Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 9781793655875, 9781666900002, 9781793655882, 1793655871

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Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales

ECOCRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI

Advisory Board Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists. Recent Titles Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism, by Keita Hatooka Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth, by Bénédicte Meillon Indian Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Nicole Anae

Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises, edited by Sune Borkfelt and Matthias Stephan Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination, edited by Danette DiMarco and Timothy Ruppert Shamanism in the Contemporary Novel, by Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu Modernism and the Anthropocene, edited by Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene, by Michael Gormley Trees in Literatures and the Arts: Humanarboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene, edited by Carmelina Concilio and Daniela Fargione Lupenga Mphande: Eco-critical Poet and Political Activist, by Dike Okoro Environmental Postcolonialism: A Literary Response, edited by Shubhanku Kochar and M. Anjum Khan Reading Aridity in Western American Literature, edited by Jada Ach and Gary Reger

Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales Fables for Ecocriticism Keita Hatooka

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hatooka, Keita, author.   Title: Thomas Pynchon's animal tales : fables for ecocriticism / Keita     Hatooka.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Series: Ecocritical theory     and practice | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary:     "Through examining case studies of animal representation in Thomas     Pynchon's works, Hatooka illuminates how radically and imaginatively the     legendary novelist depicts his empathy for nonhuman beings and conducts     conducting a comparative study of Pynchon's narratives and his     contemporary documentarians and thinkers"-- Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2022028438 (print) | LCCN 2022028439 (ebook) | ISBN     9781793655875 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666900002 (paperback) | ISBN 9781793655882 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: Pynchon, Thomas--Criticism and interpretation. | Animals in     literature. | Ecocriticism in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.  Classification: LCC PS3566.Y55 Z658 2022  (print) | LCC PS3566.Y55  (ebook)     | DDC 813/.54--dc23/eng/20220629  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028438 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028439 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: For Whom the Fable Says: Pynchon, Lyotard, and Carson 1 Chapter 1: Who Caught the Blood of the Alligator?: V.

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Chapter 2: The Dolphin Jumped over the Moon: The Crying of Lot 49 31 Chapter 3: What We Talk about When We Talk about Extinction: Gravity’s Rainbow 47 Chapter 4: Who’s Afraid of the Big Badass?: Vineland and Inherent Vice 65 Chapter 5: Sonnets for a Multispecies Cradle: Mason & Dixon and Against the Day 83 Chapter 6: The Lady with the Alligator Purse: Bleeding Edge and Jonathan Safran Foer

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Conclusion: And Then There Were None (Except for Nature on the Screen): Documentary Guys, Grizzly Man, and Thomas Pynchon 117 Bibliography Index

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About the Author



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vii

Acknowledgments

While it is impossible to acknowledge all the people who have supported me during the making of this book, I wish to recognize the special contributions of a few. I am grateful to my wife, children, and parents for their constant encouragement as I completed the manuscript. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to my mentors, Takayuki Tatsumi, Masashi Orishima, Tetsuo Uenishi, and Tomonori Tsuchida. I would also like to thank Scott Slovic and Takayoshi Ishiwari for peer-reviewing my Ph.D. thesis, which helped me immensely during the revision of this book. I would like to express my gratitude to Sascha Pöhlmann for his help and support during my research and fieldwork in Germany; all my colleagues at Meiji University for their wholehearted encouragement; Naoshi Shimohirao for editing my 2011 book, Pynchon’s Zoo (written in Japanese), on which this book is substantially based; Hiroshi Suzuki, president of Suisei-sha, for granting permission to partially translate and reproduce the main chapters of Pynchon’s Zoo for this work; the editorial boards of the American Literature Society of Japan, the Japanese Association for American Studies, and ASLE-Japan for publishing articles that were comprehensively revised and modified as chapters of this book; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, which supported this book with JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 19K00402; and Kasey Beduhn and Courtney Morales for their exceptional editing.

ix

Introduction For Whom the Fable Says: Pynchon, Lyotard, and Carson

Thomas Pynchon’s fictions can be read as fables based on a postmodern aesthetic, like Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable” (1997; originally published in French in 1993), but his narratives also resonate with Rachel Carson’s environmental fable, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” in Silent Spring (1962).1 In the afterword to the second edition of Thomas Pynchon (1990; originally published in 1974), for instance, Joseph W. Slade includes part of his conversation with Leo Marx, author of The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964): “Marx reminded me that the novel [Gravity’s Rainbow] is an expression of the pastoral dream so prominent in classic American literature.” For Slade as well as Marx, then, Pynchon is an author who narrates the “dream of a landscape for which Americans yearn precisely because it never existed for more than a moment in history,” while setting his fictions in the “waste lands.”2 This vision of the pastoral is not a “simple” but a “complex pastoralism,” which is defined as “a view of experience that matches the duality of nature.”3 Marx finds the complex pastoralism in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand” (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). When we regard some writings that express “anxiety arising from the perceived threat of an environmental hazard” as a “toxic discourse,” as Lawrence Buell argues, it might come as “no surprise” for people who have the common sense to understand that humans are confronted with a more serious conflict between capitalism and environmentalism than ever “to find contemporary toxic discourse [which begins with Silent Spring] retelling narratives of rude awakening from simple pastoral to complex.”4 However, Pynchon’s literary attitudes toward “the duality of nature” and the relationship between capitalism and 1

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environmentalism are fascinating, precisely because his novels depict the very moments people epiphanically awaken not only to the complex pastoral but also to the complexity of the extinction processes in the worlds from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century, which are interpreted based on the postmodern aesthetics by Pynchon himself. These awakenings occur especially through encounters with non-human beings—some are companion species, some are treated as vermin, and some are endangered—including alligators, dolphins, dodoes, pigs, rodents, dogs, bugs, worms, trees, and mysterious animals. From dystopian fictions such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)5 to radical environmental books such as Fred Guterl’s The Fate of the Species (2012), it is quite common in fictive and speculative narratives for human beings to be threatened with extinction as a result of capitalistic greed, environmental havoc, massive weaponry, or all of the above. While it might be possible to compare Pynchon with McCarthy ecocritically, as Tore Rye Andersen does in his article on Gravity’s Rainbow and Blood Meridian,6 Pynchon’s narratives take a more transcendental stance, which seems partially closer to Lyotard’s fable. This fable tries to reflect on philosophical themes such as “what is humanity?” by imagining the moment of “the ineluctable disappearance of the entire solar system,” when humans with the most highly developed technology will prepare for an exodus from the Earth. In “A Postmodern Fable,” Lyotard begins by quoting the last sentence of his fable within his essay: “What a Human and his/her Brain—or rather the Brain and its Human—would resemble at the moment when they leave the planet forever, before its destruction; that, the story does not tell.” So ends the fable we are about to hear.7

While admitting the postmodern discourse as a continuation of those of Western revolutionary male intellects such as Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, all of whom argued “man is not the center of the world, he is not the first (but the last) among creatures, he is not the master of discourse,” Lyotard demonstrates both the potentiality and limitation of the postmodern fable that tries to educate us by making us imagine the world after or without humans: “this fable asks not that it be believed, only that we reflect on it.”8 This fable and Lyotard’s narrative reflecting on it are, however, deeply concerned with what makes us human after the end of physical worlds, rather than how the ecosystem will be destructed before “the ineluctable disappearance of the entire solar system,” by intentionally alerting us to the precondition of the fable: “The human species is not the hero of the fable. It is a complex form of organizing energy.”9 Lyotard relentlessly relativizes his

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narrative to make us consider what the conception of anthropocentrism will be after the end of the destruction of every system of this planet, including the ecosystem. Therefore, if you read Lyotard’s postmodern fable within an intellectual chronology after Carson’s modern fable, “A Fable for Tomorrow,” the experience may lead to feelings of resentment toward local environmental destruction, as well as a sense of being overwhelmed by an inevitable ending of the Earth, which may give you both some philosophical satisfaction and a futuristic, paralyzing sense of the sublime. However, another question arises here. What if you read Carson’s fable after Lyotard’s? Do you find less satisfaction in such global apocalypses as the mass death of birds caused by environmental pollution? Indeed, some ecocritics have tended to regard postmodernists as implicit enemies because of their belittling attitudes toward objective reality and the privilege they give to acts of representation. Most notable among the postmodernists criticized in textbooks on ecocriticism is Jean Baudrillard, who is well-known for his conceptualizations of simulation and simulacrum. For Laurence Coupe, as noted in his general introduction to The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000), Baudrillard is a postmodernist who “dismisses complaints about the pollution and despoliations of the planet as irrelevant in a world of ‘simulation’”; by borrowing Charlene Spretnak’s distinction, he regards Baudrillard as a representative of a bad, “deconstructive postmodernism” fostering “a nihilistic disintegration of all values.”10 In The Truth of Ecology (2003), Dana Phillips also makes sarcastic comments on postmodern thinkers from Lyotard and Baudrillard to Linda Hutcheon, who “may be guilty of trying to give an old saw [of Lyotard and Baudrillard] new teeth,” as well as Frederic Jameson, whose statements regarding “the fate of nature” are typical examples of the “least persuasive claims” about it. Phillips claims that “postmodernists fail to recognize that the efficacy of human designs for and intentions toward nature is sharply limited.”11 Of course, the cross-fertilization between postmodernism and ecocriticism has been gradually promoted. As Coupe admits, we also have a good postmodernism, “which seeks opportunities for creativity and growth” and “works to open up possibilities for both, people and the planet.”12 In “Saving All the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism” (2002), Michael P. Branch claims that ecocritics should more closely investigate “works that express what seems an anthropocentric or even a destructively instrumentalist approach toward nature” because it might be possible for them to “reveal the origins of ideas that have often resulted in the degradation of American environments.”13 More recently, in Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (2008), Scott Slovic sums up the accomplishments of “postmodern ecocriticism.”14

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In Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), then, Timothy Morton, a polemic scholar who dares to antagonize postmodernists and ecocritics, provocatively claims that almost all environmental discourses from “wilderness writing to apocalypticism” are no less than “anti-intellectualism” or “empiricism”—“the name of the thinking that tries to be no-thinking.”15 In fact, Pynchon prefers to show strong empathy toward anti-intellectualism, represented by some of the characters in his fictions— schlemihls, lazy people, or Luddites—who often feel a strong kinship with animals, although his fable offers diverse lessons even for Morton. Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow laments over the cruelty that his family’s paper company has inflicted on the trees; touching the trees, Slothrop understands that “each tree is a creature, carrying on its individual life.”16 Then, Pynchon’s imagination accelerates, letting the tree become a talkative, trickster-like creature that urges Slothrop to disturb deforestation. Apologizing to the trees with his stock phrase, “I’m sorry,” Slothrop asks what he can do to support them, even though he has no idea how to make contact with his family.17 His words are received by a “medium-size pine,”18 who suggests that he can remove the oil filters of the tractors engaged in a logging operation and disable them. Although this episode foregrounds both the sarcastic and sentimental strains in his narrative, Pynchon adds a twist here by letting the pine tree suggest the possibility of eco-terrorism. Thus, it might be reasonable even to Morton that Pynchon tries to listen to the activist voice of the tree, precisely because Pynchon presents a literary twist on what Morton suggestively remarks upon in his book: “If a poisoned rainforest could speak, it would sound like Frankenstein’s creature.”19 What matters while rereading Pynchon’s works, from the perspectives of both postmodernism and ecocriticism, is how far and indirectly he tries to look at the animals to see what their lives are in this anthropocentric world as closely as he can. In “Why Look at Animals?” (1977), John Berger claims that when you look at the animals in a zoo, “you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal.”20 As an “endorsement of modern colonial power”21 in the nineteenth century, public zoos proliferated in Europe, exhibiting exotic flora and fauna native to conquered lands. The zoo is one of the most symbolic inventions of the colonial era precisely because it succeeded in virtually enclosing the wilderness of foreign countries within “civilized” societies. Just as the injection of a vaccine,22 also invented in the 18th century, led to developing immunity to protect the body from the inside out, building zoological gardens in the metropolises of those days worked to protect the colonialists’ egos from the inside out.23 Pynchon’s way of depicting other beings by looking over the shoulder of his anti-intellectual characters, or his not-so-ecologically-aware ones, is surely in line with certain heterodoxies of nature documentaries such as Grizzly Man

Introduction

5

(2005), edited and directed by German director Werner Herzog, which mainly comprises the footage shot by environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, who would eventually be killed by a grizzly bear.24 In the earlier part of V. (1961), Pynchon documents Profane’s hunting of alligators in the sewer and repeatedly refers to the character’s empathy for his game, but his narrative’s aim is also to satisfy the reader’s desire to see the moment of the animal’s death and to make sure the remnants of the natural world in urban areas are no longer a threat, even for a “schlemihl”: “‘I’m sorry,’ he told the alligator. He was always saying he was sorry. It was a schlemihl’s stock line. [. . .] He fired. The alligator jerked, did a backflip, thrashed briefly, was still.”25 As David Seed points out, “unlike classic hunt-narratives such as Moby-Dick, ‘The Bear,’ or The Old Man and the Sea, Profane is not operating in open nature but in the very opposite setting.”26 What is most opposite is that the sewer alligators were originally bred as pets and dumped into the toilet; that is to say, these exotic animals were “something that has been rendered absolutely marginal” and destined to live in human society. In Gravity’s Rainbow, as David Cowart claims, “Pynchon’s sympathy for the oppressed or marginalized [. . .] leads him to an elaborate counter-Freudian play on the blackness of Enzian and his fellow Schwarzkommando,” and “[e]recting the great 00001 rocket just after VE Day, the black rocket troops reassert, among other things, the manhood compromised by their colonial history.”27 The African counterforce called the “Schwarzkommando” in Gravity’s Rainbow almost succeeds in assembling parts of the German rocket, which is a symbolic instrument of the technological achievement during WWII. Pynchon narrates how the Schwarzkommando, a fictitious troop of colonized but rebellious survivors of the Herero genocide, was formed in Nazi Germany by returning to their grandparents’ captivity, like animals in zoos: “Early Rhenish missionaries [of Germany] began to bring them [the Herero people] back to the Metropolis, that great dull zoo, as specimens of a possibly doomed race.”28 After the collapse of the Third Reich, some of the descendants of the Herero people brought from Southwest Africa come together as the Schwarzkommando to take over the power of the Nazi rocket. If we note a suggestive contrast between “that great dull zoo” and “the great 00001 rocket,” their takeover of the rocket could be interpreted as a great escape from the colonial zoo. The analogy of the Schwarzkommando and King Kong in the novel affords collateral evidence to this reading of Gravity’s Rainbow: “[T]he legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children, running around inside Germany even now—the Schwarzkommando.”29 If the zoo is a colonialists’ dream place, it may become a nightmare for them if weakened animals arouse their survival instincts and rampage through the city. King

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Introduction

Kong (1933) is a thorough depiction of this nightmare as it forcefully brings exotic creatures into a civilized space. In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), Donna Haraway points out that King Kong “could only be conquered by an abstract, technical force, i.e., by the instruments of modern war,” and that this black creature “was more powerful than a naked white man without his cameras and planes.”30 Michael Bérubé, meanwhile, claims that the significance of King Kong in Gravity’s Rainbow could be attributed to its intertextuality: “If King Kong is thus transmitted and productively activated both by Prettyplace’s ‘definitive study’ and by African rocket troops, then the film’s ‘existence’ lies in the intertext.” Bérubé explains this interpretation with the experimental idea of dual aspects, both of which are opposed to another aspect, that is, “production/ consumption//transmission.”31 It should be remembered that the directors of the film, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, had previously made a nature documentary titled Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), which shot people and animals in northern Siam, where “[v]illagers fight off threats from a leopard and a tiger; after a wild elephant stampede (a staged event), the villagers tame the elephants and use them to reconstruct their peaceful jungle life.”32 They were nothing but white men with cameras, and their enthusiasm for visualizing the colonialist nightmare onscreen was endorsed not by imaginaries but by scientific knowledge; they designed King Kong’s body following advice from the Curator of Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In his 1984 essay, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” Pynchon calls King Kong “your classic Luddite saint.”33 The Luddite movement is usually understood as a historical rebellion against machines, which were posing serious threats to skilled workers in the era of the industrial revolution. Today, being a “Luddite” means anachronistically denying the worth of technology mainly because of a lack of understanding. For Pynchon, however, to be a Luddite is to become “Bad and Big”34 enough to countervail technology, from the airplane to the nuclear bomb, though this may only be possible in fiction. Pynchon says that people’s dreams of being a Luddite in this sense are genealogically fulfilled in stories from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to King Kong. In Gravity’s Rainbow, therefore, King Kong is called a “scapeape,”35 who Pynchon regards as a victim to his duty as a Luddite in fiction; the Schwarzkommando are correspondingly called King Kong’s “own children,”36 whose fate fulfills the ape’s Luddite dream. As the end of the novel draws closer, however, we encounter a short episode that tries to erase the symbolism of King Kong. In the episode titled, “AN INCIDENT IN THE TRANSVESTITES’ TOILET,” Slothrop is wearing a wig and a dress to disguise himself as Fay Wray, the heroine of King Kong,

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and “a small ape or orangutan” with a sodium bomb approaches him from behind.37 This relationship between two primates—Slothrop disguised as Fay Wray and an ape or orangutan with a bomb representing a smaller version of King Kong—reminds us of a Hallmark greeting card with an illustration that depicts a “reversal of the positions” of King Kong and Fay Wray. As Haraway claims, such a depiction “cannot simply reverse the semiotic values of the tragic 1933 film and its classic myths of race, gender, and knowledge; it turns them into farce.”38 Indeed, Pynchon’s narratives also tend to diffuse humorously rather than converge seriously on a single message. While some Pynchon scholars, like Steven Weisenburger, contend that “dodoes or Africans, it makes no difference,”39 such an equation could make Pynchon’s narrative a little too sterile. His postmodern animal tales are always open to relative interpretations, as shown above in the episode depicting the relationship between the trees and Slothrop. If Pynchon’s animals are forced to live in the zoo of his narrative, what the current volume, Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales, will do is read his narrative as we may watch Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries, which never allow us to interpret what is happening on the screen either from a human or non-human perspective. As Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson note, Wiseman’s Zoo “evokes the fascination of looking at these exotic creatures [at the Miami Metrozoo in Florida], then extends that fascination by looking back at the public and then looking behind the scenes at the feeding, medical care, maintenance, and planning that make it possible.”40 The act of looking does not just interpret others as metaphors of the observers themselves (filmmakers, audience, authors, readers, or critics) but also verifies the distance between the self and others. As Berger points out, “it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol”; the “zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and animals; nothing else.”41 As for Profane and Slothrop, they tend to say “I’m sorry” when they feel the emotional pain caused by the unfair relationship between animals and humans. This agony may be regarded as an example of a relatively newly identified psychological construct, “solastalgia,” a term coined by Glenn Albrecht and defined as “the pain or distress caused by the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory.”42 By referring to Albrecht’s conception, then, Marc Bekoff claims, “[We] experience solastalgia when we erode our relationships with other beings.”43 As Albrecht himself argues, following Beckon, even animals can feel solastalgia44; Fang, a talkative dog in Mason & Dixon (1997), is the character best-suited to helping us understand the solastalgia of Pynchon’s animals mainly because he represents the paradox of the human-centered world. The dog says “I may be præternatural, but I am not supernatural. ’Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an Explanation at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog,—Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and

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Introduction

Unicorns.”45 What is most important for Fang is the fact that he lives in the era after the Age of Miracle, so everything should be explained by logic and reason. Therefore, Fang explains that a dog who trains himself to talk could exist, but a dog who can talk from birth is a product of fantasy. Indeed, as a præternatural creature, Fang tries to remain in the “less fantastick”46 world of the 18th century than the Age of Miracles, when, as Pynchon explains, “once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so.”47 Once we accept the progressive view of history, especially from “the Age of Miracles” to “the Age of the Reason,” it is as if supernatural creatures have never existed from the beginning. Nevertheless, the præternatural could haunt the secular worlds even after being demolished by human reason. Pynchon paraphrases this notion by referring the clumsiness of the dodo birds in Gravity’s Rainbow. Of course, the dodoes are neither supernatural nor præternatural, but the nostalgia of the seventeenth-century Dutch colonialist, Frans, who helps exterminate the dodoes in Mauritius, lets Frans himself foresee the extinction of the dodoes as an inevitable course of events: “Recent arrivals all carrying the new snaphaan [a musket having a flintlock] . . . but I stick to my clumsy old matchlock . . . don’t I deserve a clumsy weapon for such a clumsy prey?”48 When the clumsiness caused by obsoleteness is dismissed as the præternatural, nature loses its diversity, and the extinction of the unreasonable creatures is accelerated. To speak simply, Pynchon loves the præternatural because of its clumsiness, and he dreams the time will come when the non-elect called the “Preterite” can live out its life in the alternative world. Pynchon’s narratives can be read as fables for our time, and his creatures, including the trees, can tell us something supplementary but essential for both postmodernism and ecocriticism. Through Pynchon’s oeuvre, we inevitably bump into other beings that tempt us to clarify the (dis)continuity between before and after the human being begins to rationally and scientifically reconsider its relationship with nature, as well as to erode it in a destructive manner. As Lyotard appropriately suggests, then, if you want to criticize a fable of the human system, it is necessary to imagine something “that remains independent of the imaginaries produced by the human system.”49 This might also be an impossible mission for Pynchon, but the way he chooses to continue narrating his stories against the entropic death of postmodern narrative is worth tracing as it opens up the possibility of improving both postmodern ecocriticism and ecocritical postmodernism. NOTES 1. In A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satire of Thomas Pynchon (1990), Theodore D. Kharpertian summarizes that, since the 1970s, the definition of the

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literary genre of Pynchon’s three fictions, V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, has confusingly changed from “fable” or “apologue” to “satire” or “epic.” He, thus, argues for the need to “read all three texts as generically similar” by categorizing them as Menippean satire. Theodore D. Kharpertian, A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1990), 22–24. In the same year as the publication of A Hand to Turn the Time, Frank Palmeri released Satire in Narrative, in which he examines The Crying of Lot 49 and concludes that “Pynchon situates his narrative apart from alternate genres and modes, between tragedy and satire, irony and allegory.” Frank Palmeri, Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 124. For a further discussion of the genre’s definition in terms of allegory, see Deborah L. Madsen, The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon (London: Leicester University Press, 1991). Moreover, Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales does not attempt to run completely counter to this tradition of Pynchon studies, but rather creatively rereads some “animal tales” that have been regarded to aid in the comprehensive understanding of Pynchon’s works as small but significant “fables” for sparking wider debates between postmodernism and ecocriticism. 2. Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon, 2nd ed. (New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1974; New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 231–32. 3. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 5. Kindle. Chris Coughran points out that pastoral representation in Gravity’s Rainbow can be interpreted as “one of a myriad ‘forms of capitalist expression’ identified [. . .] as variants of a pornographic script.” Coughran’s claim is based on his interpretation of the episodes concerning nostalgia expressed by the exiled people living in Europe, such as an Argentine anarchist and the Herero in Gravity’s Rainbow. Chris Coughran, “Green Scripts in ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’: Pynchon, Pastoral Ideology and the Performance of Ecological Self,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 2 (2009): 270. Furthermore, Eric Bulson points out that the destroyed city of Berlin is ironically regarded by Slothrop as an “ideal environment” or “a prewar agrarian past.” According to Bulson, the destructed image of Berlin could be called “a pastoral landscape” of Gravity’s Rainbow. Eric Bulson, “A Supernatural History of Destruction; or, Thomas Pynchon’s Berlin,” New German Critique, no. 110 (2010): 62. 4. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), chap. 1, Kindle. 5. See Hannah Stark, “‘All These Things He Saw and Did Not See’: Witnessing the End of the World in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” Critical Survey 25, no. 2 (2013): 71–84. Summarizing Stark’s article, Rowland Hughes and Pat Wheeler note that “Stark makes the important point that the anthropocentrism of the text [The Road] steers us towards the realization that humans now wield a power over the environment that is unique amongst species [. . .]. The Road makes clear that our power as a species is limited, if not illusory, and that we are not immune to the damage we

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Introduction

inflict.” Rowland Hughes and Pat Wheeler, “Introduction Eco-Dystopias: Nature and the Dystopian Imagination.” Critical Survey 25, no. 2 (2013): 5. 6. Tore Rye Andersen, “Back to Gondwanaland: Deep Time and Planetarity in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Critique 62, no. 1 (2021): 97–111. 7. Jean-François Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable,” in Postmodern Fables, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 83. 8. Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable,” 101. 9. Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable,” 93. 10. Laurence Coupe, The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000), 7. 11. Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 24–27. 12. Coupe, The Green Studies Reader, 7. 13. Michael P. Branch, “Saving All the Pieces: The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism,” in The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment, ed. Steven Rosendale (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 7. 14. Slovic notes that even in postmodern criticism and literary works, “the careful depiction of beauty and degradation [. . .] evokes in us—in most instances—the response, ‘Yes, but not yet.’ Yes—all things are subject to change. But let us hold onto this beauty just a little bit longer.” Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008), chap. 16, Kindle. 15. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 123. 16. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1973; New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 552–53. Kindle. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. 17. By interpreting the conversation between Slothrop and the trees in terms of animism, Paul Maltby notes that “Pynchon’s response is to project as an ideal (though not as a viable means of redemption) humankind’s reconciliation with nature.” Maltby emphasizes, however, that such a reconciliation with nature could not be promoted without retreating from “the rational or cognitive processes of reflection, ratiocination, and analysis.” Paul Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 164. 18. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 553. 19. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 195. 20. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980; New York: Vintage International, 1991), 24. Italics in original. 21. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 21. 22. Until the emergence of new types of vaccines, such as mRNA vaccines, they had usually been composed of artificially weakened viruses or bacteria so as not to hurt the human body. 23. For a further discussion of the relationship between zoos and imperialism, see Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 57–104.

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11

24. Some of Pynchon’s characters seem skeptical about the political usefulness of the documentary—a group of 1970s feminist filmmakers in Vineland becomes an anachronism in the middle of the 1980s with their manifesto “A camera is a gun.” Moreover, the “documentary guy” in Bleeding Edge, which is set around September 11, 2001, cannot expect much of the power of film or the camera, partly because he feels the symptoms of something like the arrival of the YouTube era (2005–). As Takayoshi Ishiwari argues, the narrative of Vineland succeeds in depicting Frenesi Gates, a legendary leftist filmmaker who eventually changes sides, in a manner that reminds readers of a practical genre of photography, such as the “mug shot,” while Pynchon is conveying a negative message about the idea of realism in documentary films. Takayoshi Ishiwari, “Revealing Light: Cinematic Realism in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” Machikaneyama Ronso (Japanese) 53 (2019): 12–13. 25. Thomas Pynchon, V. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1961; New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 126. Kindle. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. 26. David Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 80. 27. David Cowart, “Pynchon in Literary History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 87. 28. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 315. 29. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 275. 30. Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 162. 31. Michael Bérubé, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 231. This reading is based on Alec McHoul and David Wills’ book, Writing Pynchon, in which the authors add another element to the binary relationship between the animate and inanimate: animate/inanimate//Byron the Bulb. Alec McHoul and David Wills, Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 55. 32. Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 107. 33. Thomas Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” The New York Times Book Review, October 28, 1984. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1984​/10​/28​/books​/is​-it​-ok​-to​-be​ -a​-luddite​.html​?searchResultPosition​=3. 34. Pynchon, “Luddite.” 35. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 275. 36. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 275. 37. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 688. 38. Haraway, Primate Visions, chap. 7. 39. Steven Weisenburger, “Gravity’s Rainbow,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman, and Brian McHale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 44. 40. Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, Introduction to the Second Edition of Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), xviii.

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41. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” 27. 42. Glenn A. Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 56. 43. Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter (San Francisco: New World Library, 2010), chap. 6, Kindle. 44. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 67. 45. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997; New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 22, Kindle. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. 46. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 22. 47. Pynchon, “Luddite.” 48. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 109. 49. Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable,” 101.

Chapter 1

Who Caught the Blood of the Alligator? V.

In 1963, Philadelphia-based publisher Lippincott released a mysterious novel titled V. The author was still unknown nationally but was already touted as a different kind of a writer with an outstanding imagination that could cross the boundary between the humanities and sciences. This reputation derived from his short story “Entropy” (1960), published in the literary magazine Kenyon Review, which dealt with thermodynamics and information theory as motifs, while separately depicting two groups of youths living upstairs and downstairs in the same apartment building, in an intellectual farce. Boldly applying an excellent literary technique that combined interdisciplinary knowledge with thematically dense but stylistically parodic narrative, Thomas Pynchon succeeded in portraying the dawn of the new era that we would come to call the postmodern. In a book review titled “A Myth of Alligators,” which appeared in Time magazine in the same year that V. was published, the reviewer began with the details of a famous urban legend about alligators living in the sewers of Manhattan, sold as babies for pets and abandoned as vermin but surviving underground in the big city. The reviewer points out that this urban legend plays an important part in Pynchon’s “likable, mad and unfathomable first novel” but that it is not an “integral part” at all.1 This is because the real purpose of Pynchon’s literary quest aims toward the truth of the world, although it gets lost in “the expanding universe” or “those whirling platforms at amusement parks.”2 Though it was written at a time when the concept of “postmodernism” was not well known, this review finds that V. foreshadows what is coming after the Beat Generation. Turning away from the reality of inequality in the Cold War era and adopting attitudes of passivity or paranoiac interest in the details of the world, the protagonists in V. surely show a different attitude 13

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toward the world from that of the Beatniks, who dared to drop out of college or “real” life and wander around in search of a deeper meaning. More than half a century after his debut with V., Pynchon’s works are “integral parts” of the history of world literature, along the same lines as other writers with experimental tendencies such as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Gabriel García Márquez. As recently as in his 2013 novel Bleeding Edge (2013), Pynchon demonstrated his still vital imagination. Whereas quite a few writers have a vivid debut and suddenly disappear from the literary scene, Pynchon has been able to write “likable, mad and unfathomable” narratives for more than half a century. The secret of the long lives of his works can be partly found in his technique of metaphorizing motives such as “alligators in the sewers of Manhattan.” While the Time review regarded V. as part of a “pre-Freudian luxury of dreams dreamt for the dreaming,”3 such details give us a hint about how Pynchon relativizes the real-world environment and, especially, a suggestion to reconsider the relations between human and non-human beings. It is generally said that this urban legend, which is based on news articles reporting the extermination of a stray alligator in the mid-1930s, did not spread widely until the 1960s. However, interestingly, the cover of the November 1952 issue of the New Yorker magazine featured an illustration showing a big parade balloon casting its shadow in the shape of the alligator on the street. Almost seventeen years after the publication of V., a film titled Alligator (1980) was released, following in the footsteps of the 1970s blockbuster Jaws. In the film, the giant alligator flushed down the toilet is neither albino, as the urban legend canonically says, nor black and white “pinto”4 as Pynchon depicts. It does, however, engage in the same familiar conflict with human beings seen in King Kong; in Alligator, the conflict between uncivilized nature and civilization is replaced by one between “under” the street and “on” the street. In both films, the creature, treated as something rare and alien, fights back against humans and ends up being exterminated. Behind such plots, of course, is a sense of crisis threatening the hierarchy of the civilized society and a fear of the “uncivilized” areas of the city: from the top of the Empire State Building to the sewers of Manhattan, which also represents slum or waste areas. In V., the cities are expanding vertically as well as horizontally. The contemporary part of V. is set in the mid-1950s, when in his second term (during the Cold War), President Dwight D. Eisenhower promoted the project of the interstate system in the name of national security, causing both eye-opening destruction of nature and irreversible changes to the communities along the highways. At this turning point in American environmental history, Benny Profane, the protagonist of this part of V., becomes overwhelmingly stressed by the city life or “the Street”5 in his nightmare, wishing to escape to

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somewhere without streets. Pynchon wrote the manuscript for the novel over a few years in the early 1960s during the John F. Kennedy administration, and it should be noted that the way of life in the 1950s feels already distant.6 In the introduction to the 1984 collection of his early short stories, Slow Learner, Pynchon writes: “Until John Kennedy, then perceived as a congressional upstart with a strange haircut, began to get some attention, there was a lot of aimlessness going around. While Eisenhower was in, there seemed no reason why it should all not just go on as it was.”7 What Pynchon is evoking here is the so-called conformist attitude of the 1950s. “We were onlookers,” writes Pynchon in the introduction to Slow Learner; “the parade had gone by and we were already getting everything secondhand, consumers of what the media of the time were supplying us.”8 As for Pynchon himself, who belongs to the silent generation between the Beats and the hippies, the radical changes in the American lifestyle and the drastic expansion of the highway systems nationwide were something he was unable to directly thematize. “A new highway act spelled the end of Jack Kerouac’s open road,” notes Robert Holton, “replaced by the controlled access freeway, highly efficient for motorists but leading to an unprecedented impersonality in travel.”9 Holton notes that Pynchon’s literary obsession with the “rationalized grid of highway” also results in the accomplishment of Mason & Dixon.10 Just as Tyrone Slothrop cries over the destruction of the forest in Gravity’s Rainbow, Jeremiah Dixon, an eighteenth-century English astronomer, also says angrily near the end of the story: “A tree-slaughtering Animal, with no purpose but to continue creating forever a perfect Corridor over the Land. Its teeth of Steel,—its Jaws, Axmen,—its Life’s Blood, Disbursement.”11 According to Lee Rozelle, the Mason-Dixon Line itself is the “Animal,” and this line “becomes monster in light of contemporary environmental catastrophe.”12 Looking backward from Dixon’s words anachronistically, Profane in V., who “had been road-laboring,”13 could also be partially descended from the “treeslaughtering Animal.” At the beginning of the novel, Profane, having just been discharged, shows up in Norfolk, Virginia, and instantly becomes close to Paola, a Maltese girl working at the bar, with whom he ends up spending New Year’s Eve at a bus stop. Their destination, for now, is New York, where another girl, Rachel, is supposed to be waiting for them. Rachel cheerfully says on the phone, “Come home”; the voice echoes for Profane like his own inner voice, and he thinks that if he wanted to, he could have a place called “home” as she did. However, even in New York, he cannot find what is “home” in this city. Letting Rachel take care of Paola, he spends the rest of the day on the subway in vain because he finds no job. Before exploring Profane’s encounter with the alligators in the sewer, we must understand how seriously he is affected by inanimate things. An extreme example is the episode of the abandoned quarry where

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Rachel takes Profane by car, and where the landscape of the inanimate layers of the stone deeply depresses him. This depression arises because his obsession with non-living things prevents him from making the best use of his own paranoia as a “creative paranoia,” a borrowed conception from Gravity’s Rainbow. In contrast, Profane’s obsession with the inanimate only alienates him from anything inanimate as a metaphor for death, and we cannot find any lessons from his paranoiac narrative. While “creative paranoia” can develop a story through a sense of connection, as accomplished in Gravity’s Rainbow through the unbelievable journey of Slothrop in Europe, Profane’s obsession never does so: “Streets (roads, circles, square places, prospects) had taught him nothing.”14 What makes the lethargic Profane interested in the aggressive job of “alligator hunting” is not only his obsession with the inanimate but also Pynchon’s envy of the narrative of the Beat generation. “I was a young writer and I wanted to take off,” says Sal Paradise, who is a narrator of Kerouac’s On the Road, continuing, “Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”15 It is not hard to imagine how dramatically Kerouac’s idealized way of life would have appealed to the young Pynchon. Indeed, he writes retrospectively in 1984 that after the publication of The Crying of Lot 49, he “was out on the road at last, getting to visit the places Kerouac had written about.”16 Nevertheless, at least Profane is not interested in the “pearl”; he does not think roads and cars deserve their respect precisely because he has more empathy toward people freezing on the streets, who cannot pay for a Greyhound, let alone own a car. Needless to say, for Profane, this empathy toward comrades on the street might be no more than an excuse for himself to do nothing meaningful, and he dreams of escaping underground from the street that symbolizes the controlled, inanimate society. When recruited to volunteer for the alligator patrol, Profane is asked if he has ever used a shotgun. Even though he had never tried to use such an inanimate machine, he says yes. This is precisely because the system which frightens him could be subverted, he thinks, under the street: “But a shotgun under the street, under the Street, might be all right. He could kill himself but maybe it would be all right. He could try.”17 Under the street, his obsession could be turned upside down. Instead of destroying inanimate machines, including his body, in the dream—“if he kept going down that street, not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge brain and clock of a heart must be left behind to litter the pavement”18—he tries shooting the alligators without mercy but cannot forget that the creatures have their own hearts: “The alligator’s heart would tick on, his own would burst, mainspring and escapement rust in this shindeep sewage, in this unholy light.”19 Perhaps such a mentality is nothing but a nostalgic regression to colonialist dreams. As the reality bites,

