is just HIGH. An ounce of Mexican Commercial should run you no more than ten dollars – that’s with the seeds and stems, of course. The neighbors here run mostly to surfers and dopers and stewardesses, or, more correctly I guess, stewardii, who live in

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tore rye andersen Gordita ’cause it’s close to the airport and tend to hang out between flights in the bars up and down the street; so pretty much every night here is party night. Oh, my name, uh, my name’s Doc, and I’m a private gumshoe, or nowadays more like gumsandal. I used to work the traditional Hollywood type of PI gigs, setting up drug busts for parties and divorce cases, or helping the cops out with their many shakedown schemes and so forth, but since I moved out here to the beach, I’ve been more into the smaller tickets – less karmic hassle, less guilt-tripping. Which doesn’t bring in that much money, sometimes none at all. Sometimes it’s even me that ends up paying the tab, whether it’s in cash or something heavier; and that’s – you know, it’s groovy; or, I guess it WAS groovy, till, one night my ex–old lady shows up with a story about her boyfriend, or, actually, older guy-friend and his wife, her boyfriend. At that point it gets sorta peculiar . . . M-maybe you’ll just wanna read the book: I-Inherent Vice, Penguin Press. 27.95 – 27.95?! Really? That used to be, like, three weeks of groceries, man. What year is this again?27

With its invocation of drugs, its use of dated slang expressions, such as “groovy,” and its verbal play with terms, such as “stewardii” and “gumsandal,” the laid-back and casually distracted stoner voice of the trailer seems to adhere closely to the novel’s own portrait of Doc Sportello, but the transplantation also introduces elements that not only supplement but also complicate the portrayal. First of all, the trailer has a complex enunciative situation that differs radically from the novel’s own. Inherent Vice is a third-person narrative told in the past tense and set in 1970, but in the trailer the situation is less clear-cut. The trailer is narrated in the present tense, but the time of narration is difficult to pin down. On the one hand, it is told from 1970, but, on the other hand, the narrator knows that Gordita Beach has been converted to high-rises, and this chronological double exposure is condensed in the oxymoronic phrase “right now, back in 1970” and in the timbre of the speaking voice, which clearly belongs to an older man (Pynchon was seventy-two when he narrated the trailer). This temporal confusion is elaborated in the closing sentences of the trailer, where the narrator provides a practical piece of information about the price of the novel while simultaneously undermining it with a tongue-in-cheek comparison to the cheap old days – a fairly typical instance of Pynchon’s general penchant for anachronism. To complicate matters further, the video, unlike the novel, is narrated in the first person. Pynchon lends his voice to Doc Sportello, who is thus transformed from a narrated character to a narrator. The primary setting of Inherent Vice, Gordita Beach, is a thinly disguised version of Manhattan

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Beach where Pynchon lived while he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, and the novel’s portrayal of life on the beach thus draws heavily on the author’s own experience. The autobiographical connection is latent in the novel and dependent on our knowledge of this particular detail in Pynchon’s life, but the implicit connection between Pynchon and his main character is made explicit in the trailer, where the borders between author, narrator, and main character are blurred by the fact that they all share the same voice, Pynchon’s voice. This sharing of one voice manifests itself in various ways, for instance, in the use of the phrase “and so forth.” This phrase is used numerous times in the novel itself by both the narrator and Doc as a simultaneous activation and defusion of clichés.28 Since the phrase also frequently appears in other novels, including Against the Day (2006) and Bleeding Edge, it is furthermore just as connected to the author as to his specific characters and narrators. A similar example of a recurring verbal pattern is the slight stutter that can be heard in the trailer’s closing sentences, and which Pynchon has often given to some of his more sympathetic characters, including Tyrone Slothrop and Doc.29 Pynchon has always used such repeated verbal tics and phrases as an integral part of his character portrayals,30 and the appearance in the video of some of these verbal patterns implicates the author in the novel’s fictional space. Furthermore, it creates an effect of intimacy between the author and his main character, which makes it difficult to extricate Doc’s values and sentiments from Pynchon’s own, and which accordingly decreases the ironical distance between the mature author and his immature character that otherwise often characterizes the novel’s purely textual portrayal. Finally, the trailer introduces some important information about Doc’s past that is not present in the printed paratexts or in the novel itself. In the novel, Doc is basically portrayed as a lovable if somewhat scatterbrained pothead, who from his self-appointed position as a PI endeavors to spread good karma and help as many people as he can, but in the video we learn that this sympathetic figure has a shady past “helping the cops out with their many shakedown schemes.” This incriminating piece of information is not explicitly present within the framework of the novel, but it is difficult to discount it as irrelevant since, like the novel’s other paratexts, it is literally authorized by the author and therefore functions as a legitimate supplement to the characterization of Doc, and thus as a de facto part of the work Inherent Vice. The close but complex relation between the trailer, the printed paratexts, and the novel is thus a striking indication that the current multimedia publishing landscape necessitates an expanded concept of what constitutes both a text and a work. The border between trailer and