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the narrow sewer tortures his body and disenchants his mindset: “[Profane and his company] were in a section of 48-inch pipe, his back was killing him.”20 Profane’s pseudo-colonialist dream, however, instantly collapses with the stream of sewage, which flows downward, obeying nothing but physical law. It is an ironic but convincing scene that occurs there, as Profane experiences a feeling of tranquility, letting his wounded body float upon the stream of sewage “with pornographic pictures, coffee grounds, contraceptives used and unused, shit, up through the flushing tank to the East River and across on the tide to the stone forests of Queens.”21 Whereas the clean abstractness of the street frightens him while also urging him to be self-destructive, the dirty, chaotic, but ever-changing stream of sewage paradoxically calms this pessimistic vision.22 Historically speaking, as Benjamin Miller notes, some elite New Yorkers have tried to make the debasement of the environment, namely, “pollution,” useful in building political movements since the mid-nineteenth century. For Saul Alinsky, who has a strong presence as a leading figure of the national community organizing network IAF, in the twentieth century, the reformation of the city’s sanitary systems, including roads as well as sewers, could function as “a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.”23 In V., the cause of the Alligator Patrol is also a political one: “The department had developed a passion for honesty following the Great Sewer Scandal of 1955. They wanted dead alligators: rats, too, if any happened to get caught in the blast.”24 Zeitsuss, then, who is the leader of the patrol but “a bum too,”25 never loses his pride in his team, dreaming that “someday he would be Walter Reuther.”26 Serving as president of the United Automobile Workers and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Reuther adopted a new type of leadership. Specifically, according to Ronald Edsforth, Reuther received overwhelming support from ordinary workers because he fused “Cold War anti-communism with post-New Deal labor liberalism and the popular culture of mass-consumer affluence.”27 As the Reuther of the Alligator Patrol, Zeitsuss tries to make his team of “bum[s]” more formal by giving certain official items, such as armbands and walkie-talkies, to his members, although these members might think of this as an example of “his delusions of high purpose.”28 The more pride Zeitsuss feels, however, the more the members of the Alligator Patrol feel sympathy for him, using the words “the poor innocent”29 just as they do for the creatures in the sewer—the members often release the rats, feeling sorry for them. Identifying himself with the poor reptiles, who also lost their home and found a place to live under the streets, Profane asks himself why he has to kill them. One possible answer for him is, weirdly, the idea of the reincarnation of consumerism. That is, the narrator says that the alligators might need Profane, who also needs them as targets for his job, because of the

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refusal in “some prehistoric circuit”30 of their brain to continue to live as consumer objects. Even as babies, the alligators knew that their parents and kin were made into wallets and pocketbooks; now, they have ended up living in the sewer, directly connected to the toilets through which they could escape their fates as children’s playthings, that is, as consumer objects. For them, therefore, death by Profane’s shotgun could be the ultimate escape from the anthropocentric world. Such a twisted logic of “slaughtering to save” can be traced back to the ideas of Father Fairing, who also chose to live in the sewer almost two decades before Profane’s hunt, despairing over the Great Depression. Obsessed with visions of human extinction, the priest succeeded in converting all the rats in his parish, which ran “through the sewers between Lexington and the East River and between Eighty-sixth and Seventy-ninth Streets.”31 Akin to a mother and her boy in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) who believe that dolphins will “succeed man,”32 Fairing hopes to entrust the future of the earth to the rats. Thus, it can be said that his acts of proselytizing are for the salvation of the rats, as well as the earth, but because of the Great Depression, it is also necessary for him to eat his converts as a source of protein, without which he could not survive to preach to the rest of the rats: “He considered it small enough sacrifice on their part to provide three of their own per day for physical sustenance, in return for the spiritual nourishment he was giving them.”33 Thus, Profane wonders if the priest could convince the rats to be lambs of God or not and thinks, “How would he feel about me or the Alligator Patrol?”34 Though he himself tries to justify his hunting of alligators by imagining that the reptiles desire death to escape their fate as consumer objects, Profane cannot understand how the priest can justify killing three rats a day for food.35 For both Profane and Fairing, the acts of killing and salvation under the street are not contradictory because the dead are regarded not as victims but as sacrifices. In the case of the Alligator Patrol, killing the alligators as vermin would be slaughter, but for Profane, shooting them with sympathy could amount to rescuing them from consumerism. Thus, Profane utters the words “I’m sorry” repeatedly while aiming his shotgun at the alligators.36 As if the words were blessings, Profane pulls the trigger to kill these animate things under the street, whose blood streaks over the flowing sewage. The essential difference between Fairing’s act and Profane’s is, however, their attitude as “consumers.” Whereas Fairing’s suffering comes from his guilty conscience due to his acts as a consumer in the food chain of living things in the sewers, Profane’s consumer heart aches no less for the alligators as commodities that are going to be slaughtered and disposed of. “A few pellets from the first shotgun blast”37 by Profane accidentally hit another protagonist named Herbert Stencil, who happens to be walking from the other side of the sewers. This contingent but miraculously opportune timing of their encounter helps Profane escape the suffering of

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his guilty conscience and pass on, metafictionally, his burden as a protagonist of the story to Stencil. In fact, by using a similar structure to that of his well-received short story “Entropy,” which binds two episodes on different floors of the same apartment, V. is composed of two main plots, each of which has a patterned, caricatured protagonist, Profane and Stencil, respectively, and expands space and time both vertically (from the top of the Empire State Building to the bottom of the sewage system; from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1950s) and horizontally (from Manhattan Island to the island of Malta; from the present lifeworld of the young to that of the middle-aged). It might be such a schizophrenic structure that gives us the dream-like reading experience of “Entropy” and V. Indeed, as we will argue, Profane and Stencil partially share their fate accidentally, but basically, they are completely unrelated in terms of nationality, age, occupation, and life purpose. At over fifty years old, Stencil has spent his life in search of the mysterious V. This quest is driven by a kind of paranoia inherited from his father because it begins with Stencil discovering the letter “V.” written in his father’s journal. Standing on the meta-level of the text by referring to himself in the third person, helping “‘Stencil’ appear as only one among a repertoire of identities,”38 this Englishman seems to remain in the position of the ultimate consumer/ reader of the episodes concerning V.39 Thus, for instance, getting shot in his left buttock under the street, he makes a phone call to Rachel and speaks in the third person: “Stencil’s just been shot at.”40 After the conversation, he tells himself, in the second person, “Stencil, you’re a cool one.”41 This self-hailing shows his compassion toward “himself” as “one among a repertoire of identities.”42 In each case, hailing in the second person shows some intimacy, even though such humane relationships are one-sided: Just as Profane has to shoot the alligator, even with his stock phrase, “I’m sorry,” Stencil cannot accept his own flesh—hearing Rachel utter the consolatory words, “I’ll bet your ass is sore,” he thinks grimly that she might regard him as an “alter kocker.”43 As Donna Haraway posits, the conception of “hailing” in Louis Althusser’s theory could be applied to the relationships between human and non-human animals: “We ‘hail’ them [animals] into our constructs of nature and culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction.”44 Uttering “sorry,” which is etymologically connected to “sore,” Profane hails the alligator into “our construct of nature and culture” to kill it again. Ironically, while Haraway optimistically claims that human and non-human animals “also live with each other in the flesh in ways not exhausted by our ideologies,”45 Pynchon pessimistically tries to depict an integration of human and non-human animals by metaphorizing the blood of the dead flesh of the alligator. Overlapping Profane with Father Fairing, he keeps saying that he is sorry while shooting the alligator with his shotgun.

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After jerking and backflipping, the alligator begins to bleed. What should not be overlooked here is that the blood seeping out from the body of the reptile is described as “amoebalike,” forming “shifting patterns” on the water.46 In fact, the adjective “amoebalike,” which here describes the flow of the “blood” of the alligator, is also used to explain the form of Profane’s body. The narrator says, “If anybody had been around to remember him, they would have noticed right off that Profane hadn’t changed. Still a great amoebalike boy.”47 The hidden irony is, however, that “amoeba” originally derives from the Greek word for “change.” In Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s novel, Cat’s Cradle, the metaphor of “amoeba” is used to explain the state without “national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries”48; more than ten years later, Tom Robbins used the metaphor of an amoeba for a hitchhiker in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976):49 The first amoeba, like the last and the one after that, is here, there and everywhere, for its vehicle, its medium, its essence is water. Water—the ace of elements. [. . .] Always in motion, ever-flowing (whether at steam rate or glacier speed), rhythmic, dynamic, ubiquitous, changing and working its changes, a mathematics turned wrong side out, a philosophy in reverse, the ongoing odyssey of water is virtually irresistible.50

The amoeba is praised by Robbins as a symbol of freedom—“wherever water goes, amoebae go along for the ride”51—because it does not have any “inanimate” parts, specifically, things such as bones, teeth, or ornaments. There is a significant difference from Pynchon’s use of the motif, in that what Profane, as an “amoebalike boy,” is obsessed with is the nightmarish image of “his own disassembly plausible as that of any machine,”52 namely, a death that leaves behind only bones, teeth, and ornaments. Moreover, Pynchon superimposes the images of his scattered body parts—“not only his ass but also his arms, legs, sponge brain and clock of a heart”53—on the body of Lady V., whose track Stencil follows through the entire story of V. Stencil knows of her disassembly by reading “a small packet of typewritten pages”54 titled Confessions of Faust Maijstral, a collection of notes written by Paola’s father. It was in Malta during the war that Lady V. was bombed, caught under a beam, and finally disassembled.55 There are no traces of life in her body, which is left with some holes in her eye and false teeth, except for the blood coming out of her navel, from which a sapphire was removed. The blood, just like the alligator’s amoebalike blood, represents a form of anti-materialism inside V.’s inanimate body. Returning to Tom Robbins’ novel, Pynchon praises Robbins’ talent as a storyteller, writing, “[I] hope the book sells and sells and winds up changing the brain scape of America, which sure could use it.”56 Even in this blurb,

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Pynchon regards “changing” as a good state, and this attitude as a creator is shared with his contemporaries such as Bob Dylan, whose song “The Times They Are A-Changin’” was released the year after the publication of V.57 While Dylan sings that a human being will be “drenched” and sink unless they start swimming, the ideal of the amoeba in V. denies such a struggle amid the flow of the times: thanks to homeostasis, the amoeba as an organism maintains the same state despite any environmental changes that may occur. Norbert Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), “The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis.”58 As if embodying the metaphor of Wiener’s “stream,” Pynchon lets Profane float on the stream of the sewers along with pornography, garbage, contraceptives, and “shit.” The sewage system that stretches out under the street will never be home even for the “amoebalike boy,” who desires to escape the consumerism and conformism that prevails in the mid-1950s American street. What Profane can do amid this flow may be to remain as/in one of the “whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water,”59 in the words of Wiener, who also claims, “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”60 Letting the different patterns of Profane’s life and the alligator’s death coexist in the same text, the young Pynchon gives us the lesson of his first postmodern animal fable. The use of liquid metaphors such as “amoeba” and “blood” in V. shows how closely Pynchon’s intention of writing the novel is linked to the notion of “seeping ecology” which Laura Ogden proposes by sampling Pynchon’s depiction of surf-fog in Inherent Vice (2009): “Seeping names an ecological truth that all borders must be crossed and all boundaries spanned.”61 Of course, Ogden’s idea might not only be embodied ecocritically in both Inherent Vice and V. but it is also parodied through ridiculous representations of other aquatic animals, such as “a quadruply-amputated octopus,” in V.62 It might seem to be a detour, but we should understand how clearly opposite for Profane such an image of an octopus is to that of an ideal cowboy who is a friend of justice but not of environmental justice. While working as a member of the Alligator Patrol, Profane often passes the time by watching television. He especially enjoys watching reruns of Western movies. Among the cowboys on TV, his favorite is Randolph Scott because Scott is the “Master of the inanimate,”63 who can serve as an inverse or opposite self-image for Profane. Whereas Profane cannot help but utter the wrong thing even under the street, where his pseudo-narrative of the colonialist dream is developed, the movie star on the other side of the television has a natural gift for saying the right words at the right time. There are obvious differences between the two men, one a consumer of the Western and the other a representative of the Western as a consumable. Moreover, their fields and

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modes of living are also significantly different from each other: the cowboy star performs on the trail, and Profane is afraid of the street. The rerun that Profane watches on TV is called Abilene Town (1946): “Randolph Scott is this U.S. marshal and that sheriff, there he goes now, is getting paid off by the gang and all he does all day long is play fan-tan with a widow who lives up the hill.”64 While the sly old sheriff who loves the card game “fan-tan” is performed by Edgar Buchanan, the protagonist of the film is the good marshal played by Randolph Scott, who, as Robert Knott points out, is clearly modeled after Dwight D. Eisenhower. In fact, the re-release movie poster of Abilene Town says, “Birthplace of America’s Gun-Slinging Greatest . . . from Eisenhower on down!”65 Knott notes that the change in the film’s original title from Trail Town to Abilene Town was due to demands by both the town of Abilene and United Artists, which aimed to capitalize on the fact that Abilene was Eisenhower’s birthplace. Based on Ernest Haycox’s novel Trail Town (1941), Abilene Town depicts conflicts between cowboys, homesteaders, and townspeople. Abilene is a spot for cowboys to have fun as they travel the dusty roads from Texas to Kansas. Once they earn their meager wages, they go to saloons and become desperately drunk. Meanwhile, newcomers, known as homesteaders, are trying to settle down and live peacefully in the town. Midway through the film, the cowboys set fire to the houses of the homesteaders. Henry Dreiser, an angry young homesteader played by Lloyd Bridges, claims that the cowboys are preventing them from settling because “cattlemen hate farmers. They hate it because we make forty-eight acres support a dozen people instead of a cow!” The opening scene of Abilene Town shows a herd of cattle being urged by a cowboy along a dusty trail, but by the end of the story, the cowboy has been driven out of town by the good marshal, who successfully acts as a go-between for the homesteaders and the townspeople. “The world is changing,” are the words of a successful businessman in the town, who supports the homesteaders and the marshal against the cowboys, while profiting from new business relationships with the homesteaders. Moreover, Abilene Town also involved some complex political issues before and after the Eisenhower administration. Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten during McCarthyism, was an associate producer of the film and might have approved the narrative structure of the screenplay, which deals with left-wing populism and the Eisenhower era’s conformism. As Bernard F. Dick notes, “Superficially, Abilene Town is an oater [Western] about the familiar clash between cattlemen and homesteaders. The homesteaders, however, behave like populists, arguing that ‘the land’s free,’ forming a protective association, and fencing in their property; to ensure justice, they march down the street on election day singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”66 Despite embodying the legend of the cowboy, Eisenhower/Scott also plays a

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key role in expelling the cowboys in Abilene Town.67 For Profane, Scott as a mixture of 1950s political subjects is symbolized by his inanimate paraphernalia, such as “a six-gun, horse’s reins, lariat.”68 In particular, what the lariat symbolizes, not only for Profane but also for Eisenhower himself, is notable. As shown in a photo of his inaugural parade appearing in Life in 1953, the President smiles while Montie Montana ropes his shoulders with his lariat.69 The lariat here is nothing but the link between reality and the image inside the film or television show. However, the symbolism of the “inanimate line”70 for Profane sarcastically plays a paradoxical role in an action scene where Profane and Stencil are burglarizing a dentist’s office, on the ninth floor of the building. While asking Profane to break through a window, Stencil comes up with the idea to loop a length of line “round Profane’s middle.”71 Just as the lariat ties Eisenhower to the cowboy, this rope also bonds two men together, factually and metaphorically. Eventually, Profane manages to break the window of the dentist’s office and steal Lady V.’s fake tooth for Stencil, and we should not overlook here that the body of Profane tied with the inanimate rope/lariat in the air is described as “a quadruply-amputated octopus,” apparently a variant of Pynchon’s privileged metaphor for this character, “amoebalike.” Thus, Profane’s lonely struggle, metaphorized through the figures of the amoeba and the octopus, may reveal the entropic process in which American heroes, including conformists, consumerists, and populists, are melting and intentionally turning into mere Luddites.72 As mentioned in his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon regards his generation as “post-Beats” who have grown up as “consumers” of the representations of cowboys and misfits that offered an imaginary identity for the Beat generation.73 Thus, it is suggestive that Sal Paradise, the narrator of On the Road, enjoys a sense of unity with the “Singing Cowboy”74 Eddie Dean. In the later part of On the Road, Paradise and Dean Moriarty watch films: a Western starring Eddie Dean and a war spy movie starring George Raft. Kerouac writes: “We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came.”75 The figurative similarity between “strange Gray” and “weird dark” are based on Sal Paradise’s innocent view of life, namely, the West as a metaphor for his future, and the East as a metaphor for his past. As Manuel Luis Martinez describes in Countering the Counterculture (2003), “the Beat[s] chose to reconstruct the individual in terms of a nineteenth-century ideology of the self that celebrated ‘self-reliance’ as a movement and expansion, personified by archetypal icons of individualism: the pioneer, trailblazer, cowboy.”76 Metaphorizing the cowboy to represent individualism in the 1950s, Kerouac lets Paradise overlap his unknown future with that of the West. The West

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itself, however, does not necessarily succeed in developing a new individualism for the Beat generation but eventually results in a parody of a parody or a meta-stereotypical individualism through the image of a typical B-Western movie cowboy.77 Thus, such a representation of the West is nothing but a façade for Profane, like his own “big cowboy hat.”78 Just as the golden age of the West started simultaneously with the beginning of the Cold War in 1948, it can be said that the imaginary identity of a generation might be found anachronistically in the cultural image of a former generation. Just as Kerouac and his protagonist Paradise drove around the American continent during the golden age of the Western, Pynchon’s Profane yo-yoed around the East Coast and drifted to Malta during the age in which these Western films were being rerun on TV. Indeed, Profane is “getting everything secondhand”79 as a consumer of the Western. Acknowledging himself as no more than an “onlooker”80 of the Beat generation and Eisenhower administration, Pynchon presents his first novel, V., as offering a unique understanding of the 1950s through metaphorizations of non-human animals such as alligators, rats, amoebae, and octopuses. This attitude is also apparent in his choice of the character’s name, Profane, which indicates a secular alternate of Paradise.81 Therefore, whereas the Beat generation was a group of non-conformists that paradoxically enjoyed significant benefits from the consumerist culture of those days, Profane is portrayed as an amoebalike consumer who merely keeps “yo-yoing”82 between the outside and inside of super-conformism: between the sewer and the virtual reality of the television. NOTES 1. “A Myth of Alligators,” unsigned review of V., by Thomas Pynchon. Time, March 15, 1963. http:​//​content​.time​.com​/time​/subscriber​/article​/0​,33009​,870237​,00​ .html. 2. “A Myth of Alligators.” 3. “A Myth of Alligators.” 4. Pynchon, V., 113. 5. Pynchon, V., 35. 6. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft report that Pynchon and his editor for V. at Lippincott had already done “most of the important editorial work on the novel” by the time the editor left Lippincott for Viking around September 1962. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft, “Fast Learner: The Typescript of Pynchon’s V. at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49, no. 1 (2007): 3. Herman and Krafft also report that in the typescript of V., the narrator refers to a “family situation comedy on television,” in which a suburban nuclear family lives their life with “a hapless family dog.” This episode was cut before publication, even though

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Pynchon had at first hesitated to do so, until he eventually decided to delete it himself. Luc Herman and John M. Krafft, “Pynchon and Gender: A View from the Typescript of V.,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018), 181. 7. Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner: Early Stories (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984; New York: Penguin Press, 2012), Kindle. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. 8. Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner. 9. Robert Holton, “‘Closed Circuit’: The White Male Predicament in Pynchon’s Early Stories,” in Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins, ed. Niran Abbas (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 38. 10. Holton, “‘Closed Circuit,’” 49. 11. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 678. Charles Clerc transcribes the journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon from the original text. On September 29, 1767, the setting of Chapter 70 of Mason & Dixon, the journal entry reads as follows: “Twenty-six of our Men left us; they would not pass the River for fear of the Shawanes and Delaware Indians. But we prevailed upon 15 ax men to proceed with us, and with them we continued the Line Westward in a direction found as on July 10th and the 26th of August thus.” Charles Clerc, Mason & Dixon & Pynchon (Lanham: University Press of America, 2000), 215. 12. Lee Rozelle, Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecotourism and the Liminal from Invisible Man to The Walking Dead (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 43. 13. Pynchon, V., 2. 14. Pynchon, V., 31. 15. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1957; New York: Penguin Books, 1976), chap. 1, Kindle. 16. Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner. 17. Pynchon, V., 38. 18. Pynchon, V., 35. Regarding the episode of a boy unscrewing his navel and buttocks, which is related to Profane’s nightmare, John Dugdale suggests that it might have been conceived from a line in Moby-Dick: “[U]nscrew your navel, and what’s the consequence?” John Dugdale, Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 84. Lila V. Graves posits that Profane’s vision of the destruction of his existence is related to his detachment to the women to whom he is sexually drawn. Lila V. Graves, “Love and the Western World of Pynchon’s ‘V.,’” South Atlantic Review 47, no. 1 (1982): 68. On the other hand, Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow is doomed to be scattered, although he does not really care, while having sexual relationships with the females he desires. 19. Pynchon, V., 126. 20. Pynchon, V., 113. 21. Pynchon, V., 125. 22. Judith Chambers highlights that Pynchon’s narrative in V. tends to maintain “the tension between then and now, past and present, earthly and transcendental” in order

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to reject “a phony nostalgia,” which is an expression uttered by the dentist Dudley Eigenvalue. Judith Chambers, Thomas Pynchon (New York: Twayne, 1992), 67. 23. Benjamin Miller, Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York—The Last Two Hundred Years (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000), 221. 24. Pynchon, V., 115. 25. Pynchon, V., 117. 26. Pynchon, V., 114. 27. Ronald Edsforth, “Affluence, Anti-Communism, and the Transformation of Industrial Unionism among Automobile Workers, 1933–1973,” in Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America, ed. Ronald Edsforth and Larry Bennett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 123. 28. Pynchon, V., 117. 29. Pynchon, V., 118. 30. Pynchon, V., 151. 31. Pynchon, V., 120. 32. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966; New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 118, Kindle. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. 33. Pynchon, V., 120. 34. Pynchon, V., 124. Profane asks himself, “Did the priest teach them ‘rat of God’? How did he justify killing them off three a day?” 35. For a further discussion of the Christian allusions in the episode of Father Fairing and the rats, see Victoria H. Price, Christian Allusions in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 81–86. 36. Kodai Abe points out that the narrator directly references this “stock line” in the novel twice, while claiming that the line he utters under the street is the only time he reveals a genuine outburst of “sorrow,” which is not compassion but a “care” for the other. Kodai Abe, “Sloths and Care in Thomas Pynchon’s V.,” The American Review (Japanese) 55 (2019): 12–13. 37. Pynchon, V. 135. 38. Pynchon, V., 58. 39. It seems too apparent to point out that Pynchon’s narrative style for V. is also the third-person to allow for a “Stencilized chapter” to be read in a seamless manner. However, this rule accentuates the differences in Fausto’s confessions, which are narrated in first-person and in which, as Stefan Mattessich describes, Fausto himself “explicitly refers to himself in the third person,” just like Stencil does. Stefan Mattessich, “Imperium, Misogyny, and Postmodern Parody in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘V.,’” ELH 65, no. 2 (1998): 506. 40. Pynchon, V., 135. 41. Pynchon, V., 136. 42. Pynchon, V., 58. 43. Pynchon, V., 137. “Alter kocker,” a Yiddish phrase for “old shitter,” means “a mean and nasty old man.” Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor, eds., The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2015), 29.

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44. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University Press of Minnesota, 2008), chap. 11. Kindle. 45. Haraway, When Species Meet, chap. 11. 46. Pynchon, V., 126. 47. Pynchon, V., 31. 48. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 2, Kindle. 49. Comparing Even Cowgirls with Gravity’s Rainbow, David Seed highlights that Robbins’ representation of “the great whooping cranes” has the same function as Pynchon’s representation of the dodoes. Seed also notes that the protagonist of Even Cowgirls shares the era of her upbringing, the Eisenhower years, with both Robbins and Pynchon. Seed, The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, 221–24. 50. Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; New York: Bantam Books, 2003), 1–2. Citations refer to the 2003 edition. 51. Robbins, Even Cowgirls, 2. 52. Pynchon, V., 35. 53. Pynchon, V., 35. 54. Pynchon, V., 323. 55. Molly Hite suggests that in Faust Maijstral’s Confessions, Paola could be interpreted as one of the avatars of Lady V. In the main sections of the novel, she is treated as an existence “only in the context of men: Profane, the Whole Sick Crew, Sphere, Pig Bodine, Rooney Winsome, and [. . .] Pappy Hod, to whom [. . .] she returns in the end.” Molly Hite, “When Pynchon Was a Boy’s Club: V. and Midcentury Mystifications of Gender,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos (Athens: The University of George Press, 2018), 10–11. 56. Thomas Pynchon, “‘Thanx Pardners’: A Letter from the Author of Gravity’s Rainbow,” blurb to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins (New York: Bantam, 1977). In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the protagonist Sissy, who is Kerouac’s ex-lover, has huge thumbs, which make her a great hitchhiker who can easily stop cars and allow her own free movement. When Sissy decides to amputate that finger, therefore, the narrator directly compares it to a “the rhino, the snow leopard, the panda, the wolf and, yes, the whooping crane” to emphasize their rarity. Robbins, Even Cowgirls, 295. 57. Erik Dussere compares Pynchon’s depictions of the counterculture in The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland with Bob Dylan’s conception of the 1960s America, which appears in “Ballard of a Thin Man” and “Desolation Row,” both of which were released in 1965, a year before the publication of The Crying of Lot 49. Dussere states “Pynchon may begin with an evocation of a Dylanesque old, weird America, but he doesn’t quite end there.” Erik Dussere, “Flirters, Deserters, Wimps, and Pimps: Thomas Pynchon’s Two Americas,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 3 (2010): 592. 58. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950; New York: De Capo Press, 1988), chap. 5, Kindle. 59. Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings, chap. 5. 60. Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings, chap. 5.

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61. Steve Mentz, “Seep,” in Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), chap. 18, Kindle. 62. Pynchon, V., 420. 63. Pynchon, V., 306. 64. Pynchon, V., 141. 65. CineMaterial, https:​//​www​.cinematerial​.com​/movies​/abilene​-town​-i38284​/p​/ xu3oulhx. 66. Bernard F. Dick, Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of The Hollywood Ten (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 76. 67. David Hamilton Murdoch points out that Eisenhower is an outstanding example of the transformation of the myth of the West into history. By quoting this President’s famous line, “If you don’t know anything about him [Bill Hickok], read your Westerns more,” Murdoch concludes that Presidents of the United States have endorsed “as rules of public life the code of the West invented by the novelist.” David Hamilton Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001), 106. 68. Pynchon, V., 306. 69. Editorial, “Mightiest Pageant Salutes New Chief,” Life, February 2, 1953, 20. 70. Pynchon, V., 420. 71. Pynchon, V., 420. 72. Pynchon calls Eisenhower an “unintentional Luddite” because of his Farewell address on January 17, 1962: “As well-known President and unintentional Luddite, D. D. Eisenhower prophesied [sic] when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals, and corporate CEO’s [sic], up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way.” Pynchon, “Luddite.” 73. Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner. 74. Kerouac, On the Road, chap. 11. 75. Kerouac, On the Road, chap. 11. 76. Manuel Luis Martinez, Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivero (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 74. 77. Since the Westerns were an important consumer culture for the Beat generation, Sal Paradise also visits a ghost town in On the Road. Historically speaking, it is during the 1940s that Knott’s Berry Place, later renamed Knott’s Berry Farm, opened in California as one of the first examples of turning images from Westerns into theme parks. According to Hsuan L. Hsu, Walter Knott’s theme park enables us to see the true end of the frontier in representational culture. Hsuan L. Hsu, “Authentic Re-creations: Ideology, Practice, and Regional History along Buena Park’s Entertainment Corridor,” in True West: Authenticity and the American West, ed. William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 308–9. 78. Pynchon, V., 1. 79. Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner. 80. Pynchon, Introduction to Slow Learner.

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81. Elaine B. Safer notes that “Benny,” Profane’s first name, could be related to a slang word for “Benzedrine,” which is an “upper,” whereas his family name implies “the downward progression toward the profane, in contrast to the sacred.” Elaine B. Safer, The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 82. Pynchon, V., 14.

Chapter 2

The Dolphin Jumped over the Moon The Crying of Lot 49

Beginning with a long, artificial-sounding description of “one summer,”1 The Crying of Lot 49, a key book in the postmodern canon, narrates the curious story of Oedipa Maas, who is thrown into a hidden alternative America after being appointed executrix of the will of her former lover, Pierce Inverarity. Owning a large block of shares in Yoyodyne, which had already appeared in V., Inverarity, who still holds sway in a fictional city called San Narciso after his death, represents 1960s capitalism and consumerism. Benny Profane in the former novel wanders under the street; similarly, Oedipa is also forced to quest for something under the landscape of San Narciso. As Pierre-Yves Petillon humorously suggests, if Judy Garland’s Dorothy read The Crying of Lot 49, she would say that they were not in Kansas anymore but in “Derrida country.”2 Indeed, the relationship between Oedipa and Inverarity looks like that of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, but Oedipa will never be able to know whether Inverarity was a wizard or not. The text of The Crying of Lot 49 has been read as a postmodern fable, which shares its way of (dis)connecting the world and individuals with deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida. The fact that the tentative title of the excerption in the December 1965 issue of Esquire was “The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity” could be testimony to young Pynchon’s faith as a postmodernist who believes in equality among the world, the flesh, and the text (for example, a written testament). Two years after the release of The Crying of Lot 49,3 Derrida’s Of Grammatology was published, and its English translation by Gayatri Spivak followed in 1976. As rendered by Spivak, Derrida writes, “[I]n what one calls the real life of these existences ‘of flesh and bone,’ [. . .] there has never been anything but writing.”4 What is interesting to compare with Pynchon’s text 31

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here is that the pairing of “flesh and bone,” as a conventional idiom used to represent reality, becomes a significant metaphor for the pairing of reader and text in The Crying of Lot 49.5 Among Inverarity’s many properties, Lake Inverarity is a symbolic site, whose bottom is decorated with the bones of GIs killed in Italy in 1943. During her research on the lake, Oedipa learns two surprising facts. First, the rest of the bones were sold as bone charcoal for the development of the cigarette filter. Second, The Courier’s Tragedy, which is playing in a small arena theater in San Narciso, deals with a similar story set in seventeenth-century Italy: “[b]ones of lost battalion in lake, fished up, turned into charcoal.”6 While the former bone charcoal is used for the interest of the capitalists, however, the latter is made into ink to write the truth. In Writing for an Endangered World (2001), Lawrence Buell evaluates Pynchon’s W.A.S.T.E. (or “WASTE”) in The Crying of Lot 49 as an “instructive collateral example” of the contemporary “discourse of toxicity” that might begin with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.7 Buell claims that the pattern of thought and the rhetoric used in discourses such as that of “A Fable for Tomorrow” are not original to Carson but “revive a long-standing mythography of betrayed Edens, the American dispensation of which has been much discussed by scholars, most influentially by Leo Marx in his The Machine in the Garden.”8 What is changed in Silent Spring is that Carson assumes the potential equality between author and audience and that in “contemporary toxic discourse, furthermore, victims are permitted to reverse roles and claim authority.”9 The hierarchy among the world, the flesh, and the text in toxic discourse seems so obvious that we are likely to regard such texts merely as warnings or something to enlighten readers and inspire them to try to change the world. If the equality of the relationship between the author and the audience is much more subversive than Buell supposes, that is to say, if readers are easily allowed to substitute themselves for “I” in the toxic discourse as soon as they recognize themselves as “victims,” or even potential ones, it could bring the flesh of the subject embedded in the text—“I,” slightly different from the real flesh of Carson—into another crisis. Similarly, if we interpret Oedipa, who is a reader of the text written by W.A.S.T.E. with human-bone charcoal, as a sample of the metaphorization of the readers of the toxic discourse, then the crisis of her fictitious flesh could show us the possibilities beyond the border of Derrida country. At the core of Pynchon’s experimental text is an ambivalent attitude toward the innocence of American Nature. Comparing Thoreau’s fathoming of the pond in Walden (1854) with Pynchon’s surveying of the North American continent in his later novel, Mason & Dixon, Tony Tanner observes, “Walden Pond—believed to be bottomless; actually fathomed. America—a symbol for boundlessness; historically boundaried.”10 Referring to Lance Newman, Buell points out that Walden is a canonical text of a traditional nature and writing

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that “is more invested in the interpenetration of social and natural frames of reference than early ecocriticism tended to indicate.”11 In both Thoreau’s and Pynchon’s texts, America is a sort of test ground, just like the text itself: People keep on surveying it, vertically and horizontally, not only to conquer its land but even just to preserve its mysterious nature.12 In Walden, such acts are metaphorized in order to survey the author’s own imagination; after surveying the pond, Thoreau sarcastically writes: Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its breadth.13

It cannot be overemphasized that, here, Thoreau frankly creates a narrative to combine both acts—those of surveying vertically and horizontally—by metaphorizing the highway and the people working on it. As W. Barksdale Maynard notes, it was in the middle of the 1930s that “the ‘new Concord turnpike’ or bypass plowed through the heart of Walden Woods,”14 and the boom of Walden as a summer resort peaked in 1952: At Walden Pond itself, Sandy or Main Beach saw thirty-five thousand swimmers on hot weekends in 1952. To serve these crowds, the commissioners had expanded the reservation staff to sixty-seven, a rich source of patronage. But the boom ended with the rainy years 1953–55, when Concord was soaked with up to fifty-three inches of precipitation annually, ten more than the twentieth-century average.15

Thereafter, about a decade after the peak of the Walden boom, Pynchon let one of his characters in V., which is set in the mid-1950s, hysterically mention the name of the pond. In V., it is said that Walden Pond is already nothing but a public beach, with many “slobs”16 who come from Boston because Revere Beach is already too full of other slobs. What is worse, the slobs drink beer without the guards seeing and let their kids urinate in the pond. Indeed, Walden Pond in V. is a good example of Pynchon’s “Baedeker Land,” which is, as William M. Plater explains, “another name for landscape, reality made perceptible by the artful representation of knowledge.”17 Baedeker is a German publisher, established in the nineteenth century, whose guidebooks for travelers have been read worldwide. In the introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon confesses that the description of Egypt in his short story, “Under the Rose,” later integrated as a chapter in V., was based on Baedeker’s 1899