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text becomes fluid when the purely verbal space of the novel is extended into other media and expanded with images and sound. This audiovisual extension of the space of the novel is similar to the expansion that takes place when novels are adapted into movies. Strictly speaking, adaptations are not paratexts, but like paratexts they inevitably infiltrate our perception of the adapted work, and few readers who have seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Inherent Vice will be able to read Pynchon’s novel without distracting mental visions of Joaquin Phoenix – especially if they read the movie tie-in edition, which is adorned with an image from the movie poster of his neon-infused face.31 This poster – and all the marketing material for the movie, including movie trailers, magazine ads, and brochures – significantly employed the same neon typography and color register as the paratexts of the original novel. The typography even found its way to the credits at the end of the movie and to the bonus material on the DVD. This deliberate typographical and visual recycling connects the movie closely to the book trailer and the book itself, and even though Pynchon, despite unconfirmed rumors of a cameo appearance in the movie, has seemingly not played a very active part in the adaptation of Inherent Vice, this typographical consistency across media constitutes a clear approval of Anderson’s adaptation.32 Further sanctioning couplings take place in the movie in different ways, for instance, through a reuse of large chunks of dialogue from the book or through visual echoes: with its view of the beach through a steep alley, the opening shot of the movie recalls a similar shot in the book trailer (1:50), and in a remarkable confirmation of Inherent Vice’s latent autobiographical connections, both shots resemble the view from Pynchon’s actual address in Manhattan Beach.33 This is far from coincidental. Pynchon lived at 3404 The Strand, and the opening shot of the movie shows us a street sign with the address 3410 The Strand. The appearance of this view in both the trailer and the movie reinforces the link between Pynchon and Doc, and the many overt and latent visual and biographical parallels between novel, book trailer, and movie cause the various strands of Inherent Vice to flow together across media. When we speak of Inherent Vice, we are therefore not speaking of a clearly delimited object but of a work with fuzzy borders, which emerges in the convergence between the novel, its printed and digital paratexts, the movie and its paratexts, and the ongoing reception of both novel and movie. The recycling of dialogue, typography, and visual motifs ensures recognition across platforms and creates a clear coherence in this transmedial cluster of texts and paratexts. The aggregation of different media texts

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around the intangible entity Inherent Vice is too limited in scope to constitute a deliberate narrative strategy of the sort that Henry Jenkins has labeled transmedia storytelling.34 It can rather be understood as an instance of a single narrative that is incarnated in different media and extended with various textual and audiovisual paratexts. Although more limited in scope than the transmedia storytelling surrounding large media franchises, these modest extensions nevertheless add nuances to our literary interpretation of the novel by challenging our understanding of its characters, elaborating on its mood through sound and music, or presenting visual images that compete with our own mental images of settings and characters.

Conclusion As a result of these movements between platforms and multimedia extensions of the literary text, the limits of the work are challenged to such an extent that it becomes difficult to decide exactly where the paratexts stop and the work begins. Birke and Christ consider this undecidability a consequence of a digital publishing environment, but in Genette’s original formulation, printed paratexts were also an “undefined zone” of transaction. The border between text and paratext has always been fluid, but even though (and, indeed, because) the exact dividing line cannot be pinpointed, it is still important to discuss how the often commercially motivated paratexts also have an interpretive function and thus influence our understanding of the works they are interwoven with. One of the often discussed changes in the current literary field concerns the relationship between readers and writers. Murray and Squires argue that “[s]ocial media have given readers unprecedented and direct access to authors,”35 but in a publishing landscape where an increasing number of authors have a massive online presence, Pynchon has by and large retained his strategy of absence. In recent years he has certainly engaged with some of the paratextual possibilities offered by new digital media, and his active participation in the promotion of his most recent novels bears witness to a more relaxed and pragmatic stance toward the publishing business that he is dependent on to distribute his work. Nevertheless, his participation still takes places on decidedly Pynchonian premises, and after having raised his veil somewhat by lending his own voice (and view of the beach) to the book trailer for Inherent Vice, in the book trailer for Bleeding Edge he once again confounds our expectations in a paratextual game of hide-and-seek. While the Inherent Vice trailer successfully emulates the subject and style of the

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novel and joins a cluster of media texts that simultaneously circle around and constitute the work, the Bleeding Edge trailer uses an entirely different strategy: it is narrated by a frankly (and probably deliberately) annoying young man in a Pynchon T-shirt who smugly shows us around his New York neighborhood in a way that bears only sporadic resemblance to the plot and tone of Bleeding Edge. This strange guided tour seems to hint that the city itself, rather than its characters, is the central protagonist of the novel, and this impression is further strengthened by the epigraph of Bleeding Edge, which specifically describes New York as a character in a novel. Moreover, the Pynchon T-shirt clearly plays on our knowledge of Pynchon’s current residency in New York, teasingly hinting at the possibility of his appearance and withholding it at the same time. At the time of writing, this confounding video has only been viewed 19,000 times on YouTube (compared to 269,000 views of the Inherent Vice book trailer), and it seems deliberately designed to remind us that Pynchon can take an active part in twenty-first-century paratextual games while retaining his status as American literature’s invisible man in a digital age when invisibility is harder to maintain than ever.

Notes 1. Thomas Pynchon, “Introduction,” in Jim Dodge, Stone Junction (Canongate, 1997), p. viii. 2. With its receding twin banks of computer servers, the cover illustration of the latter novel recalls Oedipa’s vision in The Crying of Lot 49 of “zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless” (181). 3. Alison Flood, “Thousands of Authors Opt Out of Google Book Settlement,” The Guardian, February 23, 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/23/ authors-opt-out-google-book-settlement; Julie Bosman, “After Long Resistance, Pynchon Allows Novels to Be Sold as E-books,” New York Times, June 12, 2012, https://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/after-longresistance-pynchon-allows-novels-to-be-sold-as-e-books/. 4. Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia University Press, 2009). 5. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1. 6. Thomas Pynchon, Letter to Cork Smith, February 23, 1962 (held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin); Neddie Jingo, “Tibetan Ampersands,” Chumps of Choice, December 7, 2006, chu mpsofchoice.blogspot.dk/2006/12/tibetan-ampersands.html; “Cadillac Hearse Art