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guide to Egypt. Just like Derrida country, Baedeker Land is also a conceptual space for travelers and non-traveling readers like the undergraduate student Pynchon, where, in the words of Buell, “classical realism’s aspiration to make the text a replica of the world”18 would be shattered. For Oedipa, driving a rented Impala, a replica of the wild animal, LA is a contemporary American version of Baedeker Land, which wards off pain through hypothetical opioid injections of people or materials brought through the branch roads from suburban areas such as “San Narciso.”19 The narrator describes the road as the “hypodermic needle,” while comparing the freeway to the vein and likening L.A. to the “mainliner.”20 From Walden to V. and The Crying of Lot 49, we can see how the highways and branch roads have expanded horizontally, inscribing (physical and social) lines on the landscape of America, whereas human imagination dives and soars vertically. When Oedipa and Metzger, Inverarity’s lawyer and the co-executor of his will, learn of the human bones at the bottom of Lake Inverarity, what comes to the lawyer’s mind is that the bones may be dug from old cemeteries that could have been ripped up during the construction of the highway. This is not true, as they will soon also learn, since the bones came from Italy, even though it will also be revealed that they are the bones of American troops at the bottom of Lago di Pietà in Italy. However, thanks to Metzger’s simplistic explanation, which is derived from the fact that some cemeteries were indeed destroyed to build the East San Narciso Freeway by construction firms whose stock was held by Inverarity, it becomes easier for Oedipa to understand the cruelty of developers and capitalists. From their first encounter until the time they hear about the bones from Manny Di Presso, Metzger’s “actor/lawyer friend”21 who works for Tony Jaguar and is another central figure in the trading of the bones, Oedipa’s position is like that of Metzger’s audience, and Metzger’s is that of a representative of the narrator of the toxic discourse, though a dishonest inside informant. Metzger is pretending to not care about what Inverarity does to the nature and history of America while knowing almost everything about Inverarity’s cruel business, except for the information that some of the bones from the Italian lake were also sold to Inverarity as materials for the research and development of filter tips. A little earlier—just before his friend gives him deeper information about Inverarity’s business than he can fathom—Metzger already finds traces of W.A.S.T.E. while leading Oedipa into San Narciso. In fact, the narrator of the novel focuses on Oedipa so closely that Metzger’s encounter with the Tristero (or “Trystero”) system and its W.A.S.T.E. symbol may be under-considered. Metzger even feels sympathy toward them when he finds out that they are using Yoyodyne’s inter-office delivery system privately: “‘Of course,’ said Metzger. ‘Delivering the mail is a government monopoly. You would be opposed to that.’”22 Nevertheless, as we hear repeatedly, when

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he goes to Lake Inverarity with Oedipa, Metzger faces the fact that there is new information, even though he does not yet know what it is. The narrator notes, “The beginning of that performance [of the Tristero] was clear enough,”23 which occurs when they visit Fangoso Lagoons, a new housing development by Inverarity, amid which Lake Inverarity is situated. This area symbolizes Inverarity Land as a “toxic Inferno.” If we apply Buell’s words, even in this postmodern toxic discourse, relations between the author and the audience could be equal, while they are not “actual denizens” but visitors of this toxic Inferno. When they find the W.A.S.T.E., which could be generated by Inverarity’s cruelty, the relation between Metzger and Oedipa becomes very collegial. Furthermore, once Oedipa becomes the victim of the Tristero, their roles are reversed: “Metzger, don’t harass me. Be on my side.”24 After watching The Courier’s Tragedy, Oedipa desires to know about the connection between Inverarity Land and the Tristero much more profoundly than Metzger, not only as a tourist in Inverarity Land but also as a victim of this toxic land. Originally, the bones at the bottom of Lake Inverarity were also planned to be used to shock and titillate American tourists in Italy, who “would pay good dollars for almost anything.”25 The idea to reuse the relics of American soldiers as souvenirs for tourists from the United States is eventually developed into the plan to decorate the bottom of the lake in America for the “Scuba nuts,” and then into producing the filters of cigarettes that Oedipa, Metzger, and Di Presso—forward-thinkingly in the 1960s—all regarded as a toxin causing “cancer.”26 Therefore, the conception of the toxic in The Crying of Lot 49 is represented in two ways: shallowly, by the spread of cigarettes as a symbol of cancer and the expansion of the highway system; and deeply, by the spread of the “W.A.S.T.E. symbol” and the expansion of the Tristero system. Just like Baedeker Land, Inverarity Land is a hypothetical place based on tourists’ fantasy, but Oedipa’s fantasy is another type of tourism, which could have a slight connection with today’s “toxic tourism.”27 On the surface of Inverarity Land, which can expand toward and into not only the New World but also the Old World through post-war tourism, nature—including people, animals, plants, and minerals—has been exploited for consumerism and capitalism. Perhaps Pynchon’s obvious disaffection toward the global marketplace, based on its exploitation of nature, is partially inherited from Thoreau. As Michael T. Gilmore emphasizes, Thoreau’s “quarrel with the marketplace”28 is mostly ontological: For this author of traditional nature writing, the “exchange process” is the worst because it results in “emptying the world of its concrete reality and not only converting objects into dollars but causing their ‘it-ness’ or being to disappear.”29 In Walden, Thoreau criticizes the owner of Flint’s Pond, because this man “thought only of its money value” and “would have drained and sold it for mud at its bottom.”30 Moreover, for Thoreau, the reality of the bottom of the

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pond should be contrasted with the “fact of the imagination.”31 In a similar but slightly different way, for Pynchon, or his narrator, in The Crying of Lot 49, the reality of the land of America, including the bottom of Inverarity Lake, could be competing with “the orbiting ecstasy of a true paranoia.”32 Near the open ending of the novel, however, the narrator claims, “[I]f there was just America then it seemed the only was she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.”33 Attempting to make an exquisite balance between the concrete reality of Inverarity Land and her own paranoia, Oedipa finally gains the leading position in this toxic discourse.34 Shoko Ito suggests that Walden Pond is situated at the “edge” of nature and of culture so that Thoreau, as a “borderer,” could make his writing into not only an archetype of American nature writing but also an American counternarrative.35 Comparing Thoreau with Oedipa in this regard, Petillon claims that both of them are borderers and that Oedipa’s “westering impulse takes her to the ‘edge’ of her clearing, where the foreign ‘out there’ begins.”36 The “edge” is, in this case, that of the Pacific Ocean. On the road to Inverarity Lake, Oedipa imagines the bordered space between nature (“the unimaginable Pacific”) and culture (“all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions”).37 The narrator says that even long before visiting San Narciso and Lake Inverarity, Oedipa believed in the Pacific Ocean’s power of purification—a sort of redemption for Southern California, the main parts of which are polluted environmentally and socially, except for her own section. As for the “edge,” it is narrated very optimistically: “[N]o matter what you did to its edges, the true Pacific stayed inviolate and integrated or assumed the ugliness at any edge into some more general truth.”38 Oedipa’s belief in the “redemption”39 of the sea is a counter-vision to Inverarity’s capitalization and apparently opposite to Tony Jaguar’s salvaging of the bones from the bottom of Inverarity Lake.40 From a different perspective, Oedipa’s idea that the ocean can be a “more general truth”41 reminds us not of Thoreau but rather of Rachel Carson’s belief in “Oceanus.”42 In The Sea Around Us (1951), which was followed by The Edge of the Sea (1955), Carson writes, “[A]ll at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.” The sea for Carson, thus, seems equivalent to Thoreau’s wilderness, and The Sea Around Us can then be seen as Carson’s Walden. In 1953, The Sea Around Us inspired an Academy Award-winning film and catapulted Carson to nationwide fame, even though there are two major differences between Carson’s original book and Irwin Allen’s film: God and the Moon. In the opening scene of the movie, Don Forbes’s voice echoes solemnly: “ . . . and the world was drowned, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there

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be light.’ And there was light. . . . This, then, is the sea around us, born of the rain, cradled in the deep, guided by the moon.”43 Allen’s direction deserves admiration because his way of mixing the Genesis story with the scientific explanation of the earth’s formation is so spectacular and yet familiar that most of the audience could easily come to accept part of Carson’s progressive scientific view. As John A. Duvall notes, this adaptation disappointed Carson, which is not so surprising when reading her book and counting the number of times the word “God” is used. Indeed, there is no mention of “God,” except for the plural, “gods”44; she uses this term in the context of the cultural history of the ocean, which she traces back to the Ancient Greeks. While Carson carefully concludes her book by mentioning that it is since “ten centuries before the Christian era” that there has been literature regarding the origin of the world and its oceans, she begins The Sea Around Us by quoting God’s words as an epigraph, though with a reverse implication to its film adaptation. She quotes from Genesis, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” followed by, “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, and so it is with the beginnings of that great mother of life, the sea.”45 What Pynchon shares with Carson is not only this idea of the ocean but one of the origins of the moon. Oedipa thinks the Pacific Ocean is a “hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile,”46 and this hypothesis, called the “daughter theory,” is indeed a favorite of Carson’s: “But immediately, of course, the newly created satellite became subject to physical laws that sent it spinning in an orbit of its own about the earth,”47 she writes as an explanation of the birth of the moon, claiming, “There is to this day a great scar on the surface of the globe. This scar or depression holds the Pacific Ocean.”48 This hypothesis was published in an 1879 paper by George Howard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin. As Dana Mackenzie notes, it is “probably reminiscent of all the old myths in which the Moon Goddess is born from the Earth Goddess.”49 After 1882, when Osmond Fisher added the detail of the Pacific Ocean as a remnant, the daughter theory gained much more popularity, not only among specialists but even in school classrooms, thanks to its combination and explanation of both the separation of the moon from the Earth and the creation of the Pacific. As Ian D. Copestake comments, Oedipa’s “sea-consciousness” is synchronized with her quest, which “inevitably leads her to a choice between her nostalgia for the comforts of her past idealism, and hence to a delusion, or else to a new world of deconstructed truths and textual meanings.”50 In other words, believing in her supernatural connection with the Pacific, Oedipa can manage to stay in the pre-Silent Spring Carsonesque world, in which she does not yet have to awaken to the environmental crisis. Oedipa’s reluctant attitude might significantly contrast with that of Randolph Driblette, who directs the

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play within the book, The Courier’s Tragedy. In the shower room, Driblette says that if he were to dissolve and go down through the drain into the Pacific Ocean, not only his existence but also what Oedipa had witnessed this night would become nothing. As mentioned above, the tragic history of the bones in Lake Inverarity has a mysterious similarity to the plot of The Courier’s Tragedy. Moreover, the marine metaphor uttered by Driblette reminds us of what Carson writes in The Sea Around Us: “[C]ontinents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea.”51 As Copestake points out, this stage director “rejoins the appropriate symbolic realm of his own vision of meaning when he commits suicide by walking into the Pacific.”52 However, if we regard his suicide by drowning as an alternative means to dissolve “down the drain” and into the Pacific, it would be obvious that his self-centeredness is closer to Benny Profane’s immature fantasy than to Carson’s belief in Oceanus.53 Amid her paranoiac delusion, Oedipa’s imagination goes from the Pacific to the Atlantic. She learns at the airport that there might be a secret plan to save the dolphins at the aquarium in Florida. She watches voyeuristically and eavesdrops on the boy who believes dolphins are successors of human beings. In fact, this belief reminds us of Father Fairing’s relation with the rats in V. as well as of the episode with the porpoise that appears as a mythological creature called woge in Vineland (1990). The difference lies in the immense faith that the boy and his mother have in the W.A.S.T.E. system of communications. Oedipa hears the mother saying that the government will open the letter unless the boy writes “by WASTE” on it.54 Judging by the information that the boy is catching a “TWA flight to Miami,”55 it is reasonable to say that his destination, the “aquarium,” is mentioned with the Miami Seaquarium in Florida in mind, well-known due to the movie Flipper (1963), which was continued as a drama series the following year. Thus, Oedipa finds out that something will occur at the aquarium, which happens to be located at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. By some strange coincidence, the Flipper boom not only inspired Pynchon to add this episode but also caused a real dolphin trainer at the Seaquarium to become a “dolphin defender,” an eco-activist seeking freedom for the dolphins. As shown in another Academy award-winning documentary, The Cove (2009), the trainer, Richard O’Barry, devotes himself to preventing the cruel treatment of dolphins all over the world following his conversion from trainer to activist after the death of his beloved dolphin, which played the character of Flipper. Of course, Pynchon had no way of knowing this, but his fictitious episode of the relationship between the dolphin and the counterforce using the Tristero system seemingly could not remain confined to the realm of Oedipa’s paranoia. Watching The Cove today, we can experience a fraction of what Oedipa goes through as the film records, with hidden cameras, the

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eco-terroristic activities of O’Barry and his supporters protesting a dolphin hunt at a cove that is the site of a Japanese fishing village. It is possible to call O’Barry’s actions heroic, but heroes often need their enemy and autonomous victims. The movie poster for the French version of The Cove, produced by Luc Besson, for instance, shows bleeding dolphins under the sea—this is what the poster emphasizes as a big selling point of the documentary. As Helen Hughes claims, “The film does not bring scientific experts to cite studies on the capacity of animals to suffer into the story but relies on the empathy of viewers and their general knowledge about dolphins.”56 The feeling of empathy, however, often depends on the distance between viewers and victimized subjects.57 Staying empathetic toward the victims is also a part of Oedipa’s toxic discourse. After listening to the conversation about dolphins between the boy and his mother, she is overwhelmed by the fact that so many “undergrounds”58 use the Tristero (or W.A.S.T.E.) system and feels that each of these encounters is worthy of her empathy. However, what she finally realizes is that she does not know how to reach out to all these victims, that is, how to empathize with them. The people she can voyeuristically watch and listen secretly to at night are only a small number of citizens who choose to withdraw from Inverarity Land. She talks to herself: “Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world.”59 It is not certain that the edge of this “separate, silent, unsuspected world” overlaps with that of Inverarity Land, but somewhere between these two oppositional worlds, Oedipa can meet the people who use the Tristero system. After visiting Lake Inverarity, in the middle of the novel, she meets Genghis Cohen, “the most eminent philatelist in the L.A. area,”60 who reappears in the last auction scene where he and Oedipa wait for “the crying of lot 49.”61 As an honest informant on Inverarity Land, although a somewhat closer match to Oedipa than other characters in terms of his empathy for the victims, Cohen hints at the possibility of an “800-year tradition of postal fraud.”62 He ponders on it no more but serves dandelion wine to her; the flowers had been picked in the cemetery two years before the East San Narciso Freeway was constructed, and for him, the wine is, thus, a sort of testimony to the part of nature that is already lost. As Cyrus R. K. Patell indicates, Cohen’s reference to the dandelion wine and its short history is a revelation for Oedipa, but what is revealed to her is still unknown. It is accepted that the episode of the dandelion wine is a central theme of the novel: In Patell’s words, “true revelation may simply lie outside human capacity.”63 But if so, what we gather from this episode is not Oedipa’s incomprehension but rather what she can gain through the author-like position of her toxic discourse. At the end of this episode (which is also the end of the chapter), she gets an opportunity to overwrite what Cohen says to her. After

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Cohen explains, “You see, in spring, when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine goes through a fermentation. As if they remembered,”64 she slightly modifies it: “No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist.”65 While sympathizing with his nostalgic words, however, Oedipa resists making the dandelion wine a simple testament to the past. She still desires to have equal empathy for both living and dead things because while the environments of San Narciso, South California, and the whole land of the United States may be changing, to Oedipa, it still seems possible to reduce the speed of the process. Therefore, Cohen’s nostalgia is secretly rewritten: “As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.”66 This feeling could be interpreted as having something in common with solastalgia, which is a “homesickness you have when you are still at home.”67 Glenn Albrecht coined this concept to “isolate the particular form of distress that is at the core of the shattering of these living bonds between people and place.”68 As a resident of Southern California, Oedipa can feel that her identity is deeply connected with San Narciso and its suburban landscape, which has developed due to the rapid construction of the East San Narciso Freeway, as well as with her hometown, a fictional place called “Kinneret.” Even though “her own section of the state”69 does not seem to need the Pacific’s redemption yet, other areas of Southern California, especially L.A., are already beyond help. That is to say, her geographical move from Kinneret to San Narciso and its suburban areas is interpreted as a chronological and psychological movement from the past state, in which everything was all right, to a present/future state, in which everything can be remembered only as objects of nostalgia. Cohen’s nostalgia, enhanced by the dandelion wine’s fermentation, urges Oedipa to admit that it is too late to resist the process of environmental destruction. Of course, she can mourn the lost landscape with Cohen and the dead that have been dug up, but she hesitates and tries to rephrase what he says. This is because she cannot admit that she has lost her home, Southern California, which she feels should somehow be guarded or redeemed by the Pacific. Furthermore, Oedipa’s quest in this state of solastalgia is inherited by the protagonists in Vineland, where they coexist with a kind of living dead, called “Thanatoids,” who are victims of “karmic imbalances” such as “unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty.”70 Envisioning the land of the “ghosts of dandelion,”71 which are also victims of karmic imbalances, Oedipa’s fantasy “dives deeper and soars higher than the Nature goes”72 in order to debunk the superficiality of Inverarity Land. Near the end of the novel, Oedipa knows that the real toxicity of Inverarity Land is the dominant attitude of the capitalist developer and that the last glimmer of hope remains in the act of “waiting.”73 For Oedipa, the act of waiting is not one of leaving but, instead, of remaining in the same place between

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the innocent, pure past state, and the demolished, toxic present/future state. Though the “most tender flesh”74 of the part of Southern California is damaged to a deadly extent, she still believes in the “American continuity of crust and mantle,”75 which could include the bottom of Inverarity Lake and, perhaps, the bottom of Cohen’s wine bottle, where “the dead really do persist.” Of course, the “mantle” here inevitably serves as a reminder of the painting by Remedios Varo, Bordando el Manto Terrestre (“Embroidering Earth’s Mantle” in English). In this painting, we can see that the “mantle” of the Earth covers the world, putting even the ocean within it: “[A]ll the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry.”76 Carson regards the sea as a mantle—“a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean”77— and Pynchon seems to do almost the same, just, conversely, through Varo’s surrealistic vision. Once, before the death of Inverarity, Oedipa had cried in front of the painting because she empathized with the captive maidens in the tower, from which the “Earth’s mantle” depicted as “a kind of tapestry” is embroidered, and felt that she herself was locked forever into the role of a hopeless housewife. However, at the end of her wandering in Inverarity Land, what she finds is that nobody is locked in the center of the world because the dichotomy of the center or the edge is also a “symmetry of choices to break down.”78 Oedipa’s de-metaphorization of the mantle finally gives her some confidence that she can continue to stay anywhere she can call home. Even if the landscape is changing inevitably, her solastalgia can eventually be healed by choosing to believe that her home still exists somewhere on the earth anyway. NOTES 1. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1. 2. Pierre-Yves Petillon, “A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the Wilderness,” in New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O’Donnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 158. 3. The Crying of Lot 49 was coincidentally published in the same year as Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial election in California. Referring to this fact, Casey Shoop claims that the novel’s “prescient attention to the New Right reveals a world in which the ‘crisis of representation’ designates a pitched battle between the forces of entitlement and the unlisted rolls of the dispossessed.” Casey Shoop, “Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Rise of the New Right in California,” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 1 (2012): 81–82. 4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 159. 5. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds demonstrates the difference between Pynchon’s narratology and Derridean argument by emphasizing Pynchon’s characteristic use

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of punning language. She points out that what Oedipa is terrified of is “what seems unnatural in this punning language.” Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, “Thomas Pynchon, Wit, and the Work of the Supernatural,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 54, no. 1 (2000): 29. 6. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 56. 7. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, chap. 1. 8. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, chap. 1. 9. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, chap. 1. 10. Tony Tanner, The American Mystery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 225. According to David Seed, Thoreau is Pynchon’s “most famous precedent in American literature of imaginatively exploiting the concept of surveying.” For Thoreau, as Seed notes, it was necessary to imaginatively appropriate the landscape through wordplay and metaphor because the act of surveying is a sort of “dry knowledge” that “cramped his perception of the landscape.” The complex approaches to the American land in both The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon are partially based on this tradition of American nature writing since Walden. David Seed, “Mapping the Course of Empire in the New World,” in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 97. 11. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), chap. 2, Kindle. 12. Thoreau also examines humankind’s “brow” to fathom the depth of its thought, much in the same way that Oedipa stares at the “forehead” of James Clerk Maxwell’s profile on the printed photograph in order to work the Nefastis Machine. For a further discussion of “Maxwell’s Demon” and the “Nefastis Machine,” see Alan W. Brownlie, Thomas Pynchon’s Narratives: Subjectivity and Problems of Knowing (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 56–61; and Yoshihiko Kihara, Thomas Pynchon: Museifushugi-teki-kiseki no Uchu [Thomas Pynchon: The Universe of Anarchist Miracle] (in Japanese) (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2001), 48–50. 13. Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” (1854), in Walden and Civil Disobedience (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 232. Kindle. 14. W. Barksdale Maynard, Walden Pond: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 238. 15. Maynard, Walden Pond, 255. 16. Pynchon, V., 376. 17. William M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 65. 18. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, chap. 2. 19. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 15. This fictitious city is explained as “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bondissue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.” 20. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 18. Jane Jacobs, who is well-known as the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), contributed an article titled “A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug” to the Globe and Mail in 1969, criticizing the negative influence of the LA transportation system over those of other cities, including Toronto, where she happened to live in 1968. Though it was

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already apparent that the freeway directly caused air pollution, the local newspapers Jacobs read quoted the words of the director of Metro Toronto’s traffic department, which said that the transportation system of Los Angeles was recognized as an ideal, even for Toronto. Jane Jacobs, “A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug,” in Vital Little Plans, eds., Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring, (New York: Random House, 2016), part 3, Kindle. Moreover, Rachel Adams reads The Crying of Lot 49 and Karen Tei Yamahshita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) as “bookends bracketing one possible beginning and end to a particular kind of US literary postmodernism” by contrasting Pynchon’s depiction of the freeway in California with Yamashita’s, which is “the very lifeblood of the city.” Rachel Adams, “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism,” Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 249. 21. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 50. 22. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 45. 23. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 47. 24. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 70. 25. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 55. 26. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 70. 27. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, chap. 2. Giovanna Di Chiro defines “toxic tourism” as “a species of ecotourism” and notes that “the toxic tour brings the visitor face to face with the hidden externalities of industrial society, rather than with imagined purity and innocence of the world before modernity.” Giovanna Di Chiro, “Bearing Witness or Taking Action: Toxic Tourism and Environmental Justice,” in Reclaiming the Environmental Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture, ed. Richard Hofricher (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 275–99. 28. Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 38. 29. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace, 38. 30. Thoreau, Walden, 158. 31. Thoreau, Walden, 10. 32. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 177. 33. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 177. 34. By intertextually reading three texts, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Cindy Sherman’s photographic self-portraits, and The Crying of Lot 49, Takayoshi Ishiwari concludes that Oedipa, who is positioned in “the totalizing masculine discourse of capitalism,” is “an individual not living capitalism enough.” Takayoshi Ishiwari, Postmodern Metamorphosis: Capitalism and the Subject in Contemporary American Fiction (Tokyo: Eihôsha, 2001), 33, 48. Italics in original. 35. Shoko Ito, “Walden Chishi kara Tochirinri to Kankyo-seigi no Bungaku made,” in Yutakasa to Kankyo, ed. Eiichi Akimoto and Kazuto Oshio (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 2006), 46–47. 36. Petillon, “A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the Wilderness,” 139. 37. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 48. 38. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 48. 39. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 48.

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40. Criticizing Frederic Jameson by rereading Pynchon, Jon Simons claims that Jameson’s Marxist science could be used to “escape Oedipa’s uncertainty and paranoia” by simply interpreting Pierce’s will and his land as a metaphor for “global capitalism.” Jon Simons, “Postmodern Paranoia? Pynchon and Jameson,” Paragraph 23, no. 2 (2000): 213. 41. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 48. 42. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951; Canongate, 2021), part 3. Kindle. 43. The Sea Around Us, directed by Irwin Allen (1953; Burbank, CA: Warner Archives, 2010), DVD. 44. Carson, The Sea Around Us, part 3. 45. Carson, The Sea Around Us, part 1. 46. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 48. 47. Carson, The Sea Around Us, part 1. 48. Carson, The Sea Around Us, part 1. 49. Dana Mackenzie, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be (Hoboken: Wiley, 2003), 116–17. 50. Ian D. Copestake, “‘Off the Deep End Again’: Sea-Consciousness and Insanity in The Crying of Lot 49 and Mason & Dixon,” in American Postmodernity: Essays on the Recent Fiction of Thomas Pynchon, ed. Ian D. Copestake (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 198. 51. Carson, The Sea Around Us, part 3. 52. Copestake, “Off the Deep End Again,” 198. 53. Matthew W. Binney claims that Oedipa’s approach to the truth is shifting from a Habermasian to a Foucauldian one when she has an interview with Driblette, who “exercises his critique through showing Oedipa’s failure to arrive at an understanding of the Tristero and her failure to understand the basic terms of analysis that others use to project their worlds.” Matthew W. Binney, “Thomas Pynchon’s Philosophy of the Self in The Crying of Lot 49,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 7, no. 2 (2006): 24. 54. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 118. 55. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 118. 56. Helen Hughes, Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the Twenty-First Century (Bristol: Intellect, 2014), chap. 5, Kindle. 57. Indeed, most viewers of films are mere voyeurs and listeners, like Oedipa. In the same way that Oedipa becomes sick of the “W.A.S.T.E.” symbols—“A couple-three times would really have been enough. Or too much”—repeatedly viewing symbolic images of animal cruelty in the film does not necessarily foster the audience’s empathy toward the victimized subject. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 119. 58. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 119. 59. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 120. 60. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 88. 61. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 178. 62. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 92. 63. Cyrus R. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 121.

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64. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 94. 65. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 94. 66. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 94. 67. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 257. 68. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 251. 69. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 48. 70. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990; New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 173, Kindle. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. 71. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 94. 72. Thoreau, Walden, 232. 73. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 176. 74. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 176. 75. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 172. 76. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 14. 77. Carson, The Sea Around Us, part 1. 78. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 176.

Chapter 3

What We Talk about When We Talk about Extinction Gravity’s Rainbow

Pynchon’s view of death and life that appears in V. and The Crying of Lot 49 seems much simpler than that in Gravity’s Rainbow. This is largely because the deaths of Profane, Lady V., and the sewer alligators in V. and those of Inverarity, Driblette, and the dandelion in The Crying of Lot 49 are so allegorical that their lives can hardly be imagined as part of the ecological community. In contrast, the narrative of Gravity’s Rainbow is quite conscious of its own ecological connections between events—“No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into”1—so that one’s life and death are also analogically or metaphorically exchanged with those of others. This ecological narrative is symbolized by the banana breakfast scene in the opening part of the novel. The odor of the breakfast is recognized as the “weaving of its molecules,” and then, thanks to its “living genetic chains,” “Death is told so clearly to fuck off.”2 Such a pedantic and impulsive narrative cannot necessarily be praised as mature in a general way, but the literary strategy of narrating the complexity of the being is surely redeveloped in a novel manner in Gravity’s Rainbow. Throughout his oeuvre, Pynchon shows himself to be someone who empathizes with non-human beings. Before Gravity’s Rainbow, however, his human characters have little hesitation about putting themselves in the place of non-humans and prefer to mourn for the victims, such as the dying bird that Callisto keeps holding to give it his body heat in “Entropy,” the alligator that Profane shoots under the street in V., and the dandelions whose homeland is demolished in The Crying of Lot 49. So, it is a significant difference that Gravity’s Rainbow adopts the concept of transformation as a literary tool to relativize the state of human beings in the narrative. First, Pynchon chooses 47

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Wernher von Braun’s words for the epigraph of part 1 of the novel as his ironical manifesto of ecological transcendentalism: Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.3

As Steven Weisenburger points out, Pynchon deletes excludes important details in von Braun’s words—“von Braun’s claims that a belief in immortality creates a human desire for ethical action or ‘transformation’”—in order to make the engineer’s intention ambiguous.4 By doing so, Pynchon succeeds in transforming von Braun’s scientifically optimistic view of the continuity of nature into an enigmatic vision, a mixture of beliefs in technologically progressive and secular spirituality. However, such dishonest modifications might be needed for Pynchon to make his literary accusation against the System for Establishment, which is sustained by the transformation not from death to life but from death to the transfiguration of death. For example, Walther Rathenau, a historical figure who died in 1922, is now a spirit that can be communicated with supernaturally and who claims that making steel from coal is more than an industrial process by emphasizing “The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured.”5 Rathenau also adds, “The best you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymerizing is not resurrection”6; however, Pynchon’s intention here is not only to accept the pessimistic-pragmatic vision of this German-Jewish industrialist but also to rationalize or subvert it with the imagination of the counterforces potentially comprised of social misfits, as Pirate Prentice does. As an organizer of the banana breakfast, Pirate wishes that the banana’s odor, whose molecules are “the living genetic chains,” could deliver a “spell” all over London to protect the people from the German rocket attacks.7 From molecular chemistry to rocketry, modern technologies systematically push forward the transfiguration of death in the novel. In such a tragic situation, the individuals in Gravity’s Rainbow try to disguise themselves as other beings in a transfiguration of life. As an anti-heroic protagonist of the novel, for example, Tyrone Slothrop takes on the role of the “Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero who, sometime back in the tenth century, routed a Viking invasion.” Partly because of this disguise, he is accompanied by a real pig named Frieda.8 Moreover, the pig’s owner is Franz Pökler, a German chemical engineer, who is deeply involved in the secret project of the System that Slothrop quests for. Pökler is a contrasting character to Slothrop, while his closeness to the pig reminds us of the pigs raised by an ancestor of Tyrone Slothrop, as we will argue below. He expresses his gratitude to Slothrop for bringing

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Frieda back, while Slothrop replies that he did not come of his own accord; the pig brought him to her master. In fact, it might have been possible for Pynchon to compose a situation in which Slothrop met Pökler more accidentally or more purposefully, but his decision to let the animal guide the human emphasizes the distance between the human characters and the significance of in-betweens, such as animals, in their world. According to Mark Richard Siegel, Slothrop’s transformation into a pig resonates with Martin Buber’s “conception of what must happen in the transcendence into mutual being between a person and someone or something else in an ‘I-Thou’ relationship.”9 For Buber, this relationship is based on “reciprocity,” while Gregory Bateson interprets it as his own conception of “ecology.”10 Referring to Buber’s conception of reciprocity, Bateson argues that we need an “I–Thou” relationship even between us and our “ecosystem.”11 Slothrop’s quest for his identity can be regarded as a pilgrimage for integration with others, including nature and non-human animals. Even though, as in the cases of other protagonists in Pynchon’s novels, his “sloth” often prevents him from understanding what he needs to “live in the currents of universal reciprocity,”12 his ancestor’s way of life can inspire him as a predecessor of the “I-Thou” relationship. William Slothrop and his son John settled in Berkshire, Massachusetts, beginning a “pig operation,” and drove their pigs to Boston, “just like sheep or cows.”13 For William, the good nature of pigs was lovable, even though such a love was unusual for people who were familiar with folklore and the Bible. Because of his love, then, “the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must’ve been” dreadful for William.14 Indeed, William’s characterization is based on the author’s ancestor William Pynchon, who came to New England with Governor John Winthrop in 1630. Just as William Pynchon published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, which was banned, William Slothrop wrote a book titled On Preterition. This book was also banned because of its unorthodoxy but helped William overcome the grief over his pigs’ deaths and his heretical ideas. The narrator says that, for William, the slaughter of his pigs should be understood as a parable, which could even be a scientific one regarding the law of action and reaction. By means of these Newtonian mechanics, William is trying to accept the deaths of his companion animals. William’s attitude could be interpreted as anti-Calvinist precisely because he believes that the dichotomy of the “Elect” and the “Preterite” needs a rational balance.15 William is waiting for the miracle pig that will not die, while such a hope makes him recognize that human beings are responsible for the pigs’ deaths as they get the pigs to trust them, just as demons possessed the Gadarene swine that “rushed into extinction like lemmings.”16 William longs for a pig that will not die and can exist as a reaction to the biblical swine, and all swine thereafter, which are doomed to death. If Gadarene swine are

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Preterite as William is, then there should be also pigs that are Elect. This idea is getting ahead of not only Newton but also Darwin by paraphrasing the Calvinistic dichotomy of the duality of the “Selected” and the “Extinct” under the theory of evolution. In On Preterition, William Slothrop claims, “Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart,” but the book ends up banned and burned because “[n]obody wanted to hear about all the Preterite.”17 Reflecting on this rejection by society, the narrator asks us, “Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from?”18 This “fork in the road” is a junction between the force grounded in the transfiguration effected by death and the counterforce believing in the continuity of life, which is based on love. It is apparently the same dichotomy of life and death represented by molecular and chemical metaphors, such as the odor of a banana and the industrial process of steelmaking. Interestingly, following William’s thoughts, the narrator emphasizes the figural transformations of the pigs and William at the same time: “all his Gadarene swine who’d rushed into extinction like lemmings, [. . .] possessed [. . .] by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life.”19 These figural transformations from swine to lemming and human to pig can recursively lead us to Tyrone Slothrop’s episode with a lemming named Ursula, which is narrated just before William’s. Indeed, Slothrop’s quest/journey summons Ursula even before he meets Frieda the pig. In the northern part of Germany, Slothrop meets a boy named Ludwig who has lost his pet lemming. Ludwig claims the lemming is heading for the Baltic by herself, though Slothrop denies the idea because he had learned that “Lemmings never do anything alone”20 at Harvard. Slothrop’s knowledge, however, cannot convince Ludwig. “I’m sorry,”21 says Slothrop, just as Profane does to the alligator, in this case showing his empathy not to the animal but to its owner. His caring for human as well as non-human companions is again different from the protagonists of Pynchon’s earlier fictions. With Ludwig’s lemming indirectly guiding Slothrop’s quest/ journey, William’s ghost directly joins them by suggesting the comparison between Gadarene swine and lemmings. Thus, the living circle of human and non-human beings, which, in the words of Wernher von Braun, is reinforced by “spiritual existence,” assists Slothrop to resist being incorporated into the System. On the other hand, not every non-human animal in Gravity’s Rainbow is necessarily a companion for human beings. Some of them are pure victims of human cruelty, and others are incorporated into the System as experimental animals. In the first place, we should remember that Tyrone Slothrop was also a research subject at Harvard University, experimentally conditioned to react to a “Mystery Stimulus”22 with an erection in his childhood. Leo Bersani

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notes that “[a]ll this is not just a joke, but it would be a joke on us if we read its seriousness in terms of the cause-and-effect sequences.”23 The inhumane treatment experienced by Slothrop overlaps with that of Dog Vanya, dancing rodents, or Grigori the octopus. First, Dog Vanya, the subject of a Pavlovian conditioning experiment at the “White Visitation,” set in Nazi Germany, is depicted emotionlessly by the narrator, who writes, “The duct of Dog Vanya’s submaxillary gland was long ago carried out the bottom of his chin through an incision and sutured in place, leading saliva outside to the collecting funnel, fixed there with the traditional orange Pavlovian Cement of rosin, iron oxide and beeswax.”24 This depiction could be regarded as a typical “Pavlov’s dog”-type image, figuring Vanya as a victim of irrational systems like the concentration camps figured in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): “The camps [. . .] serve the ghastly experiment [. . .] of transforming the human personality [. . .] into something that even animals are not; for Pavlov’s dog [. . .] was a perverted animal.”25 As Arendt notes, living things “under scientifically controlled conditions” must be transformed into “mere thing[s].”26 In Gravity’s Rainbow, however, Pynchon builds his hopes on their pre-perverted condition, in which subjects, including Slothrop, are more than “mere things.” More than a hundred pages later, Dog Vanya has a “short break from the test stand,”27 and the narrator follows the dog’s walk to the cage of a rodent. The narrator then seamlessly introduces Webley Silvernail, who is a staff member at the White Visitation, taking care of experimental animals. Silvernail can use a camera and a film projector, and his vision allows us to view the situation of the experimental laboratory through the frame of the camera. For Silvernail, the room looks like a maze, with aisles of tables and consoles, where behaviorists are running like experimental animals.28 The narrator questions who watches the scene described above, other than Silvernail. To make an analogy between the experimental box containing the rodents and the laboratory of the behaviorists, there is an apparent repetition of the readers’ response to the situation of Dog Vanya; the difference lies in Silvernail’s awareness, shown through his words, “[W]ho notes their response?”29 If we consider his self-questioning to be literal, the answer is “Them,” a personification of the “System,” but if it is regarded as a metafictional, the answer is “us,” the readers of his words and viewers of his shots; both of these viewers remain outside of the text/film. Indeed, seen through the camera, the inhumane situation of the experimental animals is slightly but irreversibly changed for the viewers. This is exemplified nowhere better than in Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries. In January 1973, Wiseman, “cinema’s Thomas Pynchon,”30 began to shoot the inside of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, where many

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monkeys and apes of various sizes and characters were caged as experimental animals. From observational study to experimental anatomy, Wiseman’s documentary tries to let the facts speak for themselves, but his deadpan shots often cannot help provoking uncomfortable laughter from some of today’s intellectual audiences because these shots, such as the scene of a laboratory experiment on primates’ sexual behaviors, are so surreal that the primatologists’ actions could only come across as a sick joke. Notwithstanding graphic shots of the cruelty of the center, as Chuck Kraemer reviews, Primate is “profound in the questions it raises about science, compassion and the eternal tension between the rational and spiritual sides of man’s nature.”31 Kraemer points out that these questions emerge because Wiseman tries “observing scientists as closely as scientists observe primates,”32 and sure enough, it is apparent that what makes the film seem like a sick joke is nothing but the way the humans behave. In Primate, we are shown a large laboratory window on the other side of which a rhesus monkey with a small box attached to the top of its head is intermittently stimulated remotely to be sexually aggressive to two others. The scene could be taken as serious and straightforward perhaps only from the point of view of the scientists; viewed through a double frame—the laboratory window and the screen—it turns into something præternatural, as do the scientist themselves, never allowing us to easily employ them as symbols in a criticism of civilization. “[Wiseman’s] Primate should be read as science fiction,” claims Donna Haraway in her book, Primate Visions, “as well as social commentary on the production of scientific fact.”33 Reread as a literary version of Wiseman’s documentary, then, Gravity’s Rainbow can be interpreted as something beyond anthropocentric satire. As Bersani notes, Gravity’s Rainbow is literature, which could be read as an “ontological comedy” rather than for scientific, political, or historical “seriousness.”34 Another example of such an experimental animal is Grigori the octopus, who attacks a Dutch double agent named Katje (“kitten” in Dutch) but is finally enticed to leave her alone following the crab Slothrop throws away. “Yes it is the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen outside of the movies,”35 says the narrator, comparing Grigori with filmed animals. Because his encounter with Grigori occurs in the mid-1940s, the most famous filmic representation of octopuses before it is the 1916 film adapted from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. While the octopuses in the film were modified from the giant squid that appears in Jules Verne’s original novel, as Richard Ellis observes, “people [who watched the film] believed the encounter was genuine.”36 As Charles Clerc claims, Pynchon also overlaps the pairing of Katje and the octopus with the pair in Beauty and the Beast, as well as Ann Darrow and King Kong.37 However, the narrator explains that Slothrop’s impression is slightly different from what might be considered a normal reaction to a monster: It is said that the

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irrational movement of the octopus reminds him of inanimate objects, which do not move as expected. The octopus moves its tentacles violently with the onomatopoeia “WHAM!,”38 which emphasizes the inanimateness of the creature. Partially because of Slothrop’s “Puritan hopes for the Word,”39 the visuality of their dramatic encounter is exchanged with the textuality of the octopus’s action. Shifting the physical impact of the marine creature into the metaphysical impact of onomatopoeia, it can be said that the narrator tries to liberate Grigori itself from the fetters of representation. Not falling into the same rut as King Kong, the physical existence of Grigori is followed back at last to its original keeper Dr. Porkyevitch. When another of the octopus’s names, “Grischa,” is uttered by Porkyevitch, therefore, we notice that this pair of human and non-human beings have their own narrative, which could be regarded as a story of trans-species companionship.40 Porkyevitch says, “Grischa, little friend, you have performed your last trick for a while.”41 As a result, the action scene, reminiscent of King Kong, is trivialized and rendered as the “last trick” of the pet-like octopus. Slothrop’s encounter with Grigori is placed within the realm of military experiments and operations, but from the octopus’s point of view, the battle is just “making a sound of ‘WHAM!,’” that is, just a trick. Interestingly, however, it can also be seen as an ontological comedy if we regard Slothrop’s fight to the death with Grigori as a sort of laboratory experiment itself. Imitating the iconographic usage of the onomatopoeia in comic books, the narrator here is leading the reader’s eye, not to the body of the octopus but to “WHAM!,” as if the sound made by this marine monster materializes amid the process of textualizing its existence. The narrator calls such visualizable/materializable sounds “Plasticman sound”42 after the protagonist of Slothrop’s favorite comic. Indeed, Plastic Man is famous for his surrealistic appearance, and in particular, his elastic body, like that of an octopus, has a particular affinity for the graphical expression of words on the pages of the comic.43 In Gravity’s Rainbow, the “Plasticman sound” makes words meaningless, while emphasizing the onomatopoeic sounds: When the German word “warum” (“why” in English) is uttered, Slothrop “sees” the moving of the lips and the hovering of the onomatopoeia “varoom,” trapped in the mouth of the speaker.44 For some behavioral scientists in Gravity’s Rainbow, speech and the barking of the laboratory animals seem unnecessary because they are signs of the animate. By comparing them with dogs, the scientist Spectro persuades Pointsman to use the octopuses as his experimental animals by emphasizing the fact that octopuses can survive even if most parts of their brain tissue are removed. He says that dogs bark, but octopuses just move their tentacles as an unconditioned response, making the inanimate noise “WHAM!”45 It seems that the scientists in the novel regard octopuses as lower-ranked than dogs because they do not have brain complexity or the ability to bark. Thus, even if Grigori

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recalls the metaphorical image of King Kong, the octopus, which cannot bark, hardly has obvious symbolism.46 In Pavlovian conditioning, a neutral stimulus is conditioned and then associated by a response. In Gravity’s Rainbow, however, Slothrop is conditioned by a mysterious stimulus. While his reflex to have an erection is said to be already extinguished, it in fact seems to remain in a perverse relationship with the stimulus. Pointsman, a Pavlovian scientist who works at the “White Visitation,” writes, “We cannot therefore judge the degree of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero.”47 Here, the scientist claims that Slothrop’s reflexes exhibit a kind of prophetic instinct to react before the stimulus because they are too fully extinguished. This is a very tricky plot point in Pynchon’s narrative regarding Slothrop, and the animal representations in Gravity’s Rainbow pose a further challenge to us when we recognize an even more perverse relationship between stimulus and reflex in the representation of an “extinguished” animal: the dodo. Gravity’s Rainbow was released in 1973, as the environmental movement for wildlife protection in the United States was rapidly growing. “It was not until 1973 with the signing of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna and the passage of the Endangered Species Act,” Margo DeMello writes in Animals and Society, “that wild imports began to decline in the United States.”48 In the midst of growing environmental awareness, an American ecologist, Stanley Temple, was also researching why the population of the native tree on Mauritius, Calvaria major, kept declining and came to the conclusion that the tree’s slow extinction was due to the loss of the dodo on the island. After his paper was published in Science in 1977, this story became widely known. Though David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo, argues, “The story of the Calvaria tree and the dodo is [. . .] dubious,”49 it is still interesting that the dodo’s return to the front stage of scientific discussion was percolating in the early 1970s. At the same time, Pynchon was also researching and imagining seventeenth-century Mauritius, where dodoes were still alive, though having already encountered Dutch colonialists. Frans Van der Groov, one of the colonialists, was “systematically killing off the native dodoes for reasons he could not explain.”50 Frans never knew that the dodoes appearing in front of him would be the last members of the species on Earth but had an intuition that “It is too late,” just as the narrator at the beginning of the novel expresses resignation about the situation of London near the end of World War II. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the characters and narrator are consistent in their attitude toward others’ crises and their own, saying, literally or figuratively, “it is too late.” As Thomas H. Schaub points out, Pynchon’s novels tend to be tragic because “there is always some prior crime that makes our

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present moment ‘too late,’”51 and Frans’s present is also too late to avoid the bad fate of the dodoes. The narrator says that Frans “can believe only in the one steel reality of the firearm he carries.”52 This “steel reality of firearms” is another “abstract, technical force,” which Haraway referred to in Primate Visions to explain the meaning behind King Kong’s death; the firearms are also ancestors of the V-2 rocket that the narrator of Pynchon’s novel calls a “steel banana.”53 Susan Sontag claims that the 1970s was already a “nostalgic time,” when the sense of nostalgia was easily represented by the power of photographs. “Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from,” writes Sontag, “Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.”54 The dodoes on the 17th-century Mauritius of Gravity’s Rainbow are in a position where they need to be protected from people. But, as already confirmed, Frans gives up and eschews this responsibility with the words, “It is too late,” and his clumsy, nostalgic weapon—“Recent arrivals all carrying the new snaphaan . . . but I stick to my clumsy old matchlock”55—is fired to transform a dodo egg from something belonging to light into darkness. As if Frans’s weapon were a camera, the egg of the dodo is depicted as a photographic object. By comparing Frans’s shooting with the works of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, Pynchon novelizes the Sontagian conception of nostalgia: “When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.”56 As Philip Steadman determines in Vermeer’s Camera (2002), Vermeer’s works became so realistic partly because he made use of a sort of optical instrument like “the camera obscura,” which was “the predecessor of the photographic camera.”57 Of course, such observations are collateral evidence from the future; it is appropriate to say that Pynchon depicts the trans-historic “steel reality of firearms” that has been substituted from hookguns to cameras to V-2 rockets by imagining the encounter of the 17th-century hunter/photographer with the endangered dodoes. Nostalgia is a pathetic feeling for lost places or periods, but not necessarily regarding the past. As Svetlana Boym notes in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), there is a perverse nostalgia that is called “anticipatory nostalgia” for “something that hasn’t happened yet.”58 She foregrounds that Vladimir Nabokov is conscious (as is Pynchon) of the interrelationship between nostalgia and the representation of nature. “By describing his bird [a swan] as “dodo-like,” writes Boym, “Nabokov interrupts all the clichés and poetic references to the swans of other times. The detail turns the predictable swan into a creature of individual memory and anticipatory nostalgia.”59 Even for Nabokov, who taught at Cornell University when Pynchon was an undergraduate student there, the image of the dodo is a useful motif for expressing

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his perverse nostalgia and regret.60 Scott Slovic also notes that we often have “anticipated regret,” which is “nostalgia experienced, paradoxically, before actual loss.”61 This complex temporality of nostalgia could then be transformed into the conception of “solastalgia” coined by Glenn Albrecht—“the homesickness you have at home”—as discussed in the previous chapter of this book. Since “anticipated regret” works as a preparation for the worst that could happen in the future, this feeling becomes useful even in the field of environmental humanities. This anticipated regret also recalls the “ecological apocalypticism” of Lawrence Buell. Comparing this notion to “activist appeals to nostalgia,” Buell suggests that Carson’s Silent Spring and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony are cases in point: “[T]hey only intended to create moral antitheses that would force readers to confront the possibility that history has reached a turning point where the extinction of a land-centered culture (Ceremony) or even nature itself (Silent Spring) is imminent.”62 Buell explains here that Carson and Silko succeed in creating an ecological version of the “traditional American Jeremiad”; by foreseeing the “turning point,” these modern Jeremiahs try to tell us about the possibility of environmental downfalls, like a canary in a coal mine. Indeed, the dodo bird, a metaphor for “stupidity,” is also useful as a cautionary tale for endangered ecosystems today. As Scott Slovic argues, “Beyond the veil of extinction literature, so abundant in these waning days of the millennium, is the idea that we ourselves, Homo sapiens, are the ultimate dodos.”63 The change in environmental consciousness has modified what the dodo implies, and the extinction of the birds has impacted various writings. Richard Dawkins compares the extinction of the dodo with the death of his friend, Douglas Adams, known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979); Dawkins nostalgically remembers that Adams was moved by the “sad case of the dodo” and wrote a scenario for Doctor Who in which Professor Chronotis visits 17th-century Mauritius to “weep for the dodo.”64 Ironically enough, nobody knows that Chronotis lamented the dodo, simply because the episode itself was shelved and never broadcasted. Dawkins writes, “Call me sentimental, but I must pause for a moment—for Douglas, and for Professor Chronotis and what he wept for.”65 The tragic fates of the dodo and his friend make him nostalgic, while he notes that a group of Oxford scientists has been permitted to take a sample of DNA from a dodo, as if he can find some solace in the story. DNA for an evolutionary biologist is worth everything, just as a fossil is for a paleontologist. Echoing the words of Sontag, it can be said that when they are nostalgic, they collect records of extinct species such as DNA or fossils. Indeed, as Stephen Jay Gould writes, “When such valued parts of natural or human diversity disappear as active, living presences, we take special interest [. . .] in preserving the ‘fossil’ artifacts of extinguished vitality.”66 Gould

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insists on the importance of preserving records of extinct species while making an analogy between the extinction of the dodo and the death of the last native Yiddish speaker in his extended family. Moreover, he quotes a nostalgic line from Wordsworth—“The sunshine is a glorious birth / But yet I know . . . that there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”67—to begin his story on the preservation of fossils, as if he himself were a 19th-century nostalgic subject. From a feminist perspective, however, Gould’s nostalgic narrative might appear more in the tradition of manly intellectuals. Conversely, writing in the anthropological and feminist tradition, Haraway points out that masculine narratives of science have often made use of nostalgia to justify themselves. In the early 1900s, for example, Carl Akeley’s dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History showed the transformation of the image of the African continent “from nature worthy of manly fear to nature in need of motherly nurture.”68 By indirectly contrasting Akeley with Sontag, Haraway notes that Akeley, who shot wild animals in Africa, was surely feeling nostalgia not for endangered nature but for his “endangered self.”69 In fact, as Gould says self-deprecatingly, “I have never met a curator who would not prefer the happier task of restoring a remnant to vitality. Nearly anyone in this line of work would take a bullet for the last pregnant dodo.”70 For this paleontologist, the regenerative role of these “curators” is “heroic rather than futile.”71 Defending his own “endangered self” as well as the curators’ by appreciating that their work is heroic, Gould claims that we should “admire the person who [. . .] strives valiantly to rescue whatever can be salvaged, rather than retreating to the nearest corner to weep or assign fault.”72 Just as Dawkins is excited at the news of the dodo DNA, rather than remaining sentimental about his friend who wept for the dodoes, Gould wishes he could witness the “last pregnant dodo,”73 rather than merely feeling nostalgia for the lost species: “Dodos provide a particularly good illustration for my two conflicting principles: lament at the paucity of preserved remains, and blame for death largely laid to the victim’s inadequacy.”74 In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s Frans is “staring at a single white dodo’s egg”75 all day. Taking a similar attitude to Haraway’s Akeley—“the western image of darkest to lightest Africa”76—but a perverse version of it, Frans points his gun at the egg to “destroy the infant, egg of light into egg of darkness.”77 The narrator shows that Frans’s self is endangered, indicating the feeling of unsettledness he experiences between piety and impiety, which, in turn, could be regarded as a sign of the endangerment of his Calvinistic self: “Are they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as dodoes?”78 Frans knows that he himself looks like a dodo in this light; thus, he sticks to his nostalgic weapon, distinguishing himself from the doomed dodo. In fact, Frans’s fear for his endangered self might be caused not only by anxiety about his manliness but also by a perplexity about his humanness: “[The dodoes] and the

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humans who used to hunt them, brothers in Christ, the little baby they dream now of sitting near, roosting in his stable, feathers at peace, watching over him and his dear face all night long. . . . ”79 Even though the narrator explains that such a dream is nothing but the “purest form of European adventuring,”80 the breakdown of the boundary between humans and animals is connected directly to the transformation of Tyrone Slothrop and the heterodox attitudes of his ancestor William, who is introduced to us as a “peculiar bird.”81 As noted above, William writes about his sympathy for pigs, but because of its impiety, his book On Preterition is banned and burned in Boston. Though he finally sails back to England, his descendant Tyrone Slothrop dreams that William’s vision may come true in the anarchic Zone of Germany just after the fall of the Third Reich. Wearing a pig costume for a town ceremony, with a female pig kissing him, Tyrone feels neither anxiety nor perplexity about his endangered self for a moment. Of course, the selves of William and Tyrone are not so simple that neither of them can play a role in integrating the scattered parts of the whole story of Gravity’s Rainbow, and this unsettled situation of the human protagonists can be interpreted as a postmodern way to neutralize the negative power of nostalgia by irony. For postmodern irony on extinction, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) ranks beside Gravity’s Rainbow. After being kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians, Billy Pilgrim, who is “trapped in the amber of this moment [as bugs],”82 experiences how it is to live without cause and effect. Billy’s nostalgia lessens with the increasing randomness of the conception of time. From the Tralfamadorians, he learns that “we will all live forever, no matter how dead we may sometimes seem to be.”83 The narrator also says the Tralfamadorians have an interest in Charles Darwin because he teaches that “those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements.”84 This sketch of Darwinism seems to conflict with what Billy learns from them, but the ambivalent mixture of feelings about extinction is also a typical tendency of postmodern literature. Then, in order to express his apocalyptic vision in which Homo sapiens will go extinct in the course of time, like the dodo, Quammen adapts the viewpoint of the Tralfamadorians into his narrative, The Song of the Dodo: “Eons in the future, paleontologists from the planet Tralfamadore will look at the evidence and wonder what happened on Earth to cause such vast losses so suddenly at six points in [geological] time.”85 His adoption of the Tralfamadorians’ concept reminds us of Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable,” in which the narrator is outside of geological time, asking a philosophical question about “[w]hat a Human and his/her Brain—or rather the Brain and its Human—would resemble at the moment when they leave the planet forever, before its destruction.”86 Quammen confronts us with a fear of our own destruction by letting us know how difficult and strange it is to imagine the phenomenon of extinction without knowledge of the specific

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sequence of events leading to the end. Quammen’s narrative tries to remove the nostalgic tone from the worn-out dodo story, spoiling our enthusiasm for extinction: “She waited. She didn’t know it, nor did anyone else, but she was the only dodo on Earth. When the storm passed, she never opened her eyes. This is extinction.”87 “We need not marvel at extinction,”88 writes Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859). As Chris Danta notes, extinction for Darwin is a “gradual process,” and such scientific realism paradoxically results in the production of anti-scientific modern fables such as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. According to Danta, “the transformation of human into animal or of animal into human in the post-Darwinian fable is more likely to figure finitude and extinction.”89 In comparison with Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, however, Pynchon’s characters, like Vonnegut’s, are more lenient with the cause and effect of the real events precisely because their narratives are always retold by someone else, as if their fables are transforming. Indeed, what we read of Frans’s fantasy about the dodoes is as retold by Pirate, who is the organizer of the banana breakfast and has a “strange talent for [. . .] getting inside the fantasies of others.”90 After using his supernatural power to sneak into the mind of the Dutch double agent Katje Borgesius, who will be a decoy for Slothrop by serving as prey for Grigori the giant octopus, Pirate is somehow “haunted”91 by her ancestor, Frans. This trans-chronological cycle of the narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow is an alternative way of telling the extinction story. It is not von Braun’s words but Pynchon’s literary imagination that affirms our “belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death,” which enables us to feel nostalgia for all periods of history, including the future, giving us the grace to rethink what we talk about when we talk about extinction. NOTES 1. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 3. Italics in original. 2. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 10. 3. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 2. 4. Steven C. Weisenburger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel (Athens: University of Georgia, 2006), 16. Referring to the full passage from which von Braun’s words are quoted, Joseph Tabbi notes that this rocket engineer “treats life not as form but as an accumulated sum.” Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 6. 5. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 166. 6. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 166. J. Paul Narkunas points out that thanks to polymerization, IG Farben’s scientists could develop the “living plastic Imipolex-G,” through which Pynchon can envision “nonanthropocentric agency of polymers.”

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J. Paul Narkunas. “Corporatizing Life in A World System with Thomas Pynchon: ‘Networks of Interest’ and Dispersed Organization,” Criticism 58, no. 4 (2016): 661. 7. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 10. 8. According to science writer Richard Francis, pigs, even if perfectly domesticated, could until recently survive by themselves, so that “escaped porkers could manage well without human provisions.” As he describes, “The pig, both wild and domestic, is quite an evolutionary success story, and it deserves much more admiration than it is generally accorded,” whereas only “quite recently” has it become possible to “develop pigs that would not be able to survive in a feral state.” Richard C. Francis, Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 125. 9. Mark Richard Siegel, Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow (Port Washington: National University Publications, 1978), 88. 10. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 446. 11. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 446. 12. Siegel, Pynchon, 88. 13. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 555. 14. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 555. 15. Der Springer, a black marketeer in occupied Germany, says to Slothrop, “[W]e define each other. Elite and preterite, we move through a cosmic design of darkness and light.” Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 495. 16. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 555. 17. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 555. 18. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 556. 19. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 555. 20. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 553. 21. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 554. 22. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 84. 23. Leo Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” in Thomas Pynchon, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), chap. 8, Kindle. 24. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 78. 25. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Berlin: Schocken Books, 1951; New York: Penguin Classics, 2017), chap. 12, Kindle. 26. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, chap. 12, 27. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 229. 28. John O. Stark argues that the narrative technique Pynchon adopts in Gravity’s Rainbow could be explained as “infinite regress.” Stark exemplifies this technique by quoting the scene in which the laboratory is seen as a maze. John O. Stark, Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 7. 29. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 229. 30. John Semley, review of Frederick Wiseman, by Joshua Siegel, Cinéaste, summer, 2011.

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31. Chuck Kraemer, “Fred Wiseman’s ‘Primate’ Makes Monkeys of Scientists,” review of Primate, directed by Frederick Wiseman, New York Times, December 1, 1974. 32. Kraemer, “Fred Wiseman’s ‘Primate.’” 33. Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions, chap. 6. 34. Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” chap. 8. It might be helpful for us to quote an explanation of “ontological comedy” by Slavoj Žižek in order to stress the fact it is not how the director or author depicts an object that is essential but through what the objects are viewed. Taking a “large screenlike window” of the visitor’s site building on the southern side of the demilitarized zone in Korea as an example, Žižek points out, “Nothing substantially changes here; it is merely that, viewed through the frame, reality turns into its own appearance.” Such a frame is exactly what Wiseman virtually offers to us in his documentary through cinéma vérité. Slavoj Žižek, “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua),” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 226–49. 35. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 186 36. Roger Cailois posits that what Jules Verne intends to write by using the word “squid” in his original novel must actually be a giant octopus because of the number of the creature’s tentacles, adding that the fantasy of the giant octopus under the sea is an invention of Romanticism in literature. Roger Cailois, Tako: Souzou no Sekai wo Shihaisuru Rinri wo Saguru (La Pieuvre; Essai sur la logique de l’imaginarie; The Octopus: Essay on the Logic of Imagination), trans. Mikio Tsukasa (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2019), 70–76. 37. Charles Clerc, ed., Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 145. David Cowart suggests that Slothrop’s first encounter with Katje is like the knightly hero’s rescuing of “one [. . .] from the traditional monster.” David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 129. 38. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 187. The onomatopoeia “WHAM!” will also remind us of Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon-strip style art titled “Whaam!” (1963). 39. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 571. 40. The relationship between Grigori/Grischa and Dr. Porkyevitch is not necessarily fictitious. As noted by Australian philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith, “[O]ctopuses have an ability to adapt to the special circumstances of captivity and their interaction with human keepers.” Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (Sydney: William Collins, 2016), 59. Since 2008, Godfrey-Smith has dived into the sea to think about “animal minds” through the life of cephalopods: “If we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.” Godfrey-Smith, The Octopus, 15. 41. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 189. 42. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 331. 43. In an episode titled “A Whale of a Tale” in Plasticman (January 1943), the protagonist Plastic Man chases the enemy’s submarine, which is disguised as a whale. He finally transforms his body into a large octopus to hold the body of the submarine. In fact, the Plastic Man’s body is not only plastic but also elastic, so he is virtually

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unconstrained in his ability to extend his arms and legs. As Jeffery L. Meikle points out, the idea of “plastic” was confused with “elastic” in 1940s America. Jeffery L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 153. 44. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 331. 45. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 52. 46. The metaphorization of the octopus, however, can be frequently shown in satirical drawings such as one from 1904 of Standard Oil represented as an evil giant octopus. Richard Schweid, Octopus (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 148, Kindle. Pynchon’s Grigori is also close to the octopuses filmed by the French documentary director Jean Painlevé, who released short films titled La Pieuvre (The Octopus, 1928) and Les amours de la pieuvre (The Love Life of the Octopus, 1965), in which an octopus snatching a crab and eating it is filmed. James Leo Cahill explains on La Pieuvre that “[t]he octopus’s itinerary from abstract laboratory to specific natural milieu makes a passage through uncanny and oneiric landscapes of human imagination, where the incongruity of the octopus’s trajectory produces images that bring together distant realities with a powerful charge of the surreal.” James Leo Cahill, Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 64. In 2004, Zak Smith adapted the text of Gravity’s Rainbow into a series of drawings and paintings, including “100 Girls and 100 Octopuses” (2005) and Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (original exhibited in 2004, published in 2006). Some collections of essays on Pynchon, including The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (2012) and Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives (2010), have used Smith’s illustrations in Pictures as their cover images. 47. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 85. Italics in original. 48. Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 103. 49. David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (New York: Scribner, 1996), chap. 4, Kindle. 50. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 108. 51. Thomas H. Schaub, “Plot, Ideology, and Compassion in Mason & Dixon,” in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin, 201. 52. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 111. 53. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 8. 54. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977; New York: Penguin Books, 2021), chap. 1, Kindle. 55. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 109. 56. Sontag, On Photography, chap. 1. 57. Philip Steadman, Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), xv. 58. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 280. 59. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 280. 60. Melissa Lam compares The Crying of Lot 49 and Nabokov’s Lolita in terms of outsiderness in the land of America, where the cultural landscape “evokes a high

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artificiality that is manifested in the American language.” Melissa Lam, Disenfranchised from America: Reinventing Language and Love in Nabokov and Pynchon (Lanham: University Press of America, 2009), xv. 61. Slovic, Going Away to Think, chap. 5. 62. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 301. 63. Slovic, Going Away to Think, chap. 5. 64. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 276. 65. Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale, 276. 66. Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History (New York: Harmony, 1998), 231. 67. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain, 233. 68. Haraway, Primate Visions. chap. 3. 69. Haraway, Primate Visions. chap. 3. 70. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain, 233–34. 71. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain, 234. 72. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain, 234. 73. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain, 234. 74. Gould, Leonardo’s Mountain, 237. 75. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 109. 76. Haraway, Primate Visions. chap. 3. 77. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 109. 78. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 110. 79. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 111. 80. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 111. 81. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 554. 82. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Modern Library, 2019), chap. 4, Kindle. 83. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, chap. 10. 84. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, chap. 10. 85. Quammen, The Song of the Dodo, chap. 10. 86. Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable,” 83. 87. Quammen, The Song of the Dodo, chap. 4. 88. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 322. Kindle. 89. Chris Danta, Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chap. 1, Kindle. 90. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 12. 91. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 620.

Chapter 4

Who’s Afraid of the Big Badass? Vineland and Inherent Vice

“Back in the old days, a three-hundred-foot tree, about twelve-foot across, would take two men right around three days to fell,” says the narrator of The Redwoods (1967), an Academy Award-winning short documentary film sponsored by the Sierra Club, while emphasizing how quickly and systematically modern forestry accomplishes its business: “Right today a man can rip through a tree in about one hour. . . . I doubt that my dad ever dreamed that there’d be an end to these redwoods someday.”1 Such a lament has the emotional power to build a sense of crisis among people who live not only in rural or forested but also in urban and suburban areas. The acceleration of deforestation can be shown directly through the visual images of the film,2 but the symbolism of cut-down giant trees or bare hills does not seem to have effective leverage over the greediness of capitalism.3 As Jason W. Moore writes in Capitalism in the Web of Life, “[I]t is entirely possible for specific mineral veins or specific forests to be wiped out in a biophysical sense without provoking a capitalist crisis.”4 What Moore calls “Capitalism’s Cheap Nature strategy” was effective from the 17th century to the “rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s,” and these four centuries can be regarded as a “process of getting extra-human natures—and humans too—to work for very low outlays of money and energy.”5 Following this explanation, Pynchon’s fourth novel, Vineland (1990), and seventh novel, Inherent Vice (2009), are set in the final stage of the strategy, focusing on the misfits who live around the forest and beach areas of an alternative California in the Nixon and Reagan eras. Indeed, Aunt Reet in Inherent Vice, whom a private eye Doc Sportello relies on whenever he needs to know “anything touching on the world of property,”6 straightforwardly accuses developers of destructing the environment by sarcastically saying “they make Godzilla look like a conservationist.”7 This sarcastic blaming can be applied to the conceptual heirs of Pierce Inverarity in The 65

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Crying of Lot 49 because the fictitious 1960s California in The Crying of Lot 49 and the setting of Vineland and Inherent Vice are almost the same. While developers are active leaders of “Capitalism’s Cheap Nature strategy,” old-fashioned developers such as “Mickey” Wolfmann in Inherent Vice have experienced rapidly diminishing powers since the 1970s. In the alternative 1984 of Vineland, when the Japanese are “buying up unprocessed logs as fast as the forests [of redwoods in Vineland] could be clearcut,”8 the narrator alludes to the beginning of the rampant plague of “faceless predators”9 that are misunderstood to be UFOs or Godzilla in Vineland, the forerunner of which is called “Golden Fang” in Inherent Vice. The rise of the “faceless predators” also signals the decline of earlier symbolic creatures in Pynchon’s works, such as King Kong and his ancestors. In his 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” Pynchon imagines a genealogy of living things that are “Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings” in both literature and films, from “Alfonso the Good” in The Castle of Otranto (1765) and the creature in Frankenstein (1818) to King Kong (1933).10 However, he holds back from saying who King Kong’s heir is; rather, he points out that even science fiction in “the Atomic Age and the cold war” was not motivated by the traditional Luddism because the coming catastrophe caused by a nuclear war would be much more transcendent than these Bad and Big creatures’ doings. Hence, Godzilla, a monster awoken by the 1950s hydrogen bomb test, is already an object of nostalgia for Pynchon in 1984 and after.11 In fact, a good-natured joke in Inherent Vice such as “Hey, like Godzilla always sez to Mothra—why don’t we go eat some place?”12 not only makes the Japanese monster look lovable but also makes us human beings feel bigger. Interestingly enough, Pynchon refers to “Godzilla” repeatedly in his “California novels”—The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice.13 First is “Godzilla II,” the name of “the about-to-be-hijacked vessel” in The Crying of Lot 49.14 This “Godzilla” principally seems nothing but a cultural allusion, emphasizing the postmodernist playfulness shown in the scene of the boat chase on Lake Inverarity: “The Paranoids cast off, backed the ‘Godzilla II’ out from the pier, turned and with a concerted whoop took off like a bat out of hell, nearly sending Di Presso over the fantail.”15 But it is also possible to regard the name as a Pynchonesque attempt to trivialize the monster, as he would do in Inherent Vice, in order to emphasize the reality of the environmental degradation caused by the developer related to Pierce Inverarity: “earth-moving machines, a total absence of trees, the usual hieratic geometry.”16 Since Vineland, his first novel in the seventeen years after Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon has gradually shifted his narrative motif from the

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ontological insecurity of individuals to that of “legal persons” such as enterprises or organizations, leading to a misuse of the concept of insurance or compensation. As Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko (2007) tells us, it was on February 18, 1971, that Nixon proposed a new national health strategy, but at that time he already understood that “the less care they [Health Maintenance Organizations] give them [people], the more money they make.”17 Vineland depicts how easily and cold-heartedly the system in the “Computer Age” can terminate the lives of marginalized people such as Zoyd Wheeler,18 who was playing “the main title theme from Godzilla, King of the Monsters”19 in a gig for Kahuna Airlines but now lives on disability benefits for mental health conditions.20 Indeed, what is foregrounded in the narrative is not the paradox of the counterculture in the 1960s, but the illogicality of the structure of welfare provisions such as health insurance after the 1970s. In Vineland, not only the airlines—small ones like Kahuna Airlines, unfortunately, cannot afford insurance—but also “the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives,”21 a feminist commune that has settled in California, need to arrange for any kind of insurance, and these facts really matter for the narrator of the novel, as well as for their administrations. Moreover, fictitious 1980s Tokyo in Vineland is attacked by a giant “saurian creature” that could be “one hundred meters high”22; however, Pynchon never identifies the creature as Godzilla but merely narrates that “Wawazume Life & Non-Life” pays the insurance to “the shadowy world conglomerate Chipco,” which had asked to change the insurance policy to cover “damage from any and all forms of animal life” just before the appearance of “a gigantic animal footprint” on the former site of a Chipco laboratory.23 By adopting insurance as a literary motif in Vineland and Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s attitude toward risk here is rendered differently from in V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Indeed, while also being a term that means what the insurance companies refuse to accept as risk, “inherent vice” implies the shift of the Pynchonesque dichotomy between Elect and Preterite to one between insured and uninsured. Even in Vineland and Inherent Vice, some characters remain Preterite (Zoyd and his ex-wife, Frenesi Gates, Frenesi’s friend, DL Chastain, and DL’s partner, Takeshi Fumimota, and Zoyd’s nemesis, Hector Zuñiga, and the assassinated activist, Weed Atman, in Vineland; Larry “Doc” Sportello24 and his ex-lover Shasta Fay Hepworth, Doc’s friend Denis and Doc’s survey respondent Coy Harlingen, and Doc’s nemesis “Bigfoot” Bjornsen in Inherent Vice), while others are Elect (federal prosecutor Brock Vond, Presidents Nixon and Reagan, and successful entrepreneur Ralph Wayvone, Sr., in Vineland; real estate mogul “Mickey” Wolfmann, Mickey’s wife Sloane, the wealthy Crocker Fenway, and President Nixon in Inherent Vice). However, this differs from Pynchon’s former novels as neither Preterite nor Elect can avoid being sorted into insured or uninsured.