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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Print,” CruiserArt, no date, www.cruiserart.com/1959_hawaiian-surf-surfer -surfing-art.htm. Genette, Paratexts, p. 2. For analyses of how the paratexts of some of Pynchon’s early novels have affected their reception, see my articles “Distorted Transmissions: Towards a Material Reading of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,” Orbis Litterarum, 68.2 (2013), pp. 110–42; and “Cherchez la Femme: The Coercive Paratexts of Thomas Pynchon’s V.,” in Paolo Simonetti and Umberto Rossi (eds.), Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Thomas Pynchon’s V. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), pp. 31–51. Dorothee Birke and Birte Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field,” Narrative, 21.1 (2013), pp. 67–68. Bosman, “After Long Resistance,” n.p. Ellen McCracken, “Expanding Genette’s Epitext/Peritext Model for Transitional Electronic Literature: Centrifugal and Centripetal Vectors on Kindles and iPads,” Narrative, 21.1 (2013), p. 106. McCracken, “Expanding Genette,” p. 113. Birke and Christ, “Paratext and Digitized Narrative,” p. 80. Genette, Paratexts, p. 2. Ibid., p. 4. See, for instance, Jim Milliot, “As E-book Sales Decline, Digital Fatigue Grows,” Publishers Weekly, June 17, 2016, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/ by-topic/digital/retailing/article/70696-as-e-book-sales-decline-digital-fati gue-grows.html. “Cadillac Hearse Art Print,” n.p. Curiously, the British publisher Jonathan Cape has found it necessary to add a couple of picturesque palm fronds to the otherwise identical back cover. Pynchon’s own absence from the public sphere can be construed as part of this strategy. For a more elaborate analysis of this paratextual restraint, see my article “Judging by the Cover,” Critique, 53.3 (2012), pp. 251–78. The consequences of this digitalization have been thoroughly discussed in John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Plume, 2012). Steven Kurutz, “Yup, It’s Him: A Pynchon Mystery Solved,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2009, https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/08/11/ pynchon-revealed/. Thom Geier, “Thomas Pynchon Speaks! Author Lends His Voice to ‘Inherent Vice’ Trailer,” Entertainment Weekly, August 11, 2009, https://ew .com/article/2009/08/11/thomas-pynchon-speaks-inherent-vice-trailer/. Genette divides paratexts into peritexts, which are physically attached to the book, and epitexts (such as interviews and advertisements in newspapers), which are removed from it. To emphasize the agency involved in such sharing, Henry Jenkins and colleagues have developed the concept of spreadable media as an alternative to viral media. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable

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24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

tore rye andersen Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture (New York University Press, 2013). Thompson, Merchants of Culture, pp. 247–48; Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave, 2009). Squires quotes the literary editor Robert McCrum: “A book will only really sell on a large scale (as a bestseller) by word of mouth, a process that is like alchemy” (64). Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires, “The Digital Publishing Communications Circuit,” Book 2.0, 3.1 (2013), pp. 3–23. For the discussion of modern book readers as copromoters, see p. 17. The original release of the playlist on Amazon was introduced with the sentence “the playlist that follows is designed exclusively for Amazon, courtesy of Thomas Pynchon.” Carolyn Kellogg from the Los Angeles Times took this to mean that Pynchon himself had provided Amazon with the playlist, but this has not been corroborated elsewhere and is likely a misinterpretation of Amazon’s statement. Carolyn Kellogg, “Thomas Pynchon’s Playlist,” Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2009, https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/ 2009/08/pynchons-playlist.html. My transcription. I have based the spelling of slang expressions and contractions on the style of Inherent Vice. Typical instances appear on p. 6, where the narrator mentions “superhero badasses in Special Forces gear packing M16s and so forth,” and on p. 75, where Doc exclaims, “Well bummer and so forth.” See, for instance, Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 198; Inherent Vice, p. 32. Pynchon usually employs the stutter to suggest a sort of youthful eagerness in his characters. The phrase “Quit fooling” is closely tied to Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow (see, e.g., pp. 198, 242, 373, 381, 395, 438), just as the phrase “you see” usually appears in connection with Thomas Gwenhidwy (see, e.g., pp. 169, 170, 172, 191). John Bryant even describes adaptations as versions of a work on a par with different printed editions. While I would not go so far, there is little doubt that adaptations affect our ideas of the adapted work. See John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 109. See Ralph Clare’s chapter in this volume for a further analysis of the dialogical relationship between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s adaptation. The alley also appears in the opening line of the novel: “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to” (1). Transmedia storytelling is “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.” Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101,” Confessions of an ACA-Fan, March 21, 2007, henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Murray and Squires, “Digital Publishing Communications Circuit,” p. 17.