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Of course, as mentioned above, “inherent vice” itself is insurance terminology for a natural characteristic by which, for example, goods in cargo such as bananas or eggs can be made to go rotten or damaged in such a way that insurance companies will deny coverage. In Inherent Vice, Sportello, a private eye living near Gordita beach, says with feeling that even if California were an ark for those who escaped from a mysterious continent called Lemuria sinking into the Pacific, Californians Lemurians could not be covered by any insurance. Doc recalls what Aunt Reet often says to him: “Mexican families bounced out of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium, American Indians swept out of Bunker Hill for the Music Center, Tariq’s neighborhood bulldozed aside for Channel View Estates.”25 Following two historical events, a fictitious development of the land named “Channel View Estates” is introduced as one of the latest vices at the time of the novel’s setting, 1970. Almost all of Doc’s friends grieve for the degradation of the natural environment: The “environmental abuse” of Channel View Estates reminds Farley of “jungle clearings” in Vietnam; to Spike, who is obsessed with “the El Segundo oil refinery and tanks up the coast,” Sortilège agrees that “[t]hey’re destroying the planet,” while optimistically saying, “The good news is that like any living creature, Earth has an immune system too, and sooner or later she’s going to start rejecting agents of disease like the oil industry. And hopefully before we end up like Atlantis and Lemuria.”26 California is changing because of its inherent vice, which is, in the words of Doc’s lawyer, “what you can’t avoid.”27 In Vineland, we realize that the innocence of the Californian natural environment is partially symbolized by an imaginary creature of the forest called Bigfoot, and the protagonist and his friends regard themselves simply as relics of the past: “You and me, Zoyd, we’re like Bigfoot. Times go on, we never change.”28 Ironically enough, in Inherent Vice, there is a man whose very name is Bigfoot, who is not only an LAPD detective and nemesis for Doc but also appears in advertisements for Channel View Estates. Eventually, however, Doc is able to understand that young Bigfoot also knows how sacred the land they live in is, just as the real “Bigfoot,” as a mysterious creature in the redwoods, may be a symbol of the “inherent” innocence trapped in the “vice” of the world of the 1970s and 1980s. What connects the natural environments of California with the insurance-oriented postmodern world in Vineland is “Shade Creek,” whose villagers are a kind of zombie called “Thanatoids.” As James Berger notes, “The Thanatoids are symptoms—physical marks on the social body—of the traumatic ’60s now haunting and contributing to the trauma of the ’80s.”29 Thanatoids can be divided into the two generations before and after the Vietnam War—“Since the end of the war in Vietnam, the Thanatoid population had been growing steeply”30—and the latter seems to be assimilated to

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1960s hippies living in the 1980s. Hence, just like an insurance adjuster, who investigates the facts regarding insurance claims, Takeshi Fumimota starts his business of “karmic adjustment” for the Thanatoids, victimized by “karmic imbalances”31 that are caused by “dispossession and betrayal” owing to troubles over “land titles and water rights” with “goon squads and vigilantes, landlords, lawyers, and developers.”32 Thanatoids, who are newcomers to the redwood areas of California, begin to settle at the “confluence of Shade Creek and Seventh River.”33 Vineland County can be located between two real counties, Del Norte County and Humboldt County, while the “Seventh River” is an imaginary addition to the real Six Rivers: the Smith, Klamath, Trinity, Mad, Van Duzen, and Eel Rivers. Vineland is said to have been a part of the territory of the Yurok, a tribe of Native Americans in northern California. As T. T. Waterman explains in Yurok Geography (1920), the Yurok territory was located between Crescent City and Eureka, running alongside the Klamath River.34 The same area now consists of a Native American reservation, state parks, national parks, and small towns along freeways and highways, and “Shade Creek” is a place where the European settlement of Yurok territory in the late 18th century is repeated by the Thanatoid repopulation. There might exist a Bigfoot who can lift big boulders in the woods, dog-size steelhead in the river, and a lost town among the real ghost towns, where the blackberries grow thickly. These insomniac villagers are Thanatoids, and Pynchon allows us to imagine another history of misfits who need welfare or “karmic adjustment” by overlapping the new settlements of Thanatoids with the real folklore of the redwood area. Legend has it that the spirits of the Seventh River, called woge, attempted to withdraw before the influx of the first humans. Some succeeded in their evacuation, but others did not. The hippies then turned the legend to their own advantage as human beings by using the karmic notion of “reincarnation”: “Hippies they talked to said it could be reincarnation—that this coast, this watershed, was sacred and magical, and that the woge were really the porpoises, who had left their world to the humans.”35 The symbolism of the porpoises here reminds us of dolphins “who would succeed man”36 in The Crying of Lot 49, and indeed, some locals in Vineland interpret the myth of the woge’s transformation anthropocentrically: “[I]f we started fucking up too bad, [. . .] they [the porpoises] would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us. . . . ”37 Such hippie talk also recalls Walt Whitman’s anthropocentrism as expressed in his “Song of the Redwood-Tree”: “We [the trees] welcome what we wrought for through the past, / And leave the field for them [the humans].”38 In the history of American literature, as Peter Johnstone’s anthology of writing about redwoods shows, many authors, including Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Tom Wolfe, have been enchanted by the symbolism of redwoods. Whitman’s “Song of the Redwood-Tree” is

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by far the most anthropocentric example: In the poem, Whitman hears the “[v]oice of a mighty dying tree in the redwood forest dense” and sees “the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal, / Clearing the ground for broad humanity, the true America, heir of the past so grand, / To build a grander future.”39 Indeed, images of deforestation have had different implications from generation to generation. For example, on the jacket cover of Vineland (both the Little, Brown and Penguin editions), we can see a photograph taken by Darius Kinsey at Crescent Camp in Washington in 1934.40 It is hard to see this image without having a negative impression of human deeds. Though Elaine B. Safer holds that this Kinsey photo “points to the purposeful wiping out of the country’s natural resources (most often by government decree) and the absence of imaginative and creative development that is the American heritage,”41 such an interpretation of the picture is clearly based on contemporary environmental consciousness, and its original intent might be hard to see today.42 “Kinsey admired and spotlighted the chopper’s courageous dominance over the large trees,” explains Lori Vermaas, who describes “the chopper’s victory as fearless expressions of the American empire’s triumph over nature at the end of the nineteenth century.”43 Pynchon’s narrator also refers to older photographs, taken before Kinsey’s, by comparing the light in them with that of Vineland in the 1970s, when Zoyd and his daughter Prairie had just begun to live there and did not yet know what would happen in the next decade. The photos were taken around the turn of the twentieth century, showing villagers among the wild nature of the Pacific—basalt cliffs, the redwoods—and the narrator says the shared quality of the light shows that these are “territories of the spirit.”44 Amid the “rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s,”45 the redwood forest of Vineland is still able to inspire Zoyd and Prairie to dream about the spiritual territories. In fact, the name “Prairie” plays a significant role in the Yurok myth: “In these myth times there was one flat ‘prairie,’ or meadow, all the way to qe’nek and above; but when these wo’gê [sic] people went away they ‘threw it all around,’ leaving it very much broke up with ravines and hills, as it is now.”46 Thus, the name “Prairie” potentially represents the ultimate desire of the hippies to return to the place as the origin of the spiritual beings, and the child’s first experience of the redwoods is described as a “return.”47 The narrator says that as a baby, Prairie watched the redwood trees all the way while traveling to her new home, very quietly talking to the trees as if she could hear their voices and respond to them. Prairie’s precocious way of talking in a “matter-of-fact tone” are precursors of the realization of Zoyd’s dream to directly communicate with nature. And of course, Baby Prairie’s brief but direct dialogue with the tree is apparently resonant with Tyrone Slothrop’s conversation with the trees in Gravity’s Rainbow.

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Vineland broadly consists of four stories, each of which has its own protagonist: Zoyd, Takeshi, DL, and Frenesi; and Prairie’s quest for Frenesi combines them. Interestingly enough, while Prairie tries capturing as much information as possible about her mother Frenesi by watching footage shot by a 1960s radical leftist group named “24 fps,” the mother’s recollection of her daughter is instead aided by photography: “a Polaroid, mostly green and blue, North Coast colors, of a girl wearing jeans and a Pendleton shirt in a Black Watch plaid, sitting on a weathered wood porch beside a large dog with its tongue out.”48 Even though the dog, named Desmond, disappears as soon as Prairie’s quest begins, the dog is a significant other for Prairie too. Moreover, “A camera is a gun. An image taken is a death performed”49 is a manifesto offered by 24 fps, which seems to be an adaptation of the words of Susan Sontag in On Photography that we already mentioned in the previous chapter of this book: “Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder.”50 Though it suggests that the act of photographic representation, “shooting,” could be an alternative way to promote their revolution, the manifesto is ironically accomplished by Frenesi’s betrayal, which makes Rex, one of the group members, literally shoot a symbolic character of the antiestablishment, Weed Atman. More importantly, this gun is given to Frenesi by Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor who believes that the world can be separated into the “make-believe” world of the camera and the “real” world of the gun.51 From V. to Vineland, and even in Bleeding Edge (2013), Pynchon does not so easily allow the technology for representing reality to have the power to subvert the real world—not even a gun. As it happens, Frenesi brings back the gun by making the excuse to herself that incorporating the gun in the master shot of her film might add a “more intense level of truth” to “the 24-frame-per-second truth” that she still believes in.52 However, the “Polaroid” of her daughter and a dog given to the middle-aged Frenesi expresses an alternative truth regarding representation. Quoting the words of Brock again, who asked Frenesi, “What if this is some branch point in your life, where you’ll have to choose between worlds?”53 when giving her the gun, we can say that her looking at the picture, in which Prairie and Desmond are “squinting upward at nothing, at high risk for hostile magic against the image,”54 is the very branch point.55 In fact, in addition to Prairie, Desmond is also chased away by Brock, and the dog’s life is under threat because he “joined up with a pack of dispossessed pot-planters’ dogs [. . .] who were haunting the local pastures and not above ganging innocent cows at their grazing, an offense that could carry a penalty of death by deer rifle.”56 Because the dog belongs to Prairie and her father, the possibility that his own dog could be shot deepens the ties between them. Whereas the photography of Prairie and Frenesi “shot” by Zoyd urges

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his ex-wife to go back to his daughter because of nostalgia, the possibility that Desmond could be “shot” increases Zoyd’s anxiety. We must recognize that the dog is a unique existence standing at the “branch point” between the “make-believe” and the “real” for Zoyd and his family. Though Desmond is rarely depicted throughout the whole story of Vineland, except for moments when his existence can be “shot” by a rifle or on camera, this intended absence might help us grasp the relationships that exist among human beings, animals, and technology. At this moment, Desmond is totally independent of Zoyd, but the narrator still regards him as “Zoyd’s own dog”—his possession—since it is his anxiety that guarantees his relations with the dog. Of course, the single relationship between two species is only a small part of millions of ecological networks, connecting billions of different species with one another and their inorganic environments. However, as Donna Haraway claims in her 2003 book, dogs are very useful in developing narratives of ecological life on earth: the “inescapable, contradictory story of relationships—co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all.”57 After almost two decades of developing her cyborg feminism since “Reagan’s Star Wars times of the mid-1980s,” Haraway succeeds in dramatically advancing her postmodern ecology by shifting her metaphors from cyborgs to dogs at a time “when secondary Bushes threaten to replace the old growth of more livable naturecultures in the carbon budget politics of all water-based life on earth,”58 a shift that is given partial expression in The Companion Species Manifesto. Referring to Marilyn Strathern’s study, Haraway claims that “conceiving of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as either polar opposites or universal categories is foolish;”59 for her, Strathern’s term “partial connections” can be paraphrased into the “relations of significant otherness” for a “cross-species conversation.”60 Quoting the famous companion animal trainer and language philosopher Vicki Hearne, Haraway then also explains that “Hearne’s arguments about companion animal happiness, reciprocal possession, and the right to the pursuit of happiness are a far cry from the ascription of ‘slavery’ to the state of all domestic animals, including the ‘pet.’”61 By comparing slavery with the domestication of animals, Hearn and Haraway urge us to understand alternative ideas of property and happiness when considering the relationship between human and non-human beings. As in Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which is mentioned in the previous chapter of this book, Haraway focuses on the conception of reciprocity: Possession—property—is about reciprocity and rights of access. If I have a dog, my dog has a human; what that means concretely is at stake. Hearne remodels Jefferson’s ideas of property and happiness even as she brings them into the worlds of tracking, hunting, obedience, and household manners.62

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What the concept of “domestication” implies might be changed if we regard a “pet” as a member of a “companion species,” as Haraway suggests in her manifesto: “In sum, ‘companion species’ is about a four-part composition, in which co-constitution, finitude, impurity, historicity, and complexity are what is.”63 As for the relationship between Prairie and Desmond, “My diary? My hair stuff, my clothes? Desmond?”64 is the first thing Prairie says when given the bad news that her house has been seized. While Desmond is in one way just another item on her list to possess here, toward the end of the novel, she and the dog finally seem to be “companions” for each other. After Brock dies, Desmond comes back to lick Prairie’s face. The persistent moving of the tongue is full of life, which cheers Prairie up, as well as the readers. This ending sounds less experimental than those of Pynchon’s earlier novels, but it can be read in relation to Haraway’s personal yet metaphorical episode with her own dog, especially because their reciprocal experiences are both accomplished through the tongue: “Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all my cells—a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis.”65 Through her tongue and its saliva, Cayenne is said to “colonize” her master. As noted earlier, it seems inappropriate to attempt to accomplish the Hearn–Haraway Jeffersonian ideal of reciprocity through the relationship between Zoyd and Desmond. Such a thing never happens in Vineland, except for in the nostalgic and magical area of the redwoods, where baby Prairie once talked with the tree. Thus, a lesson from Vineland seems to be that only Thanatoids, who are not truly insured (except for those insured by Takeshi and DL), can learn to live with non-human beings. It is an ironical vision, but what Pynchon argues here is close to Haraway’s attitude toward such beings. This becomes all the clearer when we think about Walter Benn Michaels’ argument concerning “legal rights for natural objects.” Referring to the court decision about the rights of trees in 1983, Michaels claims the idea that non-human beings have their own reality or ethic “might lead us to think of them [. . .] as a term in Haraway’s series “women, people of color, animals, the non-human environment.’66 Michaels denies comparing the rights and compensation of human beings and those of non-human beings with reference to their interests and the damage caused to them by humans; rather, he suggests identifying non-human beings as ‘a culture,’ that is, a reference point for human beings” identity, invoking Christopher D. Stone’s essay “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” When we recall that the trees, as well as the dog, represent significant others for Prairie and Slothrop, we see that Michaels’ argument is also the key to understanding how Pynchon regards non-human beings, including animals, natural environments, technology, and even “faceless predators”—legal persons, but who are different from humans:

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Because persons have interests (whether or not they can express them), they can be compensated for damage done to them—the law, as Stone says, can protect their “welfare.” But rivers and rocks have no interests; you can’t compensate a river for its diminished flow (due, say, to damming) by paying it off. [. . .] Persons can be compensated for the loss of their culture. [. . .] The deep-ecological defense of nature as a subject is thus more a defense of nature as an identity—of nature as a culture—than it is a defense of nature as a person.67

What Michaels, Haraway, and even Pynchon share is that simple personification is not the ideal way to take for granted the rights of non-human beings, who are not articulate. Rather, these writers experimentally try to extract the very “identity” from non-human beings, regarding it as something compensable. As for the dogs, while Pynchon creates a talkative dog named Fang in Mason & Dixon and a reading dog as a counterpart of Fang in Against the Day, in Inherent Vice, he instead creates something called the Golden Fang, which is not a dog but could be a big schooner, enterprise, syndicate, “the unthinkable vengeance,”68  or a generic concept of all of them like “W.A.S.T.E.” in The Crying of Lot 49—that is to say, another variation of the “faceless predators.” Therefore, what will be apparent here, ironically, is that Pynchon tries to think about compensation for or the insurance of “the faceless predators” and make it the motif of his narrative. Furthermore, the mysterious boat called Golden Fang is used to kidnap Mickey Wolfmann, a real-estate mogul (like Pierce Inverarity in The Crying of Lot 49). Interestingly, the combination of “Mickey” and “Wolfmann,” which literally means “wolf-man” in German, is a meaningful mixture of Disney (Mickey Mouse) and Nazi (the wolf). Just as Inverarity represents the capitalist dream and nightmare, Wolfmann is also a personification of the power of money, but, at the same time, has the negative potential to be prey for the “faceless predators.” Aunt Reet, a reliable informant for the protagonist, Doc Sportello, describes the complex character of Wolfmann as follows: “Westside Hochdeutsch mafia, biggest of the big, construction, savings and loans, untaxed billions stashed under an Alp someplace, technically Jewish but wants to be a Nazi, becomes exercised often to the point of violence at those who forget to spell his name with two n’s. What’s he to you?”69

Wolfmann’s contradictory personality seems so playful that it may appear useless to interpret it as some profound metaphor like that of Pierce Inverarity. However, looking back to the intertwined history of Disney, the Wolf, and the Nazis, we easily understand that what Pynchon represents here through

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the figure of Pierce’s heir is the personification of an already old-fashioned predator with a face. In 1933, the year Hitler became German chancellor, Disney’s animated short film Three Little Pigs, with its famous theme song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” became a blockbuster hit in the United States by implicitly caricaturing the national struggle of the “Great Depression” with representations of a wolf and pigs. In his book Walt Disney (2006), Neal Gabler notes that the day of the film’s release was May 27, “a little more than two months after the inauguration [of Franklin Roosevelt],” highlighting that this timing “couldn’t have been more fortunate” because the nation could interpret the story as a “parable of suffering (the wolf as economic adversity) and triumph (the industrious little pigs as the embodiment of President Roosevelt’s New Deal that promised the country relief).”70 However, it was just a matter of time in the United States before the interpretation of the “Big Bad Wolf” in the film would be changed from the Depression to Hitler. In 1941–42, Walt Disney Studio released two other animated short films, The Thrifty Pig and Blitz Wolf. The former reuses the film Three Little Pigs but diverts it into a Canadian war bond promotion; the latter is original but parodies Three Little Pigs by pitting “the porcine trio against ‘Adolf Wolf.’”71 It could be right to say that these animated animal fables are no more than shallow propaganda for the Allies, but what is more remarkable is that the Führer caricaturized as the “Big Bad Wolf” in Disney’s film has a complicated positioning in relation to the real Hitler’s affection for the wolf and the real status of this predator in Nazi Germany. As Boria Sax notes in Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (2000), Adolf Hitler, whose first name is derived from “noble wolf” (Adolfadel+Wulf) was fond of the metaphor of the wolf, preferring to be nicknamed “little wolf” or “uncle wolf.”72 Sax points out that “the most fundamental myth of the Nazi period was the idea that predators were closer to nature and possessed greater vitality than other creatures,” and “Germany became the first nation in modern times to place the wolf under protection” in 1934.73 As a “little noble predator” who needs protection, rather than a “Big Bad Wolf,” Mickey Wolfmann, “known to be a generous Reagan contributor,”74 appears in P.I. Sportello’s life as a victim of Golden Fang. In the opening scene, Sportello’s ex-girlfriend Shasta visits his office and says that Wolfmann’s wife and her boyfriend are planning to commit Wolfmann to “some loony bin.”75 Along with Sportello’s investigation, it gradually becomes clear that Wolfmann’s critical situation is a result of his own conversion: “Suddenly he decides to change his life and give away millions to an assortment of degenerates.”76 The real estate magnate says to Riggs, a boyfriend of Wolfmann’s wife, that he has an idea to provide free housing for everyone by letting Riggs design and build futuristic domes named “zonahedral domes,”77 which are an

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improved version of Buckminster Fuller’s home: “I can’t believe I spent my whole life making people pay for shelter, when it ought to’ve been free. It’s just so obvious.”78 The project was Wolfmann’s dream—an act of redemption for the wolf who was responsible for taking away the home from the little pigs—but after being brainwashed again, the site of the domes becomes a target of Wolfmann’s bombing, like the Big Bad Wolf’s assault on the pigs’ houses. When Pynchon’s protagonists try confronting predation in capitalist society, they need to transform the world itself proactively with the help of their paranoia. By reinterpreting the “double vision” that F. Scott Fitzgerald applied to the relationship between Nick Carraway and Gatsby,79 Pynchon lets Sportello narrate both what Wolfman has done and what he could be, all through the postmodern version of The Three Little Pigs, that is, Inherent Vice, which is not so tragic as The Great Gatsby or The Crying of Lot 49.80 Wolfmann’s existence can be narrated through the paranoia of the little pigs, such as Sportello. In this sense, it can be said that the role of the predators, Wolfman and Inverarity, is to drive the paranoia of the prey. Paradoxically enough, it is only through the threat of the wolf that the little pigs can find their place in the world. Indeed, Inverarity has passed away since the beginning of the story, and Wolfmann has lost his boundaries with others by overdosing on LSD. Under these circumstances, Pynchon’s little pigs would sing “Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?” while pretending to be frightened by the shadow of the “Big Badass.” In his 1984 essay on Luddism, Pynchon describes the form of “evil” he seeks in his stories as follows: There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.81

If Pynchon’s ideal “badass” were to be generated in his novels, it would surpass our imagination with its visualization. However, he has been narrating stories of a Nazi-like evil that has infiltrated contemporary America since V. without depicting Hitler or the Nazis as such an ultimate “badass.” And even in Inherent Vice, it is just the paranoia of Sportello that elevates Wolfmann’s linkage to the Nazi-like evil, making of him a fake badass. Among many rumors circulating, some imply that both Wolfmann and Shasta are no more than the Golden Fang’s prey. For instance, as Sportello’s lawyer discovers, somebody takes out “ocean marine insurance” on the schooner named Golden Fang just before it sails with Shasta aboard by making “Golden Fang Enterprises of Beverly Hills” a beneficiary.82 As David

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Cowart indicates, Sportello’s role of hearing about the trouble that Wolfmann and Shasta get into is similar to Carraway’s role of staring uselessly at the affair between Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. However, a definite difference between these “good, if reluctant, listeners”83 is the conclusions they draw from their stories. Carraway introspectively says, “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby [. . .] that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men.”84 On the other hand, Sportello regretfully says, “[M]y one big chance to rescue somebody like that from the clutches of the System, and I’m too late. And now Mickey’s back to them old greedy-ass ways.”85 For Sportello, “the abortive sorrows and shortwinded elations of men” are not objects of interest, but he confirms that they also do not provoke a “capitalist crisis,”86  nor does it matter whether a “real-estate big shot”87 disappears or not. Rather, the real mystery for Pynchon here is nothing but what preyed on Wolfmann—the Golden Fang—which could be the very “faceless predator,” having bigger power, with insurance coverage, than the System itself. As a tentative ending, Inherent Vice narrates the return of Coy Harlingen, who Sportello succeeds in rescuing from the “clutches of the System,” from which he failed to rescue Mickey Wolfmann. While this seems like a small but definitely happy ending to Inherent Vice, it might be misleading—the airline Coy and his family will ride with is “Kahuna Airlines,” the same airline preyed on by the “faceless predators” in Vineland. Hence, what we should recall here are the words by Gretchen, a coworker of Zoyd’s in Vineland: “It would have cost more than Kahuna wanted to spend. The word they all use is ‘insurance.’”88 NOTES 1. The Redwoods, directed by Trevor Greenwood, on Internet Archive, accessed December 23, 2021, https:​//​archive​.org​/details​/theredwoods. 2. The situation concerning the redwoods in California is not improving, and as portrayed in The Last Stand: Ancient Redwoods and The Bottom Lines, the 2001 documentary directed by Holiday Phelan, Charles Hurwitz’s 1985 takeover of a locally based lumber company in Humboldt County renders the environmental degradation of the redwoods more obvious than before. 3. For a further discussion of the environmental politics of the forests in California, especially in the 1990s, see Daniel Press, Democratic Dilemmas in the Age of Ecology: Trees and Toxics in the American West (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 79–107. 4. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), chap. 5, Kindle. 5. Moore, Capitalism, conclusion.

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6. Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 6. 7. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 7. The fact that the director of the 1998 film Godzilla, Roland Emmerich, created The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which portrays a nightmarish disaster caused by climate change, illustrates the connection between monster movies and environmental disasters. 8. Pynchon, Vineland, 5. 9. Pynchon, Vineland, 383. 10. Pynchon, “Luddite.” 11. Thomas H. Schaub claims that the transition of Pynchon’s narratives from the novels before Vineland resulted in the “genre of nostalgic (or bourgeois) tragedy.” Thomas H. Schaub, “Plot, Ideology, and Compassion,” 201. Albert Rolls argues that “the Sixties” represented in Vineland and Inherent Vice, which consist of “fragments, the disparate voices of the counterculture,” are one of the “literary Badasses,” like Frankenstein’s creature. Albert Rolls, Thomas Pynchon: The Demon in the Text (Brighton: Edward Everett Root, 2019), 41. 12. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 10. 13. Paul Thomas Anderson, director of the film Inherent Vice (2014), says that Pynchon’s writing has an inherently “ambling and rambling quality,” which remains in Anderson’s adaptation of the novel, even though the “movie is actually completely pared down to the essentials.” Pierre Sauvage and Paul Thomas Anderson, “Beware the Golden Fang! An Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson,” Cinéaste 40, no. 2 (2015): 20. It might be correct to say that this nature of Pynchon’s writing is typical in his later California novels, Vineland and Inherent Vice, in which the metaphorical use of proper names like Godzilla is less emphasized than that of King Kong in Gravity’s Rainbow. 14. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 50. 15. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 50. 16. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 48. 17. Sicko, directed by Michael Moore (2007; Universal City, CA: Gaiam Vivendi Entertainment, 2007), DVD. 18. Jeffrey Severs highlights the similarity between Wheeler’s family and The Simpsons, in which Pynchon himself made cameo appearances in 2004, especially in the role of the father as a “Pynchonian schlemihl,” while he never forgets to distinguish Zoyd from Profane and Slothrop because the former grows up a schlemihl with his children. Quoting Karma Waltonen, Severs claims that in The Simpsons episodes, the father of the Simpsons family, Homer, appears as an embodiment of “all that is bad about patriarchy and masculinity,” who almost turns into “the early twenty-first century liberal, sensitive man” by the end of the episodes, suggesting that this change recalls Pynchon’s transformation into a more open sympathizer of family reunions after the publication of Vineland. Jeffrey Severs, “Homer Is My Role Model’: Father-Schlemihls, Sentimental Families, and Pynchon’s Affinities with The Simpsons,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos, 198, 200. 19. Pynchon, Vineland, 65.

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20. The Zoids health care fraud scheme can be understood as a New Left critique of the welfare state. However, it is not aimed at overthrowing it because Zoids will prolong people’s lives along with the welfare state. The interdependence of the New Left and the welfare state is also repeated, in an expanded form, in the relationship between Frenesi and Vond. The novel describes the process of interdependence between leftist meaning-making and the welfare state system. Reiichi Miura, “Disease, Hippie and Neoliberalism: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” The American Review (Japanese) 45 (2011): 42. 21. Pynchon, Vineland, 107. 22. Pynchon, Vineland, 169. William Tsutsui points out that “the new 1980s Godzilla” was officially 80 meters high, “reflecting the growth of the Tokyo skyline, which would have dwarfed the 50-meter-tall Shōwa era [original] monster.” William M. Tsutsui, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017), chap. 2, Kindle. 23. Pynchon, Vineland, 142. 24. Nick Levey compares the “yo-yo” lives of Profane and Slothrop with that of Doc Sportello, which is “more like a yo-yo broken free of its master, chaotically rolling down the street.” Levey claims that such differences inevitably occur because Pynchon writes Inherent Vice as a “tale of mental fog and struggle,” which might be needed in the age of the Internet. Nick Levey, “Mindless Pleasures: Playlists, Unemployment, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice,” Journal of Modern Literature 39, no. 3 (2016): 53–54. 25. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 17. 26. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 105. 27. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 351. 28. Pynchon, Vineland, 7. 29. James Berger, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 174. Referring to Berger’s conception of “revised nostalgia” in his After the End, which characterizes the utopic tendency of narratives developed in Pynchon’s later works since Vineland, Nadine Attewell identifies the similarities and differences between the nostalgic natures conveyed in Vineland and Gravity’s Rainbow. Attewell suggests that the nostalgia conveyed in the Blitz section of Gravity’s Rainbow is symbolized by “the reality of these supersonic rockets,” which also reminds readers of “the impossibility of return, and the fatal absurdity of narrative causality,” whereas the other symbolic discourse of paranoia refuses to “accept discontinuity” by turning “the mechanics of a supersonic explosion into a conscious mockery of the abstraction ‘return.’” Nadine Attewell, “‘Bouncy Little Tunes’: Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and Narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 45, no. 1 (2004): 26–29. 30. Pynchon, Vineland, 320. 31. Pynchon, Vineland, 173. 32. Pynchon, Vineland, 172. 33. Pynchon, Vineland, 172. 34. T. T. Waterman, Yurok Geography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1920), map. 2.

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35. Pynchon, Vineland, 186. 36. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 118. 37. Pynchon, Vineland, 187. 38. Walt Whitman, “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” in Giants in the Earth: The California Redwoods, ed. Peter Johnstone (Berkeley: Heyday, 2001), 63. 39. Whitman, “Song of the Redwood-Tree,” 66. Cyrus R. Patell suggests the similarity between Reagan, Emerson, and Whitman’s ways of talking. While it is well-known that Reagan often quoted John Winthrop, he also referred to Emerson late in his presidency. Tracing an ideological lineage from Puritanism through Emersonianism to Reaganism, Patell argues that stories told by Reagan are “based on a consistently individualist interpretation of what it means to be an American.” In appreciation of Vineland’s accomplishment as a counternarrative to that of the Reagan administration, Patell emphasizes Jess Traverse’s quotation of Emerson’s essay “The Sovereignty of Ethics” (1878). Patell, Negative Liberties, ix–xi, 132–34. 40. Regarding the deforestation represented in Kinsey’s photographs as the act of slaughter, the Japanese writer Kenji Nakagami claims that the technology of photography itself could be a symbol of capitalism. According to Nakagami, the lumberjacks in Kinsey’s photographs were made to stand next to the giant trees, the enemy of civilization, to reveal their immense size. Kenji Nakagami, “Ningen wa Chiisakatta [Human Beings Were So Little],” Shagaku 5, no. 6 (1984): 100. 41. Elaine B. Safer, “Pynchon’s World and Its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland,” in The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994), 51. 42. As I confirmed with the curator at the Whatcom Museum, in Bellingham, Washington, which holds the Kinsey collection containing this photograph, it was not Pynchon but his publisher who visited the museum and chose the photograph because they preferred the shape of the smoke. Thus, this picture may not represent Pynchon’s intention. 43. Lori Vermaas, Sequoia: The Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 107. 44. Pynchon, Vineland, chap. 317. 45. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, conclusion. 46. Waterman, Yurok Geography, 251. 47. Pynchon, Vineland, 315. 48. Pynchon, Vineland, 347. 49. Pynchon, Vineland, 197. 50. Sontag, On Photography, chap. 1. 51. Pynchon, Vineland, chap. 12. Christopher Kocela notes that Frenesi’s “unchecked faith in the protective, transformative power of the camera” traps her in troublesome sexual relationships with Brook Vond and Weed Atman. Christopher Kocela, “Between Sangha and Sex Work: The Karmic Middle Path of Vineland’s Female Characters,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Giorgios Maragos (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018), 63. 52. Pynchon, Vineland, 241.

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53. Pynchon, Vineland, 241. 54. Pynchon, Vineland, 350. 55. Victoria de Zwaan suggests that the ending of Vineland shows that “it’s not too late,” unlike The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, while Frenesi herself shares the sense of “it’s too late” with Oedipa and Prentice. Though in both The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow, life is ontologically represented through the metaphor of a movie, “the life is a movie metaphor operates more as a stylistic device in Vineland.” Victoria de Zwaan, Interpreting Radical Metaphor in the Experimental Fictions of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), 90. If Frenesi could really regain her life outside of the film and be covered by something like “insurance,” it might be considered a significant change in Pynchon’s worlds. 56. Pynchon, Vineland, 357. 57. Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003), 12. 58. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 4–5. 59. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 8. 60. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 8. 61. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 53. 62. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 53–54. 63. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 16. 64. Pynchon, Vineland, 51. 65. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 1. 66. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 2, Kindle. 67. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, chap. 2. 68. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 318. 69. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 7. 70. Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 185. 71. Michael S. Shull and David E. Wilt, Doing Their Bit: Wartime American Animated Short Films, 1939–1945, 2nd ed. (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004/2014), 225n. 72. Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich (London: Continuum Books, 2000; Pittsburgh: Yogh & Thorn Books, 2017), 66. Citations refer to the 2017 edition. 73. Sax, Animals in the Third Reich, 64–66. 74. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 95. 75. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 3. 76. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 244. Italics in original. 77. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 62. 78. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 244. 79. As Ronald Berman notes, “time and place” in The Great Gatsby “imply a kind of double vision”: “It is easy to see that for Gatsby past and present are dangerously undifferentiated—but the reader’s sense of time and place is affected also by the way that Nick states his own perception and restates the dialogue he remembers. He will do for place what Gatsby does for time: impose upon its specificity the consciousness

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of what it was—and often what it is not.” Ronald Berman, The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 3. Thomas Schaub insists that The Crying of Lot 49 is a kind of repetition of The Great Gatsby, though he emphasizes in his reading that “Pynchon intentionally represents Oedipa’s experience as a departure from the Oedipal ideology of Fitzgerald’s novel and its narrator, Nick Caraway.” Thomas Schaub, “Influence and Incest: Relations between The Crying of Lot 49 and The Great Gatsby,” in Thomas Pynchon, ed. Niran Abbas (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 148. In this respect, the similarity between Doc and Nick should be interpreted as a symptom of a restoration of the Oedipal ideology of Fitzgerald. 80. By adopting Nick as a narrator, the narrative of The Great Gatsby succeeds in representing simultaneously what Gatsby has done and what he could be. In his foreword to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Pynchon compares Orwell’s idea of “doublethink” with Fitzgerald’s double vision: “In social psychology it has long been known as ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Others like to call it ‘compartmentalization.’ Some, famously F. Scott Fitzgerald, have considered it evidence of genius.” Thomas Pynchon, introduction to Nineteen Eighty-Four, centennial edition, by George Orwell (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949; New York: Plume, 2003), xi–xii. 81. Pynchon, “Luddite.” 82. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 120. 83. David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 126. 84. F. Scott. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1925; New York: Penguin Books, 2000), chap. 1.  Quoting the words of Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby—“[the new world’s] trees, the trees that made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dream”—Donald J. Greiner claims that the question of how American dreams had become corrupted, as described in The Crying Lot 49, is answered by Pynchon himself in his depiction of the destruction of nature in Mason & Dixon, even though the latter novel is set in the two centuries before the 1960s. Donald J. Greiner, “Thomas Pynchon and the Fault Lines of America,” Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 82–83. 85. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 334. 86. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, chap. 5. 87. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 4. 88. Pynchon, Vineland, 65.