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Index

9/11. See September 11th Ahmed, Sara, 55, 61 altermodernism, 19, 31n27 anachronism, 75, 207, 234 anarchism, 74, 79, 100, 110, 116, 119–20, 144, 214 and gender, 101 and literary form, 77, 105 and Pynchon’s politics, 4, 10, 141–42 and the postnational, 100 and violence, 72, 81, 117, 199 contemporary, 148–51 network, 4–5, 10, 152–54 relationship with Marxism, 141, 146–47 sado-anarchism, 104 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 6, 12, 211, 218–22, 224, 236, See also Inherent Vice (film) Anthropocene, the, 8, 69–72, 77–78, 80–82 anthropocentrism, 7, 55, 57–58 antihumanism, 55, See also posthumanism apocalypticism, 75–76, 149, 170 and posthumanism, 8, 71, 77–78, 81–82 and technology, 9, 125–30 environmental, 9, 75, 77–78, 124, 128–30, 134–35, 149 and digital ecologies, 125–26, 136–38 Arab Spring, 10, 141, 148, 151, 153 ARPAnet, 10, 130–31, 136–37, 150, 165, 203, 219 automodernism, 19, 30n7 Barad, Karen, 55, 60–61, 63–64 Basnight, Lew, 28, 119–20 Baudrillard, Jean, 50n14, 56 Benjamin, Walter, 158–59, 223 bilocation, 59–60, 115 Birke, Dorothee, 227, 229, 231–32, 237 Black Lives Matter, 109, 111, 148 Bleeding Edge (trailer), 12 Borgesius, Katje, 62, 181 Butler, Judith, 8, 90, 92, 100, 105 Byron the Bulb, 57–58

capitalism, 81, 120, 144, 163, 169–71, 203, See also neoliberalism and apocalypse, 78 and colonialism, 71, 100, 102, 116–18 and gender, 98, 104–5 and globalization, 26, 74, 152 and Luddism, 69, 132, 163–65 and Marxism, 26, 143 and paranoia, 34 and race, 111, 114, 116 and real estate, 167 and technology, 79 anti, 11, 105, 111, 158 cyber, 11, 135, 165, 170–71 industrial, 70, 126 Central Intelligence Agency, the, 42–44, 146 Chastain, DL, 200–1 Christ, Birte, 227, 229, 231–32, 237 Chums of Chance, the, 71–72, 75, 77, 79–80, 120 and metafiction, 27–29 as world travelers, 73–74, 100 at the World’s Fair, 115–16 cinema, 17, 57, 183, 200, 210, 219, 231 and virtual reality, 215–17, 222 avant garde, 212 history of, 211, 216 in the digital age, 210–11, 214, 218, 221–23 class, 26, 149 and politics, 93, 109, 143, 148, 163, 165 Cold War, the, 7, 34–38, 204, 212 conspiracy, 25, 37, 40–42, 45, 114, 160 and September 11th, 40, 45–46, 48, 214 and the internet, 42, 135, 153, 214 counterculture, 1, 119, 152, 165, 230 collapse of, 141, 143–45, 149–50, 166, 201–2 Cowart, David, 5, 24, 54, 138, 210 Dark Web. See Deep Web decolonial, the, 4 Deep Web, 10, 135, 152, 203, 216, See also DeepArcher

259

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260

Index

DeepArcher, 52n33, 63–64, 166, 205, 216–18, 222 and digital ecologies, 10, 135–37 corruption of, 46, 136, 152–53, 168–69, 203 Deleuze, Gilles, 63, 159, 163 democracy, 4, 114, 142, 146–48, 154 and technology, 11, 152, 164–65, 213 Deseret, the, 43–44 Despard, Reg, 17, 33, 137, 212–14 detective fiction, 40, 48, 110, 198, 202, 204, 221 digimodernism, 19, 30n7 digital humanities, 176–77, 192nn13, 14 dystopia. See apocalypticism eco-criticism, 4, 125, See also ecomodernism ecologization, 9–10, 126–28, 130–31, 134, 136 ecology, 3, 29, 69, 85n56, 125–26, 167 digital, 4–5, 9–10, 126–38 media, 202 social, 130, 133–34, 171 ecomodernism, 78–80 encyclopedic novel, the, 75–77, 120, 190, 200 entropy, 39, 159, 187, 222 environmentalism, 4, 70, 124–27, 131, 134–35, 138, See also apocalypticism, environmental epic, 76–77 ethics, 63, 92, 103, 152, 154, 171, See also morality and gender, 8–9, 95, 98–102, 105 and paranoia, 7, 33–34, 43, 46–47 and postmodernism, 4–5, 25, 90 and sentimentalism, 49 fatherhood. See parenting feminism, 8–9, 94, 97–98, 102, 145, 154 and new materialism, 8, 60–62, 64–65 anticolonial, 91, 93 choice feminism, 91, 98 contemporary, 4–5, 89–91 Pynchon’s attitude toward, 65, 89 film. See cinema; Inherent Vice (film) Foppl, 9, 91–96, 99–100, 103–4, 106n17, 107n20 Fumimoto, Takeshi, 201 Gates, Frenesi, 145, 200, 211–14, 223 gender, 2, 89–90, 102–5, 143, See also masculinity and agency, 90, 96–98, 101, 105 and ethics, 8–9, 90–91, 95, 98–99, 101–2, 105 and new materialism, 8, 60–62 and postmodernism, 26 and race, 93, 97, 100–1 as binary, 62, 64–65, 91–93, 98, 103–4 Genette, Gérard, 227–29, 237 globalization, 3, 7, 26, 74, 115 and race, 113 anti, 141, 147–48 Godolphin, Hugh, 94–95, 106n17

Graeber, David, 4, 147–48 Ground Zero, 37, 47, 166, 215, See also September 11th Guattari, Félix, 63, 159, 163 Halfcourt, Yashmeen, 64, 79, 101–4 Haraway, Donna, 61–62, 69, 133 Hardt, Michael, 143–44, 148, 150, 154 Harvitz, Esther, 96–98, 107n26 hashslingerz, 35, 37 Hayles, N. Katherine, 11, 196, 228 historiography, 5, 159–60, 196, See also metafiction, historiographic and film, 12 and narrative tense, 11, 176, 185–91 and posthuman temporalities, 8, 71, 77, 81 and race, 110, 114–15, 118–21 in the digital age, 197, 211, 214, 223–24 Marxist, 141, 147 mediated, 54, 110 Hutcheon, Linda, 20, See also metafiction, historiographic hypermodernism, 19 Ice, Gabriel, 36, 38, 44–45, 137, 165, 170 and DeepArcher, 136, 169–70 and September 11th, 35, 40–41, 45 immanent naturalism, 55 Indignados, 141, 151 Industrial Revolution, the, 70, 127, 162–63 Inherent Vice (film), 6, 12, 236 and digital cinema, 211, 218–21, 224 Inherent Vice (trailer), 6, 12, 229, 231–38 internet, the, 3, 21, 137, 219, 230, 232, See also ARPAnet; Deep Web and conspiracy theories, 42, 135, 214 and anarchism, 10, 141, 150–52 and digital ecologies, 128 and film, 211, 213, 215–16 and freedom, 137, 150, 152–53, 164–65, 168–70, 203–5, 226 and hyper attention, 12, 197, 203–6 and Luddism, 128, 131–32, 164 and publishing, 227, 229, 231 irony, 63, 77, 168, 191, 221, 232, 235 after September 11th, 50n14, 204–5 and postmodernism, 25 Islam, 40, 49, 109 Jameson, Fredric, 26, 34 Kant, Immanuel, 53, 55–56 Kelleher, March, 42, 45, 49, 152 Kindred, Deuce, 101–3 Kunoichi Retreat, 200–2