Chapter 5

Sonnets for a Multispecies Cradle Mason & Dixon and Against the Day

In the summer of 2006, four months before the publication of Against the Day, Pynchon posted a description of his forthcoming book on the Internet: Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business, Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.1

This description conveys self-confidence, as well as self-parody. On one hand, the author of this passage tries to explain what Pynchon is attempting to do in Against the Day. On the other hand, by simplifying its complicated characters, describing them as “ordinary” in Pynchon’s world, and then confirming both the connection and disconnection between the real world and the fictional one, the style of narration may remind us of the song by the talkative dog in Mason & Dixon (1997), the “Learnèd English Dog” named “Fang.”2 The dog sings that if you want to ask questions about everything from fleas to the king’s monogamy, Persian princes, Polish blintzes, “Chinamen’s” geomancy, jumping beans, or flying machines, he will take great pleasure in answering them.3 As if Fang’s song were a synopsis of Mason & Dixon, its details end up appearing in this novel, though in a more complicated form. The similarity between Fang’s sales talk and the book description of Against the Day that appears on its Amazon.com shopping page as a promotion of the publisher might be revealed by noting that each emphasizes what “the main purposes of fiction” are. The writer of the description asks us to understand that “[i]f it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two,” while excusing himself with caveats such as, “No reference to 83

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the present day is intended or should be inferred.” Conversely, as a kind of press agent, Fang explains the main rule of this fictional world, where many miraculous things are narrated: “Just as it suits your Fan-sy.”4 This “rule” is explained, despite the fact that everyone is conscious of living in “the Age of Reason,” a time when things are “less fantastick.”5 In fact, as Thomas H. Schaub states, Fang’s role overlaps with both that of Pynchon himself as the author and that of Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, as Pynchon’s ministerial narrator in this novel: “The author of Mason & Dixon is a kind of Learnèd Dog, a ‘tail-wagging Scheherazade’ offering ‘Provisions for Survival in a World less fantastick,’ just as Cherrycoke earns his room and board by keeping the children entertained.”6 While Pynchon never denies the contiguousness of his fiction with the real world, he admits that “a minor adjustment or two” is a primary requirement for the creation of fiction. Such a definition of fiction reminds us of what W. J. T. Mitchell says about “representation”: “Every representation exacts some cost,” maintains Mitchell, “in the form of lost immediacy, presence, or truth, in the form of a gap between intention and realization, original and copy,” and he parodically paraphrases it, “no representation without taxation.”7 Though the Learnèd English Dog claims to deny anything “Ministerial,”8 either religiously or politically, dogs in this novel represent what Pynchon experimentally depicts as an embodiment of the concept of “Representation.”9 Moreover, Pynchon pastiches the style of the 18th-century gothic novels, letting Fang represent the writers of those days, such as Horace Walpole, who in his meta-fictional preface to The Castle of Otranto (1764) declared the restoration of “preternatural events” while deploring that “[m]iracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances” in the Age of Reason.10 It might sound paradoxical, but in the preface to the first edition, as a putative “translator” of this novel, Walpole claimed that only a rational writer would be able to depict irrational phenomena in the irrational age, the Age of Miracles. In fact, however, the true author of Otranto is of course Walpole, who saw himself as a rational writer in the rational age. As already mentioned in the introduction of this book, Pynchon also lets a talkative dog, Fang in Mason & Dixon, explain how its own irrational existence stands for “Reason” due to its disbelief in the “supernatural”: “I may be præternatural, but I am not supernatural. ’Tis the Age of Reason, rrrf? There is ever an Explanation at hand, and no such thing as a Talking Dog,—Talking Dogs belong with Dragons and Unicorns.”11 In Against the Day, on the other hand, Pugnax, “a dog of no particular breed,”12 is an alternative to Fang, whose words can be understood by just a handful of people. Pugnax is a less talkative but more literate dog, who can read, “with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James.”13

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In contrast with Desmond in Vineland, Pugnax is present throughout the main part of the Against the Day, even though he is originally one of the characters in a fiction within a fiction, the series of Chums of Chance books, just like Murray the St. Bernard in The Crying of Lot 49, who performs in the movie within the novel. While Desmond is unleashed as soon as the narrative begins and returns at the very end of the novel, Fang is lost in the middle of the story, and another terrier, named Snake, remembers that “the credulous Fang in fact, who’ve trusted Humans with the Secret only to find themselves that very Evening in some Assembly Room full of Smoke and Noise, and no promise of Diner till after they’ve perform’d”—and later uncertainly returns as another terrier, neither Fang nor Snake, but something Mason terms Representation: “They hear swift footsteps close by,—and in a moment behold, approaching them, sniffing industriously, a Norfolk Terrier, of memorable Appearance. [. . .] ‘Why, he’s the very Representation . . . ?’”14 Indeed, Pynchon utilizes the concept of representation through two different types of terriers: Fang, a talkative terrier, and an ordinary one that remains silent. While Fang stands out in the memories of young Mason and Dixon just before they depart for their first trip, the latter dog calls on them in London long after they have returned from their last cooperative survey in America. Mason and Dixon recognize that terrier as “the very Representation” of Fang, but this terrier keeps silent regarding his status. His silence seems to be a refusal on his part to be defined as either a resurrection of Fang or his representation. By contrasting the talking dog with the silent dog, Pynchon tries to display the inevitable gap that arises between representation and its substance, that is, the conflict between subjects representing and being represented. The moment the silent terrier is about to leave London, it becomes apparent that these two dogs live in a world that exists in “a gap between intention and realization, original and copy,” in the words of Mitchell. The conception of the “gap” in Pynchon’s novel is, furthermore, seen in the episode of the “Black Dog” in Mason & Dixon. While surveying the eighteenth-century American continent, Mason, Dixon, and their company are frightened by the howling of the “Black Dog” from South Mountain. While Dixon suggests that the sound is that of an “Indian Drum,” Mason complains of anxiety caused by the invisibility of the dog: “And I say, ’tis a Dog,” Mason somber. “A particular Dog, with a syncopated Bark. . . . Oh yes, a Dog well known and much fear’d in this Region—withal a Dog . . . ”15 Due to the impossibility of representing the dog, Mason cannot help but repeat the word “Dog,” without any epithets. However, as soon as the Overseer concludes that it is what they call the “Black Dog,” Mason succeeds in overcoming his anxiety, even though they have no information about it except for the adjective “Black.”

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While this episode seems to emphasize how the act of naming causes people to overcome an uncanny reality, Pynchon gives it a humorous but significant twist, hidden behind the legend of the “Black Dog” as a folkloric rule based on the condition that the name should not be uttered. Because of “An extended List” of the “Things That Are Never Said,” they are forced to identify the substance of the dog without words,16 and consequently, the Black Dog survives somewhere between representation and its denial without getting caught up in a so-called postmodernist play on words. This episode of the “Black Dog” makes it easier to understand the significance of Mason’s dreams, as well as those of Dixon, which the terrier finally voices: “I’ll have long been out upon the Darlington Road. I am a British Dog, and belong to no one, if not to the two of you.”17 The place where the terrier regains its ability to speak the human language is defined by Pynchon as “America, whose name is something else.” By depriving the place of its name, he represents the unrepresented space wherein we are unable to signify anything. This shift in name, using the relative pronoun “whose,” makes it possible to narrate the conflict between subjects representing and being represented metafictionally. In this alternative America, we are reminded of the fact that “Terrier,” the name of this dog breed, is etymologically connected with the word “terra.” Of course, such an etymological interpretation is never expected to convey the wishful thinking that, by this name, the nature of the real and the fictional can be easily overlapped. Rather, the breed of “terrier,” or more precisely, the pedigree of the “Norfolk Terrier,”18 is nothing but a “taxation” that Pynchon ventures to impose upon his own representation. This is because the Norfolk terrier’s pedigree extends back no farther than the late nineteenth century and was originally the same breed as the Norwich terrier. According to the OED, it was in 1880 that a man named Nichols first called his little red dog a “Norwich” terrier, and not until 1932 that the Norwich terrier breed was recognized by the English Kennel Club. In 1961, the English Kennel Club divided the terriers into two breeds based on the shapes of their ears: prick ears, as the Norwich terrier, and drop ears, as the Norfolk terrier. In short, Pynchon’s depiction of a Norfolk terrier in eighteenth-century London is nothing more than a form of anachronistic representation, leaving a gap between the natural world and the artificial classifications of the realm of nature. Adding to such an anachronistic status, Fang is also exposed to the ontological and religious question posed by Mason of whether the Learnèd English Dog is reincarnated from a human spirit or not. If so, for Mason, it means the dog has a soul just like him. Fang’s answer is, however, entirely different from Mason’s expectation. Citing some travelers from Japan, the dog compares his question to a Buddhist puzzle, called a koan, to which the answer is “Mu!,” which means nothing.19 Though Fang’s answer seems to be a careful evasion, to which he also adds, “[P]lease do not come to the Learnèd

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English Dog if it’s religious Comfort you’re after,” Pynchon dares to repeat the same Zen riddle with Pugnax in Against the Day, as if to keep begging the issue: “Yes, obviously—was there anything else?” in dog language.20 Just as Mason’s wife Rebekah calls herself “Representation,”21 it might be possible to view Pugnax as the “representational terrier” of Fang. The terriers in Mason & Dixon, including Fang, could have a metafictional relation with “terra,” the American land, which will become totally occupied by humans, as partly depicted in the other works of Pynchon; however, as a member of the hydrogen skyship, Inconvenience, Pugnax is a dog who belongs to the sky. In fact, Against the Day closes with a scene in which Pugnax and his followers come aboard the skyship with other animals, including cats, birds, fish, rodents, and “less-terrestrial forms of life,” as if it were Noah’s ark: “They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace.”22 Then, parallel to the story of The Chums of Chance, in which Pagnax can traverse the time and space of the globe vertically and horizontally,23 Pynchon narrates a saga of the Traverse family, the maternal lineage of Frenesi Gates, by creating a linkage between Vineland and Against the Day.24 The three Traverse brothers in Against the Day experience separate adventures, from a mining town in nineteenth-century Colorado, to east and west, and eventually to South America and Europe in order to escape from their father’s killer, Scarsdale Vibe, while simultaneously plotting to assassinate him. As the witty title of the book’s review in the Washington Post suggests, the story of the Traverse brothers could be read as a tragicomedy of “The Marxist Brothers.”25 At the end of the story, the youngest brother Kit reunites with his mentor, Professor Vanderjuice, the scientist who developed the engine of the Inconvenience. Kit shares a mathematical–philosophical idea, called the “Banach–Tarski paradox,” with Vanderjuice: “[T]he world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one.”26 This paradox reminds us of the rocket 00001 reassembled and reconstructed from parts of 00000 in Gravity’s Rainbow. While Pynchon has always dreamed of the “fork in the road” that America, or the world, never took, even narrating such an alternative history in Against the Day, the author never allows his characters to pursue an alternative direction in the “fork in the road” but encourages them to take both paths of the fork simultaneously: “Notably, ‘Even if you forget everything else,’ Rinpungpa instructs the Yogi, ‘remember one thing—when you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ Easy for him to say, of course, being two people at once.”27 What Pynchon performs as a writer in Against the Day is, therefore, not a selection of one possibility but a collection of multiple possibilities. Kit’s brother, Frank, is also enchanted with the plurality of one being, but in a more primitive manner. In Mexico, he observes the giant luminous beetles

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called cucuji and comes to regard their light as his soul. According to Frank’s understanding, his soul is represented by the beetles, which can be both divided and plural on earth, but this plurality of the soul never conflicts with its singularity, as if their light cannot be divided. As a counterpart to the luminous beetles, varieties of beetles also appear in Mason & Dixon, but with a less abstract existence. The beetle in the cage has elytra, the color of which is “the same unforgiving white as the great sand-waste call’d ‘Kalahari’ lying north of here.”28 The passage from the desert to Cape Town overlaps with that of slaves, and, in fact, the early chapters in Mason & Dixon are full of metaphorical ties between animality and slavery, emphasizing the boundary between the civilized and the uncivilized. The novel begins with Mason and Dixon being drawn out of their ordinary civilized lives in the eighteenth century in order to observe the transit of Venus at Bencoolen, on the island of Sumatra. Mason emphasizes the fact that they are sailing to the uncivilized world: “Heaven knows what’s available on Board, or out there. It may be our last chance for civiliz’d Drink.”29 Yet for Mason, what the long voyage really signifies is nothing more than an escape from the crushing sorrow of his wife’s death. It is not the path to recovery, but a way that takes him progressively off course; in other words, a road to uncivilization. On the eve of his sailing, Mason is introduced to “Dark Hepsie, the Pythoness of the Point,” and senses that through her “he will be allow’d at last to pass over, and find, and visit [his wife], and come back” because she will show him “safe-conduct Procedures for the realm of Death.”30 When Mason is alarmed by her dark prophecy that, owing to their Friday departure, his voyage will be obstructed, Dixon deprecatingly reminds him that it is the Age of Reason, that is, the age of civilization. What becomes obvious through the contrast between them is that, for Dixon, Mason’s fantasy about the realm of death is nothing but uncivilized. Eventually, they are forced to change their original plan as a result of an attack by a foreign frigate, just as the pythoness foretold, and Mason’s prediction that they will gain entrance into the uncivilized also comes true, paradoxically. This is because they must stay in Cape Town, where they witness slavery: the truth of an uncivilized system in a world of self-styled civilizers. In the earlier stage of his journey, Dixon must face the inconvenient truth of “the Courtesy”31 with which masters should treat their slaves. In fact, it is still several years before Dixon realizes that the root of all evil is slavery, independent of its operation. Thus, it is apparent that he regards “the Courtesy” as a form of behavior essential to civilizing slavery. Hoping to enlighten the slave masters in Cape Town, he zealously seeks to differentiate the “uncivilized” world from the “civilized.” In the off-limits districts of Cape Town, he sees with his own eyes the actual condition of uncivilized people surrounded by uncivilized foods,

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and he is strongly influenced by them: “He feels like a predatory Animal.”32 This feeling, caused by his “transition to the state of Outlaw,” shows that he literally considers the animal in man as “Animal,” which civilization should tame or slaughter. Cornelius Vroom, the master of the house where Mason and Dixon board, is a man whose sensibility is similar to, but more simplistic than, Dixon’s. Admiring the legend of the hunters who loved the hunt and slaughter of larger animals more than themselves, he colonizes the area with a sense of conscious superiority over wildlife. The stories depicting the hunters as heroes also form his identity as a civilized ruler of the wild. His awareness of being a civilized man has increased, becoming “a bottomless archive of epic adventures out in the unmapped wilds of Hottentot Land.”33 His real-life possession of slaves complements such a formation of his identity. At Vroom’s residence, Mason and Dixon encounter one of Vroom’s slaves, Austra, whom Vroom’s wife Johanna sends into Mason’s bed because she wants her to become pregnant with a whiter child. Refusing Austra’s offer, however, Mason, who believes in the civilization of Englishmen, cannot overcome the terrible shock for a time, which he suffers after witnessing how subordinate Austra is to her mistress. Supposing that the slaveholders are deranged with their desire, he falls into a delusion that Johanna forces young attractive slave girls to serve her lewdly while Cornelius observes. This perverse pleasure somehow makes Cornelius feel “the pain of an ineptly shot Beast.”34 As the narrator Cherrycoke comments in his daybook, “if one did not wish to suffer Horror directly, [. . .] one might either transcend it spiritually, or eroticize it carnally.”35 Although Mason makes an effort to negate this colonialist ideology by transcendentally reconsidering Cape Town as “another Planet” where “these Dutch-speaking White natives are as alien to the civilization we know as the very strangest of Pygmies,”36 he almost gives way to Johanna’s temptation “in lewd innocence erring upon the side of Eros”: “Next to Cornelius,” she dreams, “must other men figure as Adonises.”37 The surprise rushing of Johanna’s daughter into the room, however, allows Mason to make a narrow escape from Johanna’s fantasy. Simultaneously, he nearly escapes his fantasy regarding the boundary separating the civilized and the uncivilized, partly because he can hear the sound made by the “Darkling Beetle,” an insect kept as a pet in Vroom’s house, which has white elytra and a dark body. It seems more than a coincidence that the combination of colors Pynchon chooses here reminds us of the “pinto” color of the alligators in the sewer in V. Just as baby alligators are displayed at Macy’s in V., the beetles with white elytra are caught alive to be kept as pets in eighteenth-century Cape Town. Symbolically, their elytra are compared to the color of the Kalahari Desert, where non-Western civilizations have been oppressed by white colonialists in V. and where descendants of the Herero dream of returning for revenge

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against the colonialists in Gravity’s Rainbow. The irrationality of slavery in the African continent comes as a rude shock to the two protagonists in Mason & Dixon and, as an astronomer, Mason tries to calm himself by reconsidering Cape Town as “another Planet,” as mentioned above, even though his lament does not assuage his partner easily. Having a Gothic mentality, Mason tends to escape from reality, but the insects, “American bugs,” bring him back there by biting him: “That’s it, then. Himself a giant Bug, he rolls quietly from under the Counterpane and crawls from the Room.”38 Unlike the cucuji in Against the Day, many kinds of bugs, including the Darkling Beetle in Mason & Dixon, unambiguously represent the nature of the continents of Africa and America so that what the astronomers and surveyors should do is surrender to the force of nature represented by these bugs, just as Dixon does in Cape Town: “‘Ahrrh!’ He plucks from his Face a Beetle, about half an inch long and emitting green light as if bearing a Candle within.”39 As is evident in the contrast not only between Fang the terrier and Pugnax the sky-dog but also between the beetles, related to the earth—“Mountains and Deserts”—and the fireflies in the tree, related to the soul, the narrative of Mason & Dixon adheres to the Earth, while that of Against the Day floats from its surface. In the case of Reef, a brother of Kit and Frank, one of the decisive reasons he decides to carry on the family business as an anarchist bomber after the assassination of his father, Webb Traverse,40 is contained in the book series concerning the sky, The Chums of Chance: “He had brought with him a dime novel, one of the Chums of Chance series, The Chums of Chance at the Ends of the Earth, and for a while each night he sat in the firelight and read to himself but soon found he was reading out loud to his father’s corpse, like a bedtime story, something to ease Webb’s passage into the dreamland of his death.”41 As this passage conveys, the adventures of the Chums of Chance with Pugnax are episodes of a novel within a novel. Reef Traverse reads their story aloud to help his dead father leave the earth. Moreover, he wishes he could truly see the Inconvenience in the sky: “[H]e found himself looking at the sky, as if trying to locate somewhere in it the great airship. As if those boys might be agents of a kind of extrahuman justice.”42 While fascinated with these science fictions, Reef, who swears to avenge his dead father and decides to live as an outlaw, seems to be a character from Western dime novels. This is a clue we should not overlook in order to understand the nature of this novel, in which Reef acclaims the “extrahuman justice” of the Chums of Chance. In Western stories, protagonists and heroines continue to question what “human justice” is while riding their horses, traversing the wilderness, and pulling the triggers of their guns. At the same time, the alternative idea of “extrahuman justice” prohibits Reef from clinging to the law of the earth.

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Perhaps the relation between Reef and the Chums of Chance series is comparable to that between Benny Profane and the rebroadcasted Westerns of Randolph Scott in V. Proclaiming Scott as the “Master of the inanimate,”43 Profane, with a big cowboy hat, kills alligators with the shotgun, an inanimate thing he has never used before. Conversely, very familiar with inanimate things, from tools to bombs, Reef faces a snake with paws, called the “Tatzelwurm,” at the Simplon Tunnel connecting Switzerland and Italy: “The Tatzelwurm whipped its head around and stared him full in the eyes. Now I have seen you, was the message, now you are next on my list.”44 The Tatzelwurm, which is much greedier to live with than the alligators in the sewers or Grigori the giant octopus, sends Reef the “message” that it has seen him; totally opposite to the idea given to Profane by senior members of the Alligator Patrol—“You don’t see anything down there”45—the tunnel is a battlefield where the human and the non-human animal directly see each other. As a result, Reef’s gun blows the Tatzelwurm away without his sentimentalizing it at all or uttering a phrase like “I’m sorry.” The episode of the Tatzelwurm contrasts with the tale of the Lambton Worm in Mason & Dixon. The Worm, defeated by John Lambton, could be a metaphor for Nature conquered by humans. Legend has it that one day, young Lambton discovers an unusual wormlike creature that has nine holes on each side of its body. He dumps it into a well, where the worm increases in size and grows into a giant predator. The narrator of Mason & Dixon calls the well the “Womb of wet stone,”46 just as Maltese rock is called the “inviolable womb” in V.47 Pynchon has adopted the gender analogy of Nature as female, as in his early short story “Small Rain.” In the story, the swamp is also a gendered place and is parodically situated inside the colonialist’s fantasy: The protagonist, who is reading Swamp Wrench, in fact, has a sexual relationship with a woman in a cabin in the swamp. This type of male fantasy is presented in Gravity’s Rainbow more radically and essentially: Pynchon narrates, “Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature,”48 while simultaneously metaphorizing the rocket itself as a “womb” into which a young white soldier “returns.”49 If we regard the special rocket as a mutant of the System narrated in Gravity’s Rainbow, the Lambton Worm could be a mutant of Nature, namely, “the præternatural” one represented in the pseudo-Gothic novel. As Ian D. Copestake points out, Fang and the Worm are inhabitants in a realm violating the artificial “cold line drawing and divisiveness which bring Mason and Dixon into history.”50 Furthermore, the Worm is easily connected to the ouroboros, a “snake with its tail in its mouth,”51 that haunts historical chemist August Kekulé as a symbolic dream in Gravity’s Rainbow.52 As highlighted by Kathryn Hume, the narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow intentionally blends

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“the negative theological and apocalyptic meanings”53 of the serpent with positive scientifical and ecological ideas. In his dream concerning the “Great Serpent,” Kekulé heard the announcement, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” but he is afraid that the System will “violate” this ouroboric circle.54 What Pynchon is depicting here is, in fact, the threat of capitalist society, which cannot help but rely on “uncapitalized natures that can be appropriated cheaply,”55 in the words of Jason W. Moore. “Taking and not giving back,” writes Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, “the System [is] removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process.”56 As Moore claims from the standpoint of the environmental Marxist, “The conventional view is to think of ecological crisis in terms of diminishing flows of substances,”57 but the real nature of capitalism is not so simple, and we should realize that the crisis has been indeed treated “as a process through which fundamentally new ways of ordering the relations between humans and the rest of nature take shape”58 since the sixteenth century. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the crisis foreseen by Kekulé is reinterpreted by Dr. Jamf, who fabricates a continuation of the announcement by Kekulé’s serpent: “[W]e used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps—but the Serpent whispered, ‘They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . . ’”59 While Kekulé and Jamf’s serpent symbolizes the still-alchemic nature of modern chemistry, the Lambton Worm in Mason & Dixon is a præternatural existence that belongs neither to Nature nor to the System—neither Christianity as “the wrong force”60 nor a heterodoxic alchemy.61 Cherrycoke, who accompanies Mason and Dixon on their survey, suggests that the Lambton Worm “may have embodied . . . an older way of proceeding,—very like the ancient Alchemists’ Tales, meant to convey by Symbols certain secret teachings”; Evan Shelby also describes “[t]he Ancient figure of the Serpent through the Ring, or Sacred Copulation,—a much older magic, and certainly one the Christians wanted to eradicate.”62 The scientists/engineers in Gravity’s Rainbow, from Kekulé to Jamf and Blicero, who launch rocket 00000, have assisted in generating the mutation of “uncapitalized natures” and handing them over to the System that would be launched against “Mother Nature.”63 Conversely, Lambton’s Worm, which grows up as a predator in an inorganic “womb,” symbolizes something that could violate the System. In Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway expands her ideas about reciprocity from companion animals to the “worm” in the compost, which is, of course, much smaller than the Lambton Worm or the Tatzelwurm. Using “string figures” as a metaphor for ecological, reciprocal relationships among living things, Haraway tries to criticize the colonialist attitudes toward

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nature: “The worms are not human; their undulating bodies ingest and reach, and their feces fertilize worlds. Their tentacles make string figures.”64 Thus, according to her perceptive and imaginative logic, what we really need today is “SF,” which stands for not only “science fiction” but also “speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.”65 Among them, Haraway emphasizes the significance of the metaphor of “string figures,” a game in which figures are made with one string circled through the hands of two people. SF, for Haraway, is a method “of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice.”66 Thus, it is possible and reasonable to read her own book as SF, which could then also be expanded to “speculative fable” and which seems to share a vision with Pynchon’s postmodern animal fables.67 Before we begin to reread Pynchon’s oeuvre in hindsight as SF, however, it is meaningful to determine the distance between his narratives and the genre of science fiction in its original meanings. This is precisely because Pynchon and his critics and scholars have tried defining the nature of his texts by arguing how different his style of narrative is from that of what is generally called SF, just as Haraway has not only modified the definition of SF but also used many science fiction texts, which never aim at making academically scientific contributions, as primary and secondary sources for her feminist science studies. In the light of the history of literature, Pynchon’s encyclopedic imagination makes him a successor to Hermann Melville and James Joyce, his gothic creativity comparable to that of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe, and his ecological narrative, fused with the thought of cybernetics, presages writers of the next generation such as William Gibson and Richard Powers. In 1973, Gravity’s Rainbow was selected as one of the finalists for the Nebula Awards but did not win. Jonathan Lethem claims that if the award had been given to Pynchon instead of Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction genre could have merged with the mainstream of literature.68 While Pynchon shows deep respect for this genre by noting that 1950s science fiction is “just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction,” he never forgets to add that SF has, unfortunately, been excluded from the “great City of Literature,” along with other genres labeled “escapist fare.”69 For the young Pynchon, who was overwhelmed by the flowering of science fiction and the enthusiasm of the Beat generation in the 1950s, the literary style he strove for was a metafictional narrative that could subvert the hierarchy of literature referred to above. In 1963, as we argued in the first chapter of this book, Pynchon begins his full-fledged writing career with the publication of V., in which he makes a parody of “escapist fare” and Beatnik soul-searching. The divided plots of Profane and Stencil are merged under the

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street, and in a similar but different way to the odd couple in Mason & Dixon, they complement each other’s worldview and cancel each other out: Stencil continues to find causality in random events, while Profane leads a routine life, refusing to learn anything from his experience. Paranoidly obsessed with cause and effect, Stencil, a middle-aged Englishman, impersonates someone else by reading the texts. In his narrative, we can find some cybernetic details that can be called science-fictional: the body of Bongo-Shaftsbury as an “electromechanical doll,”70 and the disassembly of Lady V.’s body. In contrast, in Profane’s narrative, we can find various Beatnik characters who prefer to live their lives in freedom, even though they often feel as if they are “in the company of innumerable small and wounded animals, bums on the street, near-dying and lost to God,”71 and Profane himself is depicted as an “amoebalike boy.”72 When he asks, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?,” Pynchon nostalgically argues that even “the most irresponsible of fictions” were not able to compete with “what would happen in a nuclear war” in the 1950s.73 For him, science fiction, the “irresponsibility” of which might have had hidden the potential to overcome the postwar reality, ended up being swallowed up by the tide of mainstream literature. Thus, Pynchon claims that science fiction has failed to exercise the “irresponsibility” of its imagination, which should relativize the threat of murderous technologies—a complex of the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. In his mid-forties, Pynchon does not hide his frustration at the reality of 1984, a year symbolized by George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). A few years later, as if inheriting Pynchon’s irritation, Bruce Sterling proposed a new literary trend called “slipstream”74; this trend does not subsume the works of Pynchon, but as Takayuki Tatsumi points out, Pynchon could be its pioneer.75 As mentioned above, V. is based on a double “anti”: anti-science fiction and anti-Beat, in other words, an alternative counternarrative of the anti-mainstream literature of the 1950s.76 Similarly, The Crying of Lot 49 could be called an antidetective novel, expanding the imagination and style of dime-novel detective fiction metafictionally to surface insight about what a conspiracy theory is and how it should be treated as literature. The classic detective novel intends to provide rational explanations for irrational phenomena so that the detective, embodying modernity, can put pre-modern chaos in order. Thus, in the anti-detective novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist, Oedipa, who becomes deeply fascinated by the conspiratorial history of the premodern anti-establishment organization The Tristero, cannot help but wonder if the concept of order is relative or not. As Molly Hite notes in her Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, published a year before 1984, Pynchon’s narratives are “about what order means, how it is apprehended, and what

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it entails.”77 Of course, it might be reasonable for Hite to say that the three Pynchon novels V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow were written to parody the restricted modernist understanding that artistic creations, rooted in “[t]he Idea [. . .] of order,” should have an ironic contrast with “the ‘chaos’ of reality.”78 Nevertheless, we are certainly cautious enough to know that Pynchon’s oeuvre not only intimates the attitudes of his precursors with postmodernistic irony but seriously weaves any ideas of order, whether modern or postmodern, into his texts involving the worlds from the seventeenth century to post-9/11,79 as do the girls with heart-shaped faces in the painting of Remedios Varo, who are “embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void.”80 For Haraway, then, the act of weaving can be reinterpreted as both a practical and metaphorical concept to explain the intention of her book, Staying with the Trouble. Citing Navajo weaving, she claims that “fundamentally, weaving is also cosmological performance, knotting proper relationality and connectedness into the warp and weft of the fabric.”81 Moreover, referring to Baila Goldenthal’s painting titled Cat’s Cradle, Haraway says that “cat’s cradle is an open-ended practice of continuous weaving.”82 If weaving or string figuring “is passing on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them”83 and is equal to telling stories cosmologically, and if we call the act of weaving/storytelling SF in the manner of Haraway, Pynchon’s anti-SF, anti-Beatnik, and anti-detective narratives could be regarded as SF, that is, as “becoming-with each other in surprising relays.”84 As a combination of these three antis, indeed, Gravity’s Rainbow begins with the words “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into”85 and reaches for the protagonist’s scattering. As Sascha Pöhlmann suggests, “Slothrop’s scattering is connected to a peculiar transformation” by becoming a “crossroad where the possibility of taking a different path can arise.”86 As a story of assembly and disassembly to transform humans into other things, Gravity’s Rainbow is surely a practice of string figuring—SF, that is, a speculative fable not only for postmodernity but also for multispecies justice. 87 In Mason & Dixon, however, “weaving” is nothing but a metaphor for the capitalist colonization of the land, relating to the main motif of the narrative, the lines drawn “straight through the heart of the Wilderness.”88 Colonel Washington, whose house Mason and Dixon occasionally visit, is talking about the possibility of markets as “order [. . .] in Chaos” by using the metaphor of “a piece of tricky weaving.”89 Ironically, when Washington asks his wife, Marth, the name of the weaving style, she immediately replies, “How [. . .] would I know? Am I a Weaver?”90 Likewise, in Against the Day, bad capitalist Scarsdale Vibe boasts, “[W]e fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build

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on”; in addition, the “celebrated aeronautics club” the Chums of Chance get involved in the European war just after taking refuge behind “the other side of the tapestry,” which separates the tragic battlefields of World War I and Switzerland.91 Since 1984, perhaps, Pynchon’s narrative thread has developed its own course. Directly and indirectly referring to works of pioneers of SF, such as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Against the Day seems to concentrate on creating alternative string figures, the lines of which are never crossed and are all parallel; but, of course, what Pynchon finally aims to depict is the moment he can let his sky-dogs, who are joined by “cats, birds, fish, rodents, and less-terrestrial forms of life,”92 on board the skyship, a multispecies cradle, and depart “toward grace” with a cheerful shout: “Now single up all lines!”93 NOTES 1. Thomas Pynchon, online description of Against the Day, https: //www.amazon .com /Against -Day -Thomas -Pynchon /dp/159420120X /ref =monarch sidesheet. 2. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 18, 24. Richard Hardack argues that Against the Day can be read as a Pynchoneque duplicate of Gravity’s Rainbow. Hardack claims that the first sentence of Against the Day, in particular—“Now single up all lines!”—corresponds with the final exhortation of Gravity’s Rainbow—“Now everybody.” Richard Hardack, “Consciousness without Borders: Narratology in Against the Day and the Works of Thomas Pynchon,” Criticism 52, no. 1 (2010): 120. 3. When describing the non-humans that appear in Mason & Dixon, Arthur Saltzman emphasizes how “badly, irremediably” the ecological connections of non-humans are represented: “sentient animals and vengeful vegetables, robot ducks and nagging ghosts, lecturing dogs and rogue wheels of cheese.” Arthur Saltzman, “‘Cranks of Ev’ry Radius’: Romancing the Line in Mason & Dixon,” in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 68. 4. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 19. 5. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 22. 6. Thomas H. Schaub, “Plot, Ideology, and Compassion,” 195. 7. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Representation,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 21. 8. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 19. Italics in original. 9. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 756. 10. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London: Printed for Tho. Lownds, 1765 [1764]; London: Penguin Books, 2001), 6. 11. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 22. 12. Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006; repr., New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 5, Kindle. Citations refer to the 2012 edition. 13. Pynchon, Against the Day, 5.

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14. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 755–56. 15. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 493. 16. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 494. 17. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 757. 18. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 18. 19. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 22. Joseph Dewey points out that “koans” are different from “satire” or “joaks” because they are “posed as crises in intellection, as perplexing realities, contradictory and ir(resolvable).” Joseph Dewey, “The Sound of One Man Mapping: Wicks Cherrycoke and the Eastern (Re)solution,” in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 128. While the existence of Fang in Mason & Dixon might be based on a koan-ish paradox for human beings, the transformation of Zepho Beck, a carpenter in the same novel, into a giant beaver due to “Kastoranthropy,” might be a metafictional koan-ish paradox for animals: “They [Zepho’s wife, Professor Voam, Mason, and Dixon] are in the Barn, where Zepho has been brought, much to the perplexity of the Animals there, who must conflate the Being who feeds them with this wild creature.” Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 619. 20. Pynchon, Against the Day, 411–12. 21. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 725. Daniel Punday notes that Rebekah in Mason & Dixon is different from the Thanatoids because she is a “revenant, a visitor from the dead whose appearance within the living world is startling and abrupt.” Daniel Punday, “Pynchon’s Ghosts,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 2 (2003): 254. 22. Pynchon, Against the Day, 1085. Robert E. Kohn suggests that we can interpret the meanings of the “grace” in this final sentence in at least three ways: transcendental, vengeful, and idiosyncratic. The latter is a condition, as Kohn notes by quoting a line from Against the Day, which “he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as of grace.” Robert E. Kohn, “Pynchon’s Transition from Ethos-Based Postmodernism to Late-Postmodern Stylistics,” Style 43, no. 2 (2009): 210. 23. According to Brian McHale, the opposition of horizontality and verticality in Pynchon’s works can be interpreted as a political dichotomy between fascism and democracy: “ . . . [I]n Mason & Dixon the orientation toward the horizontal corresponds to democracy in political philosophy, and to a metaphysics of this-worldliness.” Brian McHale, “Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, A Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space,” in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 59. 24. Comparing Against the Day to V., the role of the Traverse family would be that of Profane, and the Inconvenience at the center of the cosmic narrative would be the equivalent of Stencil’s. In V., Stencil’s paranoid, hyper-temporal perspective enables us to interpret Profane’s private life in some meaningful ways. 25. Steven Moore, “The Marxist Brothers: A Long-Awaited Work from the Elusive Cult Novelist,” review of Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon, Washington Post, November 19, 2006. https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/archive​/entertainment​/books​ /2006​/11​/19​/the​-marxist​-brothers​-span​-classbankheada​-long​-awaited​-work​-from​-the​ -elusive​-cult​-novelistspan​/1d55588e​-e354​-417f​-92e3​-555bffc22093​/.

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26. Pynchon, Against the Day, 1078. 27. Pynchon, Against the Day, 766. Sean Carswell argues that Pynchon uses the conception of bilocation to appose nineteenth-century economic liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism. Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon: Politics after Gravity’s Rainbow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 87. 28. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 88. 29. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 18. During the late seventeenth century, the British soldiers and officials at “Benkulen” suffered from constant hunger and were condemned to lead a “brutish” and short life: “For those who were fortunate enough to survive the attacks of malaria and dysentery, the actual living conditions were far from pleasant. Food was scarce and, therefore, expensive.” John Bastin, The British in West Sumatora (1685–1825) (Hong Kong: University of Malaya Press, 1965), xix. 30. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 25. 31. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 69. 32. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 78. 33. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 60. 34. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 68. 35. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 152. 36. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 69. 37. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 87. The use of the name “Adonis” will remind Mason of a scene in his delusion where slave girls feed Johanna “pomegranates.” In Greek mythology, this fruit was given to Persephone by Hades, the lord of the dead, to prevent her from returning to the upper world, and Adonis was a handsome youth who was not only Aphrodite’s lover but also Persephone’s. This suggests a parallel between Johanna and “Persephone,” both of whom live in a state of slavery, and, as in “the rape of Persephone,” Johanna is insulted by uncivilized people who live in the “realm of Death.” For Mason, while it is true that this inappropriate relationship with the uncivilized should not be established, he is nonetheless already bound up in such a metaphoric complexity that he is unable to find a way of escaping her allure. 38. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 293. 39. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 89. In Gravity’s Rainbow, we can also find symbolic bugs, which Thomas Moore explains as “the subversive bugs who invade his [Gwenhidwy’s] larder and ‘unify’ its stocks” and which are called “Christmas bugs” in the narrative. Thomas Moore, The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 110–11. 40. Among the Luddite environmental movements of the counter-cultural generation are Greenpeace, a Canadian NGO that began as an opposition movement to nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, Alaska, and Earth First! in the U.S., which grew out of the publication of The Monkey Wrench Gang. In this novel, American nature writer Edward Abbey describes the struggles of environmental terrorists who wanted to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. In the episode of Webb Traverse in Against the Day, we can observe the tradition of Abbey-like American Luddism. 41. Pynchon, Against the Day, 214. 42. Pynchon, Against the Day, 215. 43. Pynchon, V., 306.

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44. Pynchon, Against the Day, 658. 45. Pynchon, V., 37. 46. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 589. 47. Pynchon, V., 341. 48. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 324. 49. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 750. 50. Copestake, “Off the Deep End Again,” 205. 51. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 413. Italics in original. 52. Referring to Thomas Moore’s comparison between D. H. Lawrence’s “Sky Snake” in Apocalypse and Pynchon’s allusion to “Uroboros,” Dwight Eddins points out that Pynchon also revaluates “the Eden myth” by denying “a Serpent-inspired Fall by which nature was supposedly devalued.” Dwight Eddins, The Gnostic Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 127. 53. Kathryn Hume, Pynchon’s Mythography: An Approach to Gravity’s Rainbow (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 66. 54. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 412. 55. Moore, Capitalism, chap. 5. 56. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 412. 57. Moore, Capitalism, chap. 5. 58. Moore, Capitalism, chap. 5. 59. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 413. Italics in original. 60. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 594. 61. For a further discussion of “Pynchon’s alchemy,” see Georgiana M. M. Colvile, Beyond and Beneath the Mantle: On Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), 93–98. 62. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 595. 63. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 324. 64. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), chap. 2. Kindle. 65. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, chap. 1. 66. Haraway, introduction to Staying with the Trouble. 67. Akira Mizuta Lippit, for instance, emphasizes the similarities of the roles of animals in Aesop’s fables, fairy tales, and Donna Haraway’s narrative. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 13. 68. Rob Latham, “American Slipstream: Science Fiction and Literary Respectability,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, ed. Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chap. 7, Kindle. Quoting Lethem’s essays, Latham notes, “In Lethem’s reckoning, the nomination of Gravity’s Rainbow for a Nebula ‘stands as a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream.’ The victory of Clarke’s novel signaled a ‘retrenchment’ behind the ‘genre-ghetto walls’—a defensive move away from mainstream respectability toward ‘a reactionary SF as artistically dire as it was comfortingly familiar.’ This retreat occurred just as literary

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novelists such as Pynchon, McElroy, and Don DeLillo were producing a sophisticated new breed of SF that spoke to a wider readership.” 69. Pynchon, “Luddite.” 70. Pynchon, V., 78. 71. Pynchon, V., 138. 72. Pynchon, V., 31. 73. Pynchon, “Luddite.” 74. Referring to Bruce Sterling’s conception of “slipstream,” which is “holding out the promise [. . .] of a ‘helpful, brisk competition to SF,’” Justin St. Clair regards Against the Day as a novel that “would have fit squarely on Sterling’s ‘slipstream list.’” Clair also uses a metaphor of strings, such as Zöllner’s knots, to describe the narrative of Against the Day by suggesting that the Transpassers, “virtual slipstreamers” in the novel, could play the same role as Slade, who collaborated with physicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner to prove a “fourth-dimensional intersection of spiritualism and science.” Justin St. Clair. “Borrowed Time: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and the Victorian Fourth Dimension,” Science Fiction Studies 38, no. 1 (2011): 46, 56, 59. 75. Takayuki Tatsumi, Metafiction no Shisou [Metafiction as Ideology] (Tokyo: Chikuma, 2001), 54. 76. Victor Strandberg claims that Pynchon searches for “an alternative ethos” to that of the political reality of Eisenhower-Nixon-Reagan through the literary inventions of the Whole Sick Crew in V., the countercultural community in the redwoods in Vineland, and “the motif of rebellion” in Mason & Dixon. As Strandberg notes, Pynchon had already explained the rationale for this search in his introduction to Slow Learner. Victor Strandberg, “Dimming the Enlightenment: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon,” in Pynchon and Mason & Dixon, ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 100. 77. Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 4. 78. Hite, Ideas of Order, 5. By reviewing some interpretations of the metaphoric uses of entropy in Pynchon’s “Entropy,” David Letzler states, “The real question, it turns out, is not about order versus chaos, but about the relative strengths of competing forms of order.” David Letzler, “Crossed-Up Disciplinarity: What Norbert Wiener, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis Got Wrong about Entropy and Literature,” Contemporary Literature 56, no. 1 (2015): 40. Referring to Dwight Eddins’ The Gnostic Pynchon (1990), John A. McClure defines Pynchon’s narrative as a “postsecular” discourse that can “reenchant the world and [. . .] change the very terms of enchantment.” In this context, McClure explains how accurately Eddins challenges the Hite’s argument: Eddins asserts “that Gravity’s Rainbow does in fact have a holy center, the living and ultimately beneficent Earth.” John A. McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2007), 30–35. 79. Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor note that Vineland accrued a renewed sense of significance after 9/11 as a way to describe works of paranoid sensibility in contemporary America. Simon Malpas and Andrew Taylor, Thomas Pynchon

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(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 126. Two years before the publication of Bleeding Edge, Paolo Simonetti claimed that Against the Day “stands as a remarkable contribution to post-9/11,” quoting Fredric Jameson’s words, and that Pynchon intentionally chooses to “focus on an out-of-fashion topic not particularly momentous at first sight and often overlooked by the media.” Paolo Simonetti, “Historical Fiction After 9/11: Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day,” Modern Language Studies 41, no. 1 (2011): 27. Though Bleeding Edge directly addresses this tragic incident, by applying Simonetti’s interpretation, it is possible to say that “9/11” itself had already become an “out-of-fashion topic,” which was, however, needed for the author to depict something secretly going on in 2010s America. 80. Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 12. 81. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, chap. 3. Lawrence Buell points out that the word “fabric” originally denoted “web”; owing to the Industrial Revolution, machines that weave fabrics as artificial woven webs have been placed in an opposing position to the web of nature. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 281–82. 82. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, chap. 2, n17. 83. Haraway, introduction to Staying with the Trouble. 84. Haraway, introduction to Staying with the Trouble. 85. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 3. Italics in original. 86. Sascha Pöhlmann, Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2010), 357. Katalin Orbán also suggests that the scattering of Slothrop can be interpreted as “constant metamorphosis.” Katalin Orbán, Ethical Diversions: The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman (New York: Routledge, 2005), 132. While Orbán proposes that the scattering of the self renders a person unclassifiable and eventually invisible, Pöhlmann claims that the scattering of Slothrop’s self could be interpreted as “the self-sacrifice of a postnational prophet,” which could be recognized as an act of the “productive” to fulfill the potentiality of the Zone as “a postnational open space.” Pöhlmann, Pynchon’s Postnational Imagination, 358. Moreover, as his ancestor is called a peculiar bird, Tyrone Slothrop is metaphorized as an albatross. The narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow states that because Tyrone is scattered, he cannot be found or identified except for the feathers. Kodai Abe claims that “with recourse to those natural, ecological tropes,” the novel would allow readers and critics to envision “a theoretical, feasible mechanism to unite people in the age of global capitalism.” Kodai Abe, “The Ad Hoc Adventure: Pynchonʼs Ecological Nationalism in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Studies in English Literature 96 (2019): 22. 87. Harold Bloom points out that the existence of Byron the Bulb is a counterpart to the scattered Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow: “Byron, unlike Slothrop, cannot be scattered, but his high consciousness represents the dark fate of the Gnosis in Pynchon’s vision.” Harold Bloom, ed., introduction to Thomas Pynchon (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), 3. Byron’s state as “death-in-life,” in the words of Bloom, can be interpreted as a bridge between the mechanical body of Bongo-Shaftsbury in V. and the Thanatoids in Vineland. 88. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 8. 89. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 281.

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90. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 281. 91. Pynchon, Against the Day, 1026–27. The Chums of Chance are unable to remain in the realm of the fantasy, just as Shambhala in the novel is not a perfect myth but “existing on two levels, one spiritual and one political.” According to Johan Elverskog, “the spiritual seems to disappear in the maw of modern capitalism” since Shambhala in the novel even has a Chamber of Commerce. Johan Elverskog, “Thomas Pynchon and Shambhala,” Mongolian Studies 29 (2007): 72. 92. Pynchon, Against the Day, 1085. 93. Pynchon, Against the Day, 3.

Chapter 6

The Lady with the Alligator Purse Bleeding Edge and Jonathan Safran Foer

Even before 2013, the year of the publication of Bleeding Edge, Pynchon might have had firsthand knowledge of the process in which “the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology, and robotics [will] all converge,”1 as he predicted in his 1984 essay “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” while contemplating the chemistry of relationships between literature, films, and other mediums such as newspapers and the Internet. As Ali Chetwynd notes, “Bleeding Edge is more skeptical about both our capacity for full enough discovery [of the exact workings of the system] and the moral priority of the fight [against the system].”2 Thanks to the explosive growth of information technology, not only readers, who already felt dizzy with information overload in Gravity’s Rainbow, but also the protagonists in Bleeding Edge can live in the “media bubble” by clinging to stories that they themselves selected through their favorite news sources. As a result, Maxine Tarnow can feel safe even after 9/11, supported “with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise,”3 even though her diffusion of information concerning the fictional conspiracy behind the attacks eventually causes her lover’s death. It all starts with footage recorded on the DVD that Reg Despard sends unbidden to Maxine. Reg offers a disclaimer—“Ain’t like I was ever Alfred Hitchcock or somethin. [. . .] I see something interesting, I shoot it is all”4— even though this “documentary guy” began his career by secretly filming screens in movie theatres in the 1990s.5 Acclaimed as a “post-postmodern art form” and “neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis” by a scholar of film studies, Reg’s skill at shooting enables him to earn money while also turning him into a prophet of the future of film (as of September 2001): “Future 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.”6 While he disappears from Maxine’s sight after sending 103

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the DVD, the footage he captures becomes scattered around the Internet. Subsequently, with Maxine’s help, March Keller, “a forever-unreconstructed lefty,”7 posts it on her blog, implying that the September 11 attacks cannot be explained by a “simple story line with Islamic villains.”8 She urges site visitors to disbelieve “co-enablers like the Newspaper of Record,” as well as to examine “theories and countertheories.”9 Ironically, however, March’s post causes the death of Maxine’s romantic partner, Nicolas Windust, who has been in something like “a brother-or God forbid sisterhood of neoliberal terrorists [. . .] from the jump.”10 At the very moment Maxine finds Windust’s corpse, Pynchon has her recite to herself a skipping-rope rhyme, “The Lady with the Alligator Purse,” which—contrary to Reg’s claim—reminds us of Hitchcock, as the same nursery rhyme appears in one of his films, in contradiction to Reg’s claim. As Ken Mogg highlights, Hitchcock’s version of the rhyme is the authentic original, which features some unique lines: “‘Mumps,’ said the doctor, / ‘Measles,’ said the nurse, / ‘Nothing,’ said the lady with the alligator purse.”11 In contrast, Maxine’s recitation differs slightly from that which appears in Hitchcock’s film, changing the first words of the song’s lines into “Dead”: Dead, said the doc-tuhvr, Dead, said the nurse, Dead, said da lady wit De al-liga-tuh purse . . . 12

After reciting this rhyme, she stumbles to the bathroom to vomit, “seized in a vision of all the exhaust ducts from every dismal office and forgotten transient space of the city.”13 For long-time readers of Pynchon, or the reader of this book, this scene may recall Benny Profane’s confrontation with alligators in the sewers due to the conjunction of various concepts, such as consumerism (the alligator purse), waste and sewage (the toilet and all the exhaust ducts), and the relationship between hunter and game. However, due to the half-century gap between V. and Bleeding Edge, as well as 9/11, which drastically changes the symbolism of Manhattan as a setting of the novel, Maxine’s rhymes cannot evoke the same feelings as Profane’s expedient fantasy—“[I]n some prehistoric circuit of the alligator brain they knew that as babies they’d been only another consumer-object, along with the wallets and pocketbooks of what might have been parents or kin.”14 Indeed, whereas Profane, who has been overwhelmed by an empty feeling, has no choice but to shoot the alligator and utter his stock phrase “I’m sorry,” Maxine manages to persuade the wild dogs to behave without pulling the trigger of her Walther PPK with the laser sight. “All right, Toto—freeze!” yells Maxine, negotiating with one of the dogs, “a mix of rottweiler plus you name it,” by warning

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it, “[W]e don’t need to have this happen.”15 As a more mature character than the young schlemihl, this mother of two boys knows that she herself could be both a “Lady with the Alligator Purse” in her dream and a “Certified Fraud Examiner” without certification who lives her life in the “Manhattan meatspace.”16 In fact, at least four spheres of life exist in Bleeding Edge: “meatspace,” “cyberspace,”17 “rodent life,”18 and dreams. The scene mentioned above occurs in “rodent life,” which, for Maxine, directly connects with her irresistible desire to sexually surrender to power, such as the power formerly represented by special case officer Nicholas Windust, whose corpse is now at the “safe house.”19 This desire is similar to that of Frenesi in Vineland, to whom federal prosecutor Brock Vond whispers, “This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells . . . ,”20 or of Shasta in Inherent Vice,21 who describes the “real-estate big shot”22 Mickey Wolfmann as “[f]ast, brutal, not what you’d call a considerate lover, an animal, actually.”23 Even though the space of the “rodent life” represented by Windust’s “safe house” is part of or close to “meatspace,” this sphere of life is synchronized with Maxine’s dream, in which she is a mouse and “understands that this place is a holding pen between freedom in the wild and some other unimagined environment into which, one by one, each of them will be released.”24 Just as the telephone is a tool to come in and out of cyberspace in Lana and Lilly Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999), the space of “rodent life” might be connected with Maxine’s “meatspace” through the phone (“The phone rings. She jumps a little. The dogs come to the doorway, curious.”25), and moreover, her dream of becoming a mouse seems to be triggered by Windust’s call (“The phone rings. ‘Are you all right?’”26). Conversely, Maxine dives into “cyberspace” using a program called “DeepArcher,”27 which allows people to use alternative living spaces even after their death.28 As a matter of fact, however, “DeepArcher” or the “Deep Web,” which “surface crawlers”29 cannot get to, is not just a science-fictional gimmick in Bleeding Edge. This is because, for Pynchon, the “p[rice]/e[arnings] ratio” of the information technology business should be described as “science-fictional,”30 and the main theme of the novel is the notion that “cyberspace” is nothing but an investment property for greedy capitalists. As Jeffrey Severs notes, “Pynchon, Bleeding Edge again shows, has almost always constructed his paranoid networks according to Deep Throat’s trenchant advice in All the President’s Men: Follow the money.”31 Indeed, DeepArcher is compared to the “100 acres of untouched marshland” at the heart of the “Island of Meadows, at the intersection of Fresh and Arthur Kills, toxicity central, the dark focus of Big Apple waste disposal,”32 not only because they are safe places for “marsh birds”33 or for the “poorest, no home,

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lowest of jailbirds, obizhenka, condemned to die,”34 but also because they have “developers after it.”35 In the same way, Windust’s “safe house” seems to be waiting for “demolition and replacement by some high-rise condo scheme,”36 and Maxine’s dream is also corrupted by the noise of “not one but several jackhammers” that are working to achieve the “quality infrastructure” of NYC.37 When we remember that Profane is also involved in constructing the infrastructure of the city—“Road work and sewer work is all I know”38—and that he has a Jewish mother without whom he thinks “the world would be worse off,”39 it might be possible to say that one shift from V. to Bleeding Edge is switching the viewpoint from the son’s perspective to that of the mother in a Jewish community. It is unclear, though, why Pynchon prefers to give his protagonists Jewish identities, especially in his Manhattan stories, whereas he metafictionally illuminates his own Waspy lineage extending back to William Pynchon, one of the founding fathers of colonial New England, in Gravity’s Rainbow. In a review of Bleeding Edge, referring to Toni Morrison’s famous words about President Clinton, Gary Lippman rhetorically asks, “If Bill Clinton was our ‘first black President,’ can Pynchon now be declared our most Judaical WASP?”40 Indeed, this novel is full of pseudo-prejudicial remarks on Jewish culture, which Maxine, as a Jewish mother of two sons, sometimes accepts masochistically but, as a liberal New Yorker, also often rejects. For example, in the cab, Maxine hears the driver shout “Fucking Jews”41 at a car with dealer plates that violently cuts him off, as if the plates are a kind of insurance not to be held responsible for any accidents. Though it is not apparent whether the car’s driver is Jewish, the taxi driver adds, “[P]eople drive like fucking animals.”42 Hearing that, Maxine realizes it is no use trying to point out his (potential) mistake; she merely claims that animals cannot drive, and moreover, that Jesus was also Jewish. Just as Mason views the colonists’ way of life in Cape Town as that of “another Planet,” Maxine and the taxi driver end up in disagreement on the issue: The driver says, “Honey, you must be from way out of town,” and Maxine almost replies, “You know, [. . .] I must be.”43 In such conversation, a combination of significant concepts through which Pynchon has depicted American society after the 1960s becomes evident: In Vineland and Inherent Vice, these include security under the law or insurance, animality as a rough synonym for præternaturality, and a sense of alienation from one’s hometown. Precisely to narrate such a challenging occasion as the 9/11 attacks, Pynchon purposefully selects a stereotypical Jewish mother as a protagonist, who does not eat pork, obviously, but somehow forgets to “fondle material or study the tags.”44 He leads her to one of the most symbolic sites of Manhattan, the Island of Meadows, where she becomes overwhelmed by a

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“collective history”45 that could be evoked to a degree by her ethnicity and experiences the illumination that nobody gets any exemption from their own abandonment: “Every Fairway bag [. . .] is up in there someplace, [. . .] and what she thought was lost and out of her life has only entered a collective history, which is like being Jewish and finding out that death is not the end of everything.”46 Pointing out that, just after this quotation, Maxine imagines that DeepArcher could be a substitute for the Island of Meadows in cyberspace, Anthony Lioi claims that such an “alchemy of garbage and the green world is particularly attractive to the ‘swampy’ ecocriticism,” and moreover, that Pynchon might give a role to “nerds” that Maxine has known though her mission to investigate a suspicious internet company as significant individuals who “will provide the bridge between virtual and material refuges in a city where everything is dirty.””47 Of course, this swampy ecocriticism and “nerd ecology” (the title of Lioi’s book) have the side effect that Maxine cannot differentiate the “meatspace” from the “soyextenderspace,”48 which could, however, be good for both health and environment. Just as Slavoj Žižek compares the “WTC explosions” broadcasted on TV with “coffee without caffeine,”49 Pynchon leaves his protagonist alone on “some refuge, some American DeepArcher,”50 which can be rephrased as the “the desert of the real” in the words of Žižek, who quotes it from The Matrix.51 Before Windust’s death, in fact, Maxine wonders how to “dowse her way across the desert of this precarious hour,”52 asking herself what she wants to find there. Her tentative answer is “some refuge, some American DeepArcher,” even though the refuge where she finally arrives is nothing but “soy-extenderspace,” in which the towers as “pure geometry” were blown “to pixels,”53 as Windust’s Guatemalan wife, who comes from “coffee-growing country,”54 says to Maxine after her husband’s death. Thus, whether you can interpret the ending of the novel approvingly depends on what you think of as real or on your evaluation of the meat extender as a welcome alternative or not. In his collection of essays We Are the Weather (2019), for instance, Jonathan Safran Foer urges us to “eat a plant-based diet” because it “immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.”55 In another essay, written during the COVID-19 pandemic, he points out that “a quarter of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 say they are vegetarians or vegans, which is perhaps one reason sales of plant-based ‘meats’ have skyrocketed, with Impossible and Beyond Burgers available everywhere from Whole Foods to White Castle,”56 referring to a report in The Economist. His claims on this issue are straightforward and do not seem interesting enough to be regarded as a literary statement, but if you read his 9/11 novel, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), while comparing it with Bleeding Edge, you can realize that this Jewish writer’s approach to reality is as complicated as

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that of Pynchon. In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a son and his mother quarrel about his father’s coffin, which is empty because the father was one of the casualties of the 9/11 attacks: “Mom said, ‘His spirit is there,’ and that made me really angry.”57 Perhaps, as Kristiaan Versluys suggests, because this novel decides to take “the side of the victims, irrespective of their national origin or allegiance,”58 the boy Oskar and his mother are not Jewish; however, Oskar’s affect is close to that of Foer himself as he appears in his 2009 collection of essays, Eating Animals. Foer’s grandmother’s statement, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save,”59 is one of the most significant lines in Eating Animals. Whereas what his grandmother meant to save was her own life and what mattered to her was being kosher, this line is changed at the end of the book to an aphorism for the cruelty of factory farming. In contrast, in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Foer uses the verbs—“save” and “matter”—to illustrate the cruel situation in which Oskar cannot be religious at all when facing the emptiness of his father’s death: “She said, ‘We can’t save everything.’ I said, ‘So it will be OK if I throw away all of your things and forget about you after you die?’”60 For Oskar, if everything matters, there’s nothing to throw away. Another dialogue with his mother shows that Oskar has a long list of “everything,” such as the “meat and dairy products in our refrigerator, fistfights, car accidents,” and so on.61 What makes Oskar’s words heavy is the irreversible fact that they could not save either the life or the death of his father, namely, neither his beingness nor emptiness. Eventually, Oskar digs up his father’s empty coffin and is shocked by the fact of its emptiness again, much more intensely than before: “I felt like I was looking into the dictionary definition of emptiness.”62 Here, emptiness itself is described as if it were something to save, but it also implies that real emptiness is no more than words that can be read but signify nothing at all. While Oskar, after all, finds his own refuge in time and space by flipping in reverse his self-made flipbook with pictures of a falling body, what rhetorically saves his father and himself is his narrative, written in the subjunctive mood: “And if I’d had more pictures, he would’ve flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would’ve poured into the hole that the plane was about to come out of.”63 Just like the image that Maxine shares with Windust’s wife—“[A]s 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 . . . ”64—Oskar’s flipbook can serve as virtual reality, a variant of “the desert of the real.” (Oskar also says, “I found a bunch of videos on the Internet of bodies falling.”65) However, the slight but definitive difference between the two images amounts to the power of belief or disbelief. Indeed, there is an episode that will convince us that Foer may be more pragmatic than Pynchon

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about how to handle the emptiness, including death without a body, when we reverse the pages of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in the first chapter. In the scene, Oskar is still in a limousine on the way to the cemetery when he sees his mother put her hand in her purse: “‘What are you squeezing in your purse?’ She pulled out her hand and opened it, and it was empty. ‘Just squeezing,’ she said.”66 While Oskar’s mother’s hand was squeezing nothing, Oskar thinks of the nothingness as the emptiness; however, Foer dares to let her use “squeezing” as an intransitive verb, that is to say, in itself an act of moving her hand forcibly. The episode of Oskar’s mother’s purse could be read as a parable for consumers living in the imperfect world generated between “meatspace” and “soy-extenderspace.” In an essay titled “Dispute with the Soul,” collected in We Are the Weather, Foer maintains a conversation with his own soul and finally reaches a sort of deadlock when he admits that there is a counterargument that leaves him “stumped.”67 The counterargument maintains that it is “a scientifically sound fantasy, an ethical fantasy, an irrefutable fantasy” for almost all people to change their eating habits, for example, “to give up dairy and eggs” together before the irreversible planetary crisis occurs.68 Living consciously in the “meatspace” where “veggie burgers that are indistinguishable from beef hamburgers” have not been invented yet, Foer says it is hard to imagine conveying “how the fantasy could be a viable plan” to those who think “[c]linging to a fantasy is every bit as dangerous as a viable plan.”69 Nevertheless, he claims that “the price of hope is action,” even if the act of “[g]iving up animal products” is not accomplished, as long as the act of just giving up is done.70 The two-sidedness of Foer’s writing as a novelizer and non-fiction writer is, indeed, rooted in a long tradition in American literature. In “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” (1865), Mark Twain describes one of the best trainers in American literature, who brings out the talents of a fighting dog named Andrew Jackson and patiently trains a frog named Dan’l Webster. But Twain himself is said to have been ambivalent about the idea of taming animals. After he became a famous writer, he drew literary inspiration from various interspecies interactions, but he also published an article titled “Cruelty to Animals” in the Daily Morning Call in September 1864, criticizing the inhumane treatment of horses.71 The animal ethics of both Twain and Ambrose Bierce, for instance, have a humor that is similar to that of Pynchon and Foer. In The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), Bierce defines the word “Pig” as “[a]n animal closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig.”72 He does not deliberately blur the boundary between humans and animals, nor does he unnecessarily put them at odds with each other. Instead, he focuses on the asymmetrical relationship between humans and animals that becomes

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apparent when comparing humans and pigs from the perspective of what they regard as “meat.” By using his unique sense of language, Bierce succeeds in expressing the absurdity of animals that do not have human-like rights in human society. According to Shelly Fisher Fishkin, Twain was a fan of the animal fables by Bierce that were published in the 1870s.73 Furthermore, Twain wrote a short story featuring a Newfoundland dog who has a sharp tongue when describing human beings. The dog writes in a letter to a St. Bernard dog, “Cruelty—the inflicting of pain upon the feeling or the body for the mere pleasure of inflicting it—is an infamous characteristic which is found in no animal but one—Man.”74 Upton Sinclair released The Jungle in the same year as The Devil’s Dictionary. It is said that this accusatory novel significantly changed American attitudes toward the meat industry, although no notable change occurred in the treatment of animals in the meat processing industry during the twentieth century. As David A. Nibert claims, the “animal-industrial complex” (in the words of Barbara Noske) is the ultimate form of animal cruelty, and the treatment of animals there should be called “domesecration” rather than domestication.75 Two books on the “animal-industrial complex” have been published: Ruth Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats (1998) and Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001), both of which were advertised as contemporary versions of The Jungle. Conversely, in Shosha (1974), originally written in Yiddish, Isaac B. Singer has his character say that “we do to God’s creatures what the Nazis do to us”76 when discussing the ethical treatment of animals. Comparing his innocent cruelty to animals (catching flies) with the Nazi oppression of the Jewish people, this Polish-born writer makes us very self-conscious about our way of dealing with animals after Auschwitz. In order to bequeath Singer’s legacy to future generations, Charles Patterson, author of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (2002), intentionally reverses the ordinary historical order of the Holocaust and animal cruelty, quoting words from J. M. Coetzee’s novel: “Chicago showed us the way; it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies.”77 In the history of literature regarding the treatment of the animals, Pynchon’s depiction of the pigs in chapter 3 of Gravity’s Rainbow also plays a significant role,78 whereas his latest way of developing his protagonist in Bleeding Edge is much more easygoing. From the beginning of the narrative, for example, Maxine is convinced to allow her children to play the first-person shooter set in “a cityscape that looks a lot like New York” because its “splatter options” are disabled and a woman, their target, “just disappears, not even a stain on the sidewalk”—“See? No blood, virtually nonviolent.”79 This episode is easily understood as a parable of the “soy-extenderspace,” but what annoys Maxine more is the other side of the space, where she is offered a salon service called

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a “Meat Facial”: “[M]eat here, directly onto this lovely yet depleted face.”80 Ironically enough, the blood of the chicken does not represent its death (“Not quite dead yet”81), but this exaggerated part of the narrative, as well as the reference to the first-person shooter, contrasts sharply with the scene where Maxine faces the reality of Windust’s death, never using her gun against the wild dogs around the body. After trying to wash vomit off her sleeve, Maxine now meets the Lady with the Alligator Purse in the mirror, seemingly the same one who often appeared in her dream. Of course, Maxine never knows whether the purse is empty or not, but she likely would not care because she also has her own purse, in which she usually puts the Beretta, a symptom of a sort of “James Bond Syndrome”82; its weight allows her to keep cool. As the Lady with the Alligator Purse whispers in the mirror or her dream, Maxine’s life resonates with a simple phrase such as “time’s a-wastin,”83 preferentially to “The Times Are A-Changin,’” the Bob Dylan song released the year after the publication of V. and mentioned in the first chapter of this book. Though in 2013, more than a decade after 9/11, the “bleeding edge” technology of those days does not seem to be bleeding anymore, we readers living in the 2020s are now facing another bleeding edge of progress—the same cruel animal treatment and, of course, another big “change,” namely, climate change. If Maxine’s children or the grown-up Oskar write new stories depicting their times, their settings will be in the veggie-burgers-that-are-indistinguishable-from-beefhamburgers space, and the narratives will be first-person with the “splatter option disabled and [a] no-kill policy,” urgently foregrounding environmental issues, even though it is thus far unpredictable to what degree the climate will then be a-changing or entropically stable. NOTES 1. Pynchon, “Luddite.” 2. Ali Chetwynd, “Pynchon after Paranoia,” in The New Pynchon Studies, ed. Joanna Freer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 37. 3. Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), 424, Kindle. 4. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 143. 5. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 8. 6. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 143. 7. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 474. 8. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 388. 9. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 388. 10. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 108.

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11. Ken Mogg, “Melancholy Elephants,” in Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen, ed. Mark Osteen (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), chap. 8, Kindle. 12. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 410. 13. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 410. 14. Pynchon, V., 151. 15. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 409–10. 16. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 413. 17. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 327. 18. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 409. 19. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 408. 20. Pynchon, Vineland, 287. 21. By comparing Inherent Vice to Bleeding Edge in terms of “hard-boiledness,” Jennifer Backman argues that Maxine Tarnow is more clearly defined as a protagonist of the detective narrative than Doc Sportello. This difference contributes to the complementary relationship between the two novels: “If Inherent Vice confronts [. . .] our collective repressed urge to control, Bleeding Edge counters with the ability to resist that urge.” From this perspective, Backman claims that Windust’s role also complements that of Shasta, both of whom “help reveal the detective’s deepest, most uninterrogated fears”: Windust is not a metaphor for the power that Maxine could surrender but for the power of a victim, which she never wants to become. Jennifer Backman, “From Hard Boiled to Over Easy: Reimagining the Noir Detective in Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018), 30. 22. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 4. 23. Pynchon, Inherent Vice, 305. 24. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 319. 25. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 411. 26. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 318. 27. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 36. 28. Kostas Kaltsas highlights the similarity between DeepArcher in Bleeding Edge and Tristero in The Crying of Lot 49 as functions that serve to show an alternative to a “commercialized, hypermonitored world.” Meanwhile, the origins and goals of DeepArcher are “not mystery,” unlike The Tristero, because DeepArcher is an invention of cutting-edge (or bleeding-edge) technology. Kaltsas argues that this difference is derived from the fact that DeepArcher is “unquestionably real,” but it might be possible to interpret DeepArcher as an artificial substitute for Tristero, which is naturally generated, that is, as a “soy-extender” version of Tristero. Kostas Kaltsas, “Of ‘Maidens’ and Towers: Oedipa Maas, Maxine Tarnow, and the Possibility of Resistance,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018), 41. 29. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 10. 30. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 10. 31. Jeffrey Severs, “Capitalism and Class,” in Thomas Pynchon in Context, ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 201.

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32. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 166. 33. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 166. 34. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 373. 35. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 167. 36. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 257. 37. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 210. 38. Pynchon, V., 490. 39. Pynchon, V., 408. 40. Gary Lippman, “Pynchonicity,” review of Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon, Paris Review,  September 5, 2013. https:​//​www​.theparisreview​.org​/blog​/2013​/09​/05​/ pynchonicity​/. 41. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 122. 42. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 122. 43. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 123. Italics in original. 44. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 153. 45. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 167. 46. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 167. 47. Anthony Lioi, Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), chap. 3, Kindle. 48. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 429. 49. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: New Left Books, 2002), 10–11. 50. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 353. 51. W. J. T. Mitchell also points out the lack of reality of the 9/11 attacks, considering the destruction of the World Trade Center from different perspectives. First, the towers of the World Trade Center “were already widely recognized as icons of globalization and advanced capitalism.” Second, the twinning of the towers had the same function as the cloning of Dolly the sheep: “The ‘twin towers’ were (as their ‘twin’ designation indicates) already anthropomorphized, perhaps even clonelike.” Finally, for the terrorists, as Mitchell guesses, the “destruction of the towers had no strategic military (as distinct from symbolic) importance, and the murder of innocent people was [. . .] merely a regrettable side effect [. . .] or merely instrumental to the aim of ‘sending a message’ to America.” W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13–15. 52. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 353. 53. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 446. 54. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 110. 55. Jonathan Safran Foer, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Beings at Breakfast (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 78. 56. Jonathan Safran Foer, “The End of Meat Is Here,” New York Times, May 21, 2020. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/05​/21​/opinion​/coronavirus​-meat​-vegetarianism​ .html. 57. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005; New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 169. Citations refer to the Penguin edition.

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58. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), chap. 3, Kindle. 59. Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2009; New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 263. Kindle. Citations refer to the Penguin edition. 60. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 102. 61. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 42. 62. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 321. 63. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 325. 64. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 446. 65. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 256. 66. Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 7. 67. Foer, We Are the Weather, chap. 4. 68. Foer, We Are the Weather, chap. 4. 69. Foer, We Are the Weather, chap. 4. 70. Foer, We Are the Weather, chap. 4. 71. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, ed., introduction to Mark Twain’s Book of Animals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 12. 72. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (London: Arthur F. Bird, 1906; New York: Albert and Charles Boni,1911), 254. Google Books. 73. Fishkin, introduction to Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, 9. 74. Mark Twain, “Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man,” in Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 102. 75. David A. Nibert, Animal Oppression & Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 12. 76. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974; New York: Penguin Books, 2012), chap. 13, Kindle.. 77. Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), chap. 3, Kindle. Patterson’s research forces us to rethink the nature of “post-memory” regarding the Holocaust, just as Foer uses his grandparents’ memories of the Nazis to construct a narrative history of animal treatment in the age of the “animal-industrial complex.” 78. “Pig” is also the name of the character that appears in “Low-lands,” V., and Gravity’s Rainbow, Seaman Pig Bodine. Patrick J. Hurley suggests that Pig Bodine is “a simple anagram of Ping Bodie, the name of a New York Yankee from 1918 to 1921.” While mentioning some interpretations of the name by critics, Hurley gives his views: “Bodie is best known as Babe Ruth’s spring training roommate [. . .]. Pig Bodine is meant to mirror the qualities of a popular American hero, one whose popularity is tied to transgression.” Patrick J. Hurley, Pynchon Character Names: A Dictionary (Jefferson.: McFarland, 2008), 27. 79. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 33–34. 80. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 50.

The Lady with the Alligator Purse

81. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 50. 82. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 14. 83. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 410.