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Index Latewood, Cyprian, 64, 101–4 Lemuria, 128–31, 134 Leninism, 141, 145–46 Loeffler, Horst, 49, 134–35, 138, 215 Los Angeles, 136, 149, 170, 231, 233 and apocalypse, 129–30, 134, 149 Luddism, 171, 226 and freedom, 127, 132, 162–64 and posthumanism, 69, 82 Maas, Oedipa, 124–25, 130, 137, 144, 151, 220 comparison with Maxine Tarnow, 37, 41–42, 166, 217, 226 Marx, Karl, 26, 55, See also Marxism Marxism, 5, 10, 26, 141, 143, 145–47, 154, See also Leninism masculinity, 62, 91, 95, 99–102, 104, 106n16 McClintock, Anne, 94–95, 101 McClure, David, 11, 178–82 McHale, Brian, 7, 23–25, 110 and postmodern ontology, 8, 58, 64–65, 115 Meillassoux, Quentin, 55–56 Mendoza, Josefina, 97–98, 107n26 metafiction, 27 historiographic, 23, 25, 28 metamodernism, 19 metaphysics, 45, 48, 55, 217, 222–23 Mittelwerke, 183, 185, 188–89 modernism, 19, 23, 30n7, 63, 75–76, 115 Mondaugen, Kurt, 99, 106n17, 189 morality, 36, 42, 121, 143, 183, See also ethics and gender, 92, 98–99, 101 and history, 184 and postmodernism, 25, 27, 90 and race, 115, 117 and the internet, 135 relationship with paranoia, 7, 33–34, 37, 41–43, 45–49 motherhood. See parenting nation, the, 24, 26, 49, 166, 200, See also nationalism; postnational, the; transnational, the nationalism, 26, 111, 114–15 Negri, Antonio, 143–44, 148, 150, 154 neoliberalism, 9, 34–35, 37, 192n14, See also capitalism and race, 111, 115, 121 New Left, the, 141, 143–47, 149, 154, 211 New York, 48, 95–96, 102, 118, 151, 202, 238 and ecology, 132–35 and September 11th, 39, 45, 136–37, 199, 214, 216–17, 223 Nixon, Richard, 145–46, 219

261

Occupy, 10, 141, 148, 151–54 ontology, object-oriented, 55 Outfield, Eric, 135, 137, 205 Owlglass, Rachel, 96–97, 99, 107n26 parenting, 101, 104, 132, 134, 204, 218, 220 and paranoia, 36, 39, 44–49 parody, 7, 33, 41, 198 pastiche, 25, 198, 202 Patriot Act, the, 48, 168 Peenemünde, 183, 185–88 performatism, 19 periodization, literary, 18–23 Pökler, Franz, 183–90 pornography, 91, 94, 135, 187, 220 postanthropocentrism. See posthumanism postcolonial, the, 5, 112–13, See also decolonial, the postfactual, the, 5, 12, 214 posthumanism, 2, 25, 77–78, 82, 161 and ecology, 9 and Luddism, 69, 162 and new materialism, 8, 55–58, 65 and temporality, 8, 77, 81 postnational, the, 26, 73, 100, 104, See also transnational, the postracial, the, 9 poststructuralism, 3–5, 27, 90 Profane, Benny, 97–99 Pudding, Brigadier Ernest, 62, 159, 183, 185 Pynchon, Thomas “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”, 69, 127–28, 132, 162–64, 197 race, 5, 26, 109, 113–14 and capitalist colonialism, 100, 115–18 and gender, 91–95, 97 and historiography, 118–21 and Marxism, 55, 143 antiracialism, 9, 111–14, 121 antiracism, 9, 111–13, 115, 121 as systemic, 112–13, 121 postracial, the, 110–11, 113–16, 120 racial neoliberalism, 111, 115, 121 Ramsay, Stephen, 11, 176, 178, 181, 192n13 Rancière, Jacques, 142–48, 154 Reagan, Ronald, 145–46, 219 realism, 22, 27, 220 philosophical, 56–57 speculative, 55, 59, 113, 118 realities, alternative. See worlds, other remodernism, 19 renewalism, 19, 31n28 Renfrew, Professor P. Jotham, 59–60, 80 Rideout, Dally, 101–3, 118–19 Russia, 41, 44, 48, 73, 161, 204