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Conclusion And Then There Were None (Except for Nature on the Screen): Documentary Guys, Grizzly Man, and Thomas Pynchon

It might not be just me who has recalled the title of the environmental documentary film featuring Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, when encountering the name of the fantastic hydrogen airship, Inconvenience, in the opening scene of Against the Day. Because both the film and the novel were released in 2006, it is presumably coincidental that the former Democratic vice-president and famously reclusive novelist Pynchon chose something inconvenient as a key concept. However, it is worth considering whether there are some similarities among radical intellectuals, including writers, filmmakers, politicians, and environmental activists, who feel compelled to say something inconvenient to the establishment.1 Naturally, these people are not always standing on the side of justice; rather, what is more significant is their transcendental but paranoiac attitudes toward the issues concerning the environments of both human and non-human beings. In books, films, and even criticism concerning ecological issues and the ecological imagination, the author is not dead but still matters. Of course, not all the promoters who try to advance environmental causes necessarily have literary or documentary genius; as Michiko Kakutani notes, even Gore “isn’t a scientist like [Rachel] Carson and doesn’t possess her literary gifts; he writes, rather, as a popularizer of other people’s research and ideas.”2 Nevertheless, what we expect of these “authors” is paranoid visions that can play a role in “galvanizing public opinion about a real and present danger.”3 At the opening of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017), Gore casually states to his audience, “I was reminded recently of how long it’s 117

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been since I started this.”4 He delivers a humorous anecdote about his own (un)changeable image, which stems from media coverage of his popular first film: “I was sitting in a restaurant. A woman came walking by in front of my table, just staring at me. [. . .] And she took one step forward and she said, ‘You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore.’ And so, I said, ‘Thank you.’ And she said, ‘You sound like him, too.’”5 This small talk unintentionally illustrates that audiences often remember who appears in a documentary film rather than what it documents. Moreover, quite a few environmental and social justice documentaries in the twenty-first century feature an environmentalist or activist who operates as a combination of narrator, director, producer, moderator, facilitator, and subject of the film; examples include Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour (2007) and Before the Flood (2016), Richard O’Barry in The Cove (2009), and Colin Beavan and his family in No Impact Man (2009). Therefore, this genre of documentary can possibly be interpreted varyingly as pedagogical, autobiographical, and self-promotional. Even though “[m]ovies presenting themselves as based on a true story are not simply claiming to tell the truth,”6 as Thomas Leitch reminds us, they might resonate with the boom of biopics of environmentalists, such as A Civil Action (1998) and Erin Brockovich (2000). Indeed, the freelance director of the documentary film in Bleeding Edge—the “documentary guy”—becomes excited by comparing himself to this environmental activist: “Ah-right! Makes a man feel like Erin Brockovich!”7 As John A. Duvall claims, “telling the life stories of important historical figures in the environmental movement” is a reasonable and effective method to engage an audience, leading to biographical films such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (2007), a documentary of Aldo Leopold titled Green Fire (2011), and The Island President (2011) featuring Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, since these “compelling stories promote audience identification with an activist figure.”8 When environmentalists appear onscreen in documentaries to share how they struggle to deliver the truths that they have learned through their own activities, audiences of such realistic documentaries may expect to see these environmentalists act bravely or tragically, just as they are portrayed in feature films. For instance, audiences often want to watch biographical films based on the true story of an environmentalist who struggles to spread the truth while sentimentalizing the mass extinction of plants and animals or being amazed by sublime scenes of catastrophic climate threat. Such a style of entertainment might be linked to today’s worldwide tendency toward “eco-necrophilia.” Referring to Erich Fromm’s 1964 book The Heart of Man, Glenn Albrecht explains that because of the spread of this perversive mental condition, “our Earth emotions become commodified and are ultimately exterminated.”9 Though we have consumed nature via environmental documentaries even after the disruption

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of the ecosystem and when global warming became a reality, it does not necessarily mean that acts of depicting, narrating, and editing the world with pen or camera are losing their value as fables for us humans. As Pynchon’s hunting narratives—from Profane’s alligator patrol in the sewer to Reef’s extermination of Tatzelwurm in Against the Day—are parodical descendants of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edger Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799) and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), it seems reasonable to seek successors to these hunting narratives among documentary films, especially Grizzly Man (2005), one of the best. In fact, Grizzly Man is an inauthentic documentary, shot by American amateur environmentalist Timothy Treadwell and edited by German filmmaker Werner Herzog after Treadwell’s death. More properly speaking, Grizzly Man is based on the true story of Treadwell, known as “Grizzly Man,” who did not hunt bears but identified himself as their guardian, and includes genuine video footage found after his death, as well as audio of Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie being mauled to death by a grizzly bear as if in an unreasoning act of revenge by nature. In an interview, Herzog says, “[the tape] is so horrifying” and that “it was immediately clear it will not be published out of respect for the two victims and, of course, out of respect for an audience.”10 While Herzog’s decision regarding the found footage seems reasonable for a director who does not intend to make a snuff film, some members of the film’s audience were inevitably frustrated because they believed that the authenticity of the film might lie precisely in the moment of Treadwell and Amie’s death. If the documentary had been adapted to a feature film, such a film might not hesitate to represent the bear’s attack, following the cliché developed by films like Man in the Wilderness (1971), which was virtually remade as The Revenant (2015),11 or Into the Grizzly Maze (2015), which is a descendant of 1970s animal panic movies such as Grizzly (1976). However, in the case of Grizzly Man, Herzog omits the “horrifying” death of a protagonist, which it seems natural to represent in a feature film. This ethical and filmological decision also reminds us of an episode during the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in Germany, which appears in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. “At one point, however, the camera lingers almost by accident on what seem to be living people, a group of prisoners crouched on the ground or wandering on foot like ghosts,” writes Agamben, who informs us of the slang term Muselmänner, which signifies prisoners who are ill, infirm, captured, tortured, lost souls, and/or almost dead yet alive in the concentration camps. Clearly shifting his critical object from the state of the prisoners to the cameraman, Agamben continues: “[T]he same cameraman who had until then patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible ‘dolls’ dismembered and stacked one on top of another, could not bear the sight of these half-living beings; he

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immediately began once again to show the cadavers.”12 The Muselmänner are neither human nor animal and make the audience/cameraman embarrassed and even reluctant to witness them. Masachi Osawa notes that one cannot endure much more indignity than having one’s death documented on camera and is unsurprised that the cameraman would rather choose to begin “once again to show the cadavers,” that is, to see the death itself rather than bodies that are dying. The lesson of this episode is, for Osawa, that “taking ethical behavior in front of Muselmänner is completely unethical.”13 While it remains ambiguous whether Herzog’s decision to omit the sound-only footage will be judged as unethical, conversely, Pynchon already parodies the psychological conflict of those who witness the ghost-like existences of those in the concentration camp in Gravity’s Rainbow. Shortly after the liberation, the fictitious tour guide of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp gives electric lanterns to tourists while offering “basic instruction on what to do in case of any encounter with the dead.”14 He claims that death for the prisoners is a spiritual liberation that makes them off-balanced in mind as well as body. As Luc Herman states, “it is impossible to make definitive statements about the ideological underpinnings of [Pynchon’s] depiction” of the Holocaust,15 but as we would understand later, the ghost-like liberated beings, “apt to be on a spiritual rampage,”16 are at the stage prior to becoming Thanatoids in Vineland, who can “feel little else beyond their needs for revenge” and whose community even has “Thanatoid dogs.”17 Regarding the issue of dignity, then, Herzog’s directing in Grizzly Man seems to value the bear above both Treadwell and Amie as a victim. Patricia Aufderheide claims that “Herzog contrasts Treadwell’s misguided sentimentalism with his own nihilism and belief in the inherent cruelty of nature; he matches Treadwell’s narcissism with his own and manages to make the bears look more dignified than any of the people in the film.”18 In other words, if the director were to let us hear the horrified sounds of the victims without mercy, our impression of the victims, as well as the grizzlies in the film, would serve to undermine the dignity of both humans and animals. Indeed, “inherent cruelty” is not necessarily an “inherent vice” of nature, but once the cruelty is represented on the screen, it is difficult to prevent such a scene from having virtually the same effect as a horror movie or snuff film. Indeed, as Gregg Mitman highlights, especially since the 1990s, environmental documentaries have often been consumed as “animal snuff films” in which audiences can witness real deaths, even though the violent scenes in the nature films of the 1950s are often balanced by depictions of the harmonious relationships of nature: “In the animal snuff films of the 1990s, the choice shot would be a close-up of the hawk tearing the flesh of the starling, with an amplified audio-track of the starling’s shrieks. The scene would be made

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more intense than my actual experience could be.”19 This sadistic tendency of environmental documentaries peaked with the release of The Cove, as mentioned in chapter 2 of this book. The film stars an eco-activist and celebrated dolphin trainer, Richard O’Barry, who worked on the 1960s TV series Flipper but switched over to environmental activism. In The Cove, he literally dives into the cove, the site of a fishing village in Japan, to protest a dolphin hunt. By watching the shocking scenes of dolphins being slaughtered in The Cove, however, various audience members living in or familiar with Japan might have had complicated feelings that could be called “Topoaversion.” According to Glenn Albrecht, this feeling is explained as “a strong enough feeling to keep you from ever returning to visit the place that was once beloved.”20 While the reality of the fishing village did not change from before to after the release of the film, it seems difficult for people who were familiar with the place to revisit it as before. This is not only because the “reality” of the place, for those familiar with it, was changed by the new perspective supplied by the film but also because the film’s sadistic nature as an “animal snuff film” might ruin people’s love for the place and the dignity of life there. By extension, if Grizzly Man were a radical environmental documentary that equivocated the dignity of animals and their habitat, it would make sense for Herzog to represent Treadwell and Amie’s death onscreen, just as The Cove shows (and markets) the death of dolphins. There are many movies that feature giant bears killing innocent people in wilderness settings, such as The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which is uniquely close to the filmological approach of Grizzly Man. This closeness is not merely because DiCaprio is widely portrayed as an eco-conscious Hollywood celebrity but also because he devoted himself to producing the environmental documentary Before the Flood while the shooting of The Revenant. In his documentary, DiCaprio describes his journey to the present. He begins his story from his birthplace, remembering that he found refuge at the Natural History Museum. Through the experiences he had at the museum’s exhibitions, he says he was “fascinated with species that had become extinct [. . .] from the dodo to the passenger pigeon, which was the most plentiful bird on earth, to the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thylacine, to the great auk, the quagga, the moa.”21 As an adult, he remembered the anger he felt in those days toward explorers and settlers who caused the extinction of entire species and the decimation of ecosystems, including Hugh Glass, the protagonist of The Revenant. Narrated against off-shot footage of The Revenant, this monologue can then be interpreted as DiCaprio’s expression of anger toward Hugh Glass. Based on Glass’s true story and adapted from Michael Punke’s 2002 novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, this film attracted widespread public attention by dynamically and shockingly depicting a grizzly attack in a hyper-realistic way. However, the film’s cinematographer, Emmanuel

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Lubezki, never allows the scene to appear to be recycled from one of the many other furious bear movies. Instead, Lubezki succeeds in dramatically representing the ambiguity of the archetypal explorer of the American West as both hero and villain. As Eric R. Williams notes, “it is important to know that a ‘revenant’ is a person who has returned from the dead,” and DiCaprio’s Glass is “thought of as an animated corpse who returns to terrorize the living.”22 Recall here Agamben’s Muselmänner and Pynchon’s Thanatoids, as Williams continues: “When reading the 9 August 2010 draft of the screenplay, it seems obvious to me that the screenwriters did not intend for Glass to seem human. He is much more of a wraith.”23 Glass in The Revenant, trampled and injured badly, is nothing but the representation of a “half-living being.” In short, if this footage was genuine, audiences would not be able to bear the sight of it. By depicting Glass as a “half-living being,” though he is revitalized later, the filmmakers of The Revenant succeeded in creating a feature film that is based on a true story and does not lionize him. Their decision seems to save DiCaprio’s honor as an actual environmentalist who might demonstrate a deep understanding of Herzog’s decision not to publish the real footage of Treadwell’s death. Since The River (1937) and The Sea Around Us (1953), environmental documentaries have by and large urged audiences to act. However, as the catastrophes predicted and documented by these films become fact, Albrecht argues that “it will be the worst nightmare for those who thought nature was the historic past presented as a documentary on a nature channel.”24 While Treadwell seems to be the opposite of Albrecht’s children, who have a phobia of close urban encounters with untamed beasts, to Herzog, Treadwell is no different from them. In fact, Herzog’s Treadwell is childish and wants to play with grizzlies to satiate his ego. Herzog said that the “deep, deep human tragedy pervading the entire film” is not the moment of the protagonists’ death, but that we sentimentalize wild nature too much.25 As it turns out, then, Treadwell exists somewhere between self-promoting documentary guys such as Gore and O’Barry, and fictional environmentalists in feature films. He shot footage of Alaskan wildlife for both public and private aims and left extraordinary footage behind. However, Herzog—who does not want to create an ordinary documentary that nostalgically depicts the present as the past—shows a strong interest in adapting the “outtakes” of Treadwell’s footage; those more genuine, authentic moments of Treadwell’s lived present that spill through the gap between his self-advertisement and social withdrawal. Through such adaptation, Grizzly Man becomes a unique environmental documentary, shot not for eco-necrophiliacs but rather for eco-spectrophiliacs,26 encouraging them to dare to love nature and human beings as “revenant ghosts” there.

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As for a reference to ghost-like nature documentary films in Pynchon’s novels, we encounter a ridiculous description of a Korean karaoke party in Bleeding Edge. On the karaoke screen, behind the text of the lyrics, can be seen some “enigmatic tape clips” or “low-res footage from Korean soap operas and nature documentaries and other strange peninsular visuals.”27 As the narrator commonsensically points out, this relationship between the images and lyrics offers a peculiar sense of disconnectedness. Of course, it is not so sharply satirical criticism of the “glocal” customs in the opening of the twenty-first century, but rather, because of its banality, the nature documentaries on the karaoke screen could be a motif of a fable for twenty-first-century ecocriticism. “By connecting what ecocriticism forbids us to connect—consumerism and environmentalism,” claims Timothy Morton in Ecology without Nature, “we could do fresh ecological criticism, awake to the irony that a national park is as reified as an advertisement for an SUV.”28 Similarly, with the conception of “eco-necrophilia,” Albrecht shows us that there is a negative history of connection between consumerism and environmentalism, from “trophy hunting” to “realistic games” and “natural history documentaries.”29 Albrecht laments that “witnessing violence and death in the natural world only via natural history documentaries” could not help promote emotional education; instead, such virtual education does nothing but “exacerbate” the ironical condition,30 which might be similar to what Morton urges us to awaken to. As for a documentary film critic such as Gregg Mitman, traditional nature films consist of “sentimental and violent framings of nature” without “the urban and human setting” so that we can hold “the illusion of this recreated nature as God’s place of grace.”31 The symptom of the “eco-necrophilia”32 in nature films appears as a repeated maudlin sentiment over the deaths of nonhuman creatures in the natural world. In the history of virtual reality, including novels and films, therefore, sentimentalism (or just the praise of nature) played a significant role in connecting consumerism and environmentalism, even though Mitman presents Theodore Roosevelt’s attacks on Jack London and William Long as typical examples of accusations of “using sentiment to sell nature,”33 namely, consumerist uses of sentimentalism.34 The connection between sentimentalism and ethical thinking is also a significant issue for ecocriticism because to be ethical is sometimes to deny consumerism. In the case of modern literary animal representations, many writers all over the world have confronted ethical issues about animal treatment in their novels and nonfiction writings. As Philip Armstrong notes, good examples include J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, which won the Booker prize in 2000, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Yann Martel’s novel on taxidermy, Beatrice and Virgil, further stating, “Narratives of sympathy for animals never lost their force in popular culture, and at the end of the twentieth century they also began to make a comeback in literary culture.”35 This

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is because, as Armstrong suggests, the penetration of postmodernism, which “called into question the elitism of literary and artistic practice,” enables serious writers to “rediscover the power and versatility of once-despised popular forms such as sentimental narrative.”36 In Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales, then, we also rediscover the power of these “narratives of sympathy for animals” in relation to so-called postmodernist skepticism, especially through rereading the texts of Pynchon, whose long-standing challenge has been to deconstruct the boundary between humans and non-human animals by expressing skepticism toward the moral and ethical use of literature. In Eating Animals, Foer defines the word “sentimentality” as the “valuing of emotions over reality.”37 By asking “who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist,”38 Foer never stops writing the reality of the animal farms in a sentimental mood. Indeed, his use of sentiment seems appropriate to persuasively narrate the paradoxical situation of being an animal. In the foreword of the academic book Animals and the Human Imagination, Foer explains how he felt at the moment he was presented with his son at his birth. “Watching him eat, all of my more particular identities—American, male, Jew, writer—fell away from me,” writes Foer, “I think of them [my most extreme experiences] in the language of animality: ‘I howled like an animal’; ‘I hungered for it like an animal’; ‘ . . . like a wounded animal’; ‘ . . . like a blood-thirsty animal’; ‘I was an animal.’”39 Relying on the power of sentimental narratives, then, Foer finds himself “confronted with the paradox,”40 which makes what might be taken for naïve philanthropism into something else as well; that is, by stressing the moment he felt that “we were animals,” his narrative of sympathy for his baby could be understood as an implied attack on our desire to ask what being animal might mean. Sentimental narrative in the postmodern era seems to have two directly opposing functions: to make its narrator’s identity both clear and obscure. Indeed, in the words, “[A]ll of my more particular identities—American, male, Jew, writer—fell away from me,” Foer succeeds in clarifying his particular identities while simultaneously discarding them. Especially when writing about animals, postmodern writers’ political attitudes tend to be confident, but their political positioning is often rather tentative. In When Species Meet, the expanded version of The Companion Species Manifesto, mentioned in chapter 4 of this book, Donna Haraway also depicts the moment when her particular identities fell away. Haraway asks her readers and herself two undivided questions: “Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?” and “How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?”41 One of the questions sounds like the title of Raymond Carver’s short fiction “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” but Haraway’s approach is more direct. This might be because “love” is not the goal but merely the first step for her to discuss the differences and similarities between humans and animals: “Significantly other to each other, in

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specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is a historical aberration and a natural cultural legacy.”42 Such a proactive manifesto for love and infection is, however, associated with Pynchon’s desperate declaration of love and death in Gravity’s Rainbow: “Fathers are carriers of the virus of Death, and sons are the infected.”43 This monologue is uttered by Captain Blicero, whose father is himself and whose son is Gottfried, and between them is the inanimate body of the rocket which is going to bring a young Nazi soldier into the sky. Paradoxically enough, however, Pynchon tries to extend mercy to Gottfried by letting him return into the “womb” of the rocket, precisely because it is narrated beforehand that the “rockets are his pet animals, barely domesticated, often troublesome, even apt to revert” and that he “loves them in the way he would have loved horses, or Tiger tanks, had he pulled duty somewhere else.”44 Becoming part of his own pet animal, Gottfried is celebrated by the somber voices of both Pynchon and Blicero: “She should not be a mystery to you, Gottfried. Find the zone of love, lick and kiss . . . ”45 Pynchon’s approach of using a sentimental narrative of love and death between technology, the animal, and the human being is also employed during the episode of the dodoes in Gravity’s Rainbow. Frans shoots the peculiar birds in Mauritius but cannot “endure to eat their flesh,”46 partly because he cannot find ordinary animal-human relationships between the dodoes and himself: He thinks, “[H]ad we but found savages on this island, the bird’s appearance might have then seemed to us no stranger than that of the wild turkey of North America.”47 While Pynchon’s Frans hates the flesh of the dodoes, to keep an emotional distance from the prey,48 Foer claims we should feel shame in the presence of the very flesh of animals, while referring to Franz Kafka’s epiphanic experience of becoming a vegetarian: According to Kafka’s close friend, he suddenly spoke to fish in their tanks, saying “Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don’t eat you anymore” without tones of “any affection” nor “the least sentimentality.”49 Perhaps we cannot feel a mixture of shame and sentimentality at the same time because shame is “what we feel when we almost entirely—yet not entirely—forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification,” in Foer’s words.50 While sentimentality may include works to prevent us from eating animals—Foer also points out that “[o]ur taboo against dog eating says something about dogs and a great deal about us,”51 and in Bleeding Edge, for example, Maxine’s friend screams, “Oh God! Those people eat dog over there! You ordered this, how could you?”52—feeling shame without any sentimentality reminds us of “our obligations to others,”53 which we forget until facing the flesh of the animals. In Pynchon’s animal fables, however, Foer’s words of animal protection could become something like lyrics on a Korean karaoke screen, with unrelated images, even though this does not necessarily

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mean that his sincere and intelligent words cause Pynchon to cringe. In fact, whereas Maxine shrugs and says to her friend, who is mistakenly eating the flesh of a dog, “You want me to help induce vomiting, or can you remember how to do that OK?,”54 Fang, the talkative dog in Mason & Dixon, claims that the bad habit of eating animals has promoted their evolution: “Noting that among Men no crime was quite so abhorr’d as eating the flesh of another human, Dog quickly learn’d to act as human as possible.”55 Fang’s attitude reminds us of an Aesop’s fable that portrays the relationship between an owner and his dog. It begins with, “There was a farmer who was trapped on his country estate by a winter storm.”56 Because he does not have any food, the farmer eats his sheep, goats, and oxen. The dogs then learn their owner’s true nature and decide to escape. Another Aesop’s fable portrays a man who rushes his dog to get ready to go out, but the dog replies, “I am all ready to go; you are the one who’s delaying!”57 Based on a social hierarchy between humans and animals, these fables teach the lesson that people who mistreat their companions lose credibility. However, some of Pynchon’s dogs cannot quite bring themselves to distrust humans and instead decide to return. In Mason & Dixon, a young dog, the “very Representation” of Fang, appears in the surveyors’ dreams to say, “I am a British Dog, and belong to no one”58; in Vineland, Desmond finally comes back to lick Prairie’s face, and the narrator concludes by saying, “It was Desmond, none other, [. . .], face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home.”59 It is possible to say that their return is a sort of expression of sentimentality by which Pynchon is swayed, but what should be considered is the true meaning, or the critical explanation, of their returning to untrustworthy humans.60 “People told each other these Aesop’s fables and everybody knew what stood for what. But can we in the 21st-century U.S. say the same?”61 This is a rhetorical question asked by March Kelleher in Bleeding Edge. In March’s “Aesop’s fable,” there are two human characters: an older lady with “a huge sack full of dirty rags, scraps of paper and plastic, broken appliances, leftover food, and other rubbish she collected off the street”62 and a powerful ruler who compensates people for “a highly toxic form of energy.”63 One day, the two of them meet, and the lady denies the ruler’s offer, saying “I cannot and must not forget.”64 Her attitude is so subversive that the ruler could resort to violence, but he does not because he is smarter than old-fashioned tyrannical rulers. Instead, he tries to hire her as “an environmental cabinet minister,” even though he can never find the lady nor delete her “criticism of the regime,” which has already become a part of “the collective consciousness of the city.”65 Perhaps it will become easier to derive lessons from Bleeding Edge if we can interpret March’s fable as showing the intention of Pynchon’s narrative.

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But this “bag-lady”66 does not seem to completely share her political attitudes with the writer of this novel, just as March’s address cannot get her satisfactory applause. Rather, perhaps the lady with a huge sack is meant to intentionally contrast with the “Lady with the Alligator Purse” in Maxine’s dream; with Maxine’s friend, Heidi, whose identity is partly supported by name brand bags such as Coach, Longchamp, and a Henri Bendel bag presented to her by Monica Lewinsky; or with Maxine herself, with the Beretta in her purse. Even if the characters in the novel are criticized as “poor specimens, neither resonant nor satiric in any memorable way”67 in the words of Michiko Kakutani, their bags shallowly but richly epitomize the cultural and political landscape of the late-twentieth and twenty-first-century U.S.: garbage problems, an exotic leather ban, scandals in the White House, and gun control. The superficiality of these topics may serve as strong reminders of entertaining political documentaries such as those of Michael Moore, who suspiciously narrates in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), “Is it rude to suggest that when the Bush family wakes up in the morning, they might be thinking about what’s best for the Saudis instead of what’s best for you or me?”68 This is similar to how March’s address allows not Maxine but her child to ask embarrassedly, “Mom, did you know that the Bush family does business with Saudi Arabian terrorists?”69 Such Moore-like “nattering” in Bleeding Edge is harshly criticized by Kakutani, who believes it is “embarrassing”; however, being “slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details” does not necessarily mean that Pynchon’s work is “scattershot.”70 It can be said that Kakutani’s gun metaphor here is irrelevant, particularly because the world Pynchon correctly depicts in this 2013 novel is very close to that of the “Trump era,”71 as Kakutani argued in her 2018 book, The Death of Truth. Referring to a political science study that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and on NPR, she informs readers of such “absurd details”72 as follows: 25 percent of Americans believe that the 2008 crash was secretly orchestrated by a small cabal of bankers, 19 percent believe that the U.S. government had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and 11 percent even believe a theory made up by the researchers—that compact fluorescent lightbulbs were part of a government plot to make people more passive and easy to control.73

It is understandable that sensible critics find these details “unnerving rather than merely comical”74; the presidency of Donald Trump, for instance, was good at utilizing them to attack the news media. For Pynchon, in contrast, the reality of the “soy-extenderspace” should be narrated much more comically than merely unnervingly. This is because the community to which Maxine Tarnow belongs is equal parts “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true

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and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist,”75 in the words of Hannah Arendt, as quoted by Kakutani. Not only ordinary citizens but also Gabriel Ice, the “moneyed” one in Bleeding Edge, is backstabbed, as one “having had a fateful encounter with tabloid figure Donald Trump’s cost accountants.”76 Then, just as Kakutani appropriately claims that the opening lines of Gravity’s Rainbow “uncannily sound like a savagely prescient description of what would happen on Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City,”77 the scene following a karaoke joint at the Lucky 18 in K-Town in Bleeding Edge uncannily implies what would happen in the Trump era: Then she’s out in the street and everybody is scattering [. . .]. Leaving behind them in the Lucky 18 an empty orchestra playing to an empty room.78

Even if every human scatters just like Slothrop does—“He is being broken down instead, and scattered.”79—and even though, as Morton put in the memorable words, “One cannot have a video of one’s own extinction,”80 the Korean karaoke screen will repeatedly show representations of nature, animals, or creatures. This may be one of the richest images of the world after, or without, humans that is evident in Pynchon’s narratives, and it stands as an alternative to Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern fable that Pynchon offers to stimulate our ecocritical thought for tomorrow. NOTES 1. Interestingly enough, as Catherine Flay argues by quoting Deborah Madsen, what was regarded as “Pynchon’s paranoid vision of global conspiracy” in the 1970s was accomplished by 1990s developments in “public-sector initiatives like Al Gore’s National Performance Review.” Catherine Flay, “Conservatism as Radicalism: Family and Antifeminism in Vineland,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 212. 2. Michiko Kakutani, “Al Gore Revisits Global Warming, With Passionate Warnings and Picture,” review of An Inconvenient Truth (Book), New York Times, May 23, 2006. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2006​/05​/23​/books​/23kaku​.html. 3. Kakutani, “Al Gore.” 4. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2017), DVD. 5. An Inconvenient Sequel.

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6. Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), chap. 12, Kindle. 7. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 11. 8. John A. Duvall, The Environmental Documentary: Cinema Activism in the 21st Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), chap. 3, Kindle. 9. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, chap. 3. 10. Werner Herzog, “‘Grizzly Man,’ Herzog’s Human Nature Tale,” interview by Scott Simon, NPR, July 30, 2005. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/templates​/story​/story​.php​ ?storyId​=4778191. 11. A film review on The Revenant begins by pointing out its affinity with a digital game: “The Revenant (2015) isn’t based on a video game, but it looks like one.” The reviewer’s comparison between The Revenant and Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption reveals the film’s eco-necrophiliac nature. Kyle Meikle, “The Revenant’s Returns,” review of The Revenant, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárittu, Adaptation 9, no. 3 (2016): 439. 12. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 51. 13. Masachi Osawa, Fukanosei no Jidai [The Age of Impossibility] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2016), part. 5, chap. 3, Kindle. 14. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 296. 15. Luc Herman, “Antwerp and the Representation of the Holocaust in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works, ed. Thomas H. Schaub (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 112. Herman wrote this essay as a professor of American literature and narrative theory teaching Gravity’s Rainbow at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, where many students are “more or less familiar with the V-2 raids on the city in 1944 and 1945.” Herman claims that “local knowledge” could contribute to the discussion of the ethical matters within Pynchon’s treatment of “the fate of the Jewish people.” Herman, “Antwerp,” 106. 16. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 296. 17. Pynchon, Vineland, 366. 18. Aufderheide, Documentary Film, 122. 19. Gregg Mitman, epilogue to Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), Kindle. 20. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 79. 21. Before the Flood, directed by Fisher Stevens (National Geographic Documentary Films, 2016), DVD. 22. Eric R. Williams, Screen Adaptation: Beyond the Basics—Techniques for Adapting Books, Comics and Real-Life Stories into Screenplays (New York: Routledge, 2018), 209. 23. Williams, Screen Adaptation, 209. 24. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 74–75. 25. Herzog, “‘Grizzly Man.’”

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26. “Spectrophilia,” a sexual attraction to ghosts (specters), is not the antonym of “necrophilia,” but the transition of our tendency from eco-necrophilia to eco-spectrophilia is useful for us to connect Albrecht’s considerations of nature to Herzog’s filmmaking. 27. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 151. 28. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 164. 29. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 120. 30. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 120. 31. Mitman, epilogue to Reel Nature. 32. Albrecht, Earth Emotions, 119. 33. Mitman, epilogue to Reel Nature. 34. Consumerist representations of nature have been adopted not only in sentimental narratives but also in hunting narratives. At the start of his history of film, Gregg Mitman notes that Roosevelt in Africa (1910) was much anticipated, particularly because the film was “shot by Cherry Kearton, a famous naturalist-photographer from London on safari in British East Africa, with the assistance of James L. Clark, a sculptor and taxidermist on a collecting expedition for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City,” but was abandoned. This disappointed audiences because Kearton was not “successful in his attempt to secure the first motion picture footage of lions in the wild.” Not surprisingly, a contemporary entrepreneur named Colonel William Selig tried filming the moment Kearton missed, releasing Hunting Big Game in Africa (1909), which “faked a scene of a lion being shot and carried away by native porters.” Such historical episodes demonstrate that the nature documentary genre has improved as a result of intense competition with entertainment films: A fictional shot of hunting the lion could be substituted for the real footage of killing the animal, and vice versa. The ultimate aim of photographing nature is to visually communicate that the wilderness no longer poses a threat to human beings (both filmmakers and audience). Mitman, Reel Nature, (2009), chap. 1, Kindle. 35. Philip Armstrong, “Literary Animal Encounters,” in Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, ed. Margo DeMello (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 344. 36. Armstrong, “Literary Animal Encounters,” 344. 37. Foer, Eating Animals, 74. 38. Foer, Eating Animals, 74. 39. Jonathan Safran Foer, “Foreword,” in Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies, ed. Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), ix–xi, Kindle. 40. Foer, foreword to Animals and Human Imagination. 41. Haraway, When Species Meet, chap. 1. 42. Haraway, When Species Meet, chap. 1. 43. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 723. 44. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 103. The intimacy between the young engineer Gottfried and the rocket reminds us of Pynchon’s two-year career as a technical writer for Boeing in Seattle. Reviewing Pynchon’s letters to his friend at that time, Jeffrey Severs notes that the young Pynchon was so impressed by the Seattle World’s Fair in

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1962, known as the Century 21 Exposition, that the images of the rocket-centered city and life in Gravity’s Rainbow would be affected by the experience. From the mention of Henry Adam’s surprise at the 1900 Paris Exposition in V. to the opening scene of Against the Day, when the Chums of Chance arrive at the city of Chicago, which hosts the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, Pynchon attributes a great deal of importance to world expositions as historical moments that might be anatomized “for their boosterism and recapitulation of colonial patterns in theme and physical layout.” Jeffrey Severs, “‘A City of the Future’: Gravity’s Rainbow and the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.” Twentieth Century Literature 62, no. 2 (2016): 146. 45. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 751. Marie Franco suggests that Gottfried in the tail section of the rocket, a “womb” as mentioned here, is stripped of the power to generate his own narrative because his “queer practice” with Blicero just before the launch of the rocket “prevents the production of intelligible narrative.” Marie Franco, “Queer Sex, Queer Text: S/M in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Thomas Pynchon, Sex, and Gender, ed. Ali Chetwynd, Joanna Freer, and Georgios Maragos (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018), 100. 46. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 109. 47. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 110. 48. Refusal to eat the flesh of the dodo can be found in the letters of actual colonists. Errol Fuller, Dodo: A Brief History (New York: Universe, 2002), 64. 49. Foer, Eating Animals, 36–37. 50. While Foer uses the specific case of shame in Jacques Derrida’s philosophical lecture to illustrate his argument, Haraway sharply criticizes Derrida for the imbalance between animals and humans: “Still, shame is not an adequate response to our inheritance of multispecies histories, even at their most brutal. Even if the cat did not become a symbol of all cats, the naked man’s shame quickly became a figure for the shame of philosophy before all of the animals.” This idea is directly linked to Harraway’s Marxist feminist perspective, which holds that both humans and animals are equal as workers composed of minds and bodies. She says the “problem is actually to understand that human beings do not get a pass on the necessity of killing significant others, who are themselves responding, not just reacting.” Haraway, When Species Meet, chap. 3, Kindle (2008). 51. Foer, Eating Animals, 25. 52. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 214. 53. Foer, Eating Animals, 37. 54. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 214. 55. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 22. 56. Aesop, “The Farmer and His Dogs,” in Aesop’s Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 139. 57. Aesop, “The Dog and Her Master,” in Aesop’s Fables, 183–4. 58. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, 757. 59. Pynchon, Vineland, 385. 60. Michael O’Bryan emphasizes that Vineland does not aim to “elaborate political positions but to embody political practices.” The lives Prairie and Zoyd will rebuild with Desmond after the death of Brock Vond might indicate another possibility of

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their political practices. Michael O’Bryan, “In Defense of Vineland: Pynchon, Anarchism, and the New Left.” Twentieth Century Literature 62, no. 1 (2016): 22. 61. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 114. 62. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 113. 63. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 113. 64. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 113. 65. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 114. 66. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 168. 67. Michiko Kakutani, “A Calamity Tailor-Made for Internet Conspiracy Theories,” review of Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon, New York Times, September 10, 2013. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2013​/09​/11​/books​/bleeding​-edge​-a​-9​-11​-novel​ -by​-thomas​-pynchon​.html. 68. Fahrenheit 9/11, directed by Michael Moore (2004; Culver City: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2004), DVD. 69. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 53. 70. Kakutani, “A Calamity Tailor-Made for Internet Conspiracy Theories.” 71. Michiko Kakutani, introduction to The Death of Truth (London: Harper Collins, 2018), Kindle. 72. Kakutani, The Death of Truth, chap. 1. 73. Kakutani, The Death of Truth, chap. 1. 74. Kakutani, The Death of Truth, chap. 1. 75. Kakutani, introduction to The Death of Truth. 76. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 188. 77. Kakutani, “A Calamity Tailor-Made for Internet Conspiracy Theories.” 78. Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, 158–59. 79. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 738. 80. Morton, Ecology without Nature, 206.

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Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 119, 122 Albrecht, Glenn, 7, 40, 56, 118, 121–23, 127n26; solastalgia, 7, 40–41, 56 alligators, 2, 5, 13–21, 24, 47, 50, 89, 91, 104; Alligator (film), 14; alligator patrol, 16–18, 21, 91, 119; alligator purse, 104–05, 111, 127 Althusser, Louis, 19 amoebae, 20–24; amoebalike, 20–24, 94 anthropocentrism, 2–4, 9n5, 69; anthropocentric example, 70; anthropocentric satire, 52; anthropocentric world, 4, 18; nonanthropocentric agency, 59n6 Arendt, Hannah, 51, 128 Atwood, Margaret, 123 Baedeker Land, 33–35 Bateson, Gregory, 49 Baudrillard, Jean, 3 Beat Generation/Beats/Beatniks, 13–16, 23–24, 28n77, 93–94; anti-Beat, 94–95; post-Beats, 23 Berger, James, 68, 79n29 Berger, John, 4, 7 Bierce, Ambrose, 109–10 birds, 3, 47, 87, 96, 105, 121, 125; albatross, 101n86; dodo birds, See dodoes; peculiar bird (William

Slothrop), 58, 101n86; peculiar birds (dodoes), 125; swan, 55 Blicero, Dominus, 92, 125, 131n45 Bloom, Harold, 101n87 Borgesius, Katje, 52, 59, 61n37 Brown, Charles Brockden, 93, 119 Buber, Martin, 49, 72 Buell, Lawrence, 1, 32–35, 56, 101n81; See also toxic discourse bugs, 2, 58, 90, 98n39; beetles, 88–90; cucuji, 88, 90 Carson, Rachel, 1, 3, 32, 36–38, 41, 56, 117–18; Edge of the Sea, The, 36; “Fable for Tomorrow, A,” 1, 3, 32; pre–Silent Spring Carsonesque world, 37; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (film), 118; Sea Around Us, The, 36–38; Sea Around Us, The (film), 36–37, 122; Silent Spring, 1, 32, 56 cat’s cradle, 95; Baila Goldenthal’s painting, 95; Cat’s Cradle, See Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.; string figures, 92–93, 96 Chastain, DL, 67, 71, 73 chemistry, 48, 92, 103

149

150

Index

Chums of Chance, 90, 96, 102n91, 130n44; Chums of Chance, The, 85, 87, 90–91 civilization, 14, 52, 80n40, 88–89 Clinton, Bill, 106 Coetzee, J. M., 110, 123 colonialist, 4–6, 8, 16–17, 21, 54, 89–92 companion species, 2, 73; Companion Species Manifesto, The (Haraway), 72, 122 conformism, 21–22; conformists, 15, 23; non–conformists, 24; super– conformism, 24 Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (film), 6; See also King Kong (film) Coupe, Laurence, 3 Cove, The (film), See O’Barry, Richard COVID–19 pandemic, 107; mRNA vaccines, 10n22 Darwin, Charles, 2, 37, 50, 58–59; Darwinism, 58; post–Darwinian fable, 59; Darwin, George Howard, 37 Dawkins, Richard, 56–57 Derrida, Jacques, 31, 131n50; Derrida country, 31–32, 34 Despard, Reg, 103, 104 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 118, 121–22; 11th Hour, The (film), 118; Revenant, The (film), 1179, 121–22, 129n11 Disney, 74–75; Three Little Pigs