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262

Index

sadomasochism, 62, 103–5, 107n27 Saldívar, Ramón, 9, 110–14, 120 Sarah, 93–95, 97, 103, 107n20 Schoenmaker, Shale, 63, 96–97 science fiction, 114, 130, 219, See also realism, speculative Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 7, 14, 36–37, 43–44, 47–48, 61 semiotics, 27, 62, 187–88 sentimentality, 49, 220 September 11th, 1–2, 5, 10, 137, 140n33, 157, 203 and anarchism, 111, 148, 151, 199 and capitalism, 44–45, 165–67 and digital media, 137, 152, 168–70, 204–5, 214–15, 217, 223 and paranoia, 34–35, 37, 39–41, 46–49 and postmodernism, 19 sexuality, 26, 100, 154 and gender, 62, 64, 92–99, 102–5 and race, 92–95 Shaftsbury, Bongo, 161–62 Slothrop, Tyrone, 62, 144, 176, 181–82, 185–90, 235, 240n30 spirituality, 46, 71–73, 167, 204, 217, 221 Sportello, Doc, 38, 42, 51n18, 165, 219, 224 and apocalypticism, 128–29, 134, 136, 149 and community, 149–50, 154 and Inherent Vice trailer, 231, 234–36 and sentimentality, 221 use of digital networks, 131 supernatural, the, 42–46, 53–54, 72, 118, 136 Tarnow, Maxine, 137–38, 168, 203–5, 212–13, 220, 226 and ecology, 132–34, 138 and paranoia, 7, 33–49, 202–3 and September 11th, 152, 167, 214–15, 217 experience with DeepArcher, 136–37, 166, 203, 205, 215–18, 222–23 television, 164, 219, 221, 231 and digital media, 210–12, 215, 217, 222

and hyper attention, 11–12, 197, 200–5 terrorism, 35, 47–48, 80–81, 157, See also September 11th and September 11th, 169, 199, 204, 215 post September 11th, 111, 157 Tesla, Nikola, 79 transhumanism, 78, 82 transnational, the, 4, 7, 113, 116, 121, 144, 152, See also postnational, the Traverse, Lake, 101, 103 Traverse, Reef, 74, 101–4 Trespassers, the, 75, 77–78 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 71–73 Underwood, Ted, 21, 23 Vheissu, 95 Vibe, Fleetwood, 100, 116–18 Vibe, Scarsdale, 79, 100–1, 116–17 video games, 4, 46, 134–35, 211, 215–16 virtual, the, 4, 157, 165, 211, 226 and DeepArcher, 63, 152, 168–69, 215–18 and film, 12, 214–18, 221–24 von Göll, Gerhard, 210, 212–13 Vond, Brock, 146–47, 201 Wahhabism, 40, 45 Wheeler, Zoyd, 146, 200–1 Windust, Nick, 35–36, 42–43, 46–48, 137 Winsome, Mafia, 96–97 World Trade Center. See September 11th World War I, 72, 75–76, 110, 120 World War II, 70, 127, 144, 160, 166, 169, 183, 185–89 and film, 210 and Luddism, 162 and the supernatural, 54 worlds, other, 60, 128, 130, 135 and new materialism, 58–59 and postmodernism, 25 and race, 115, 118, 121

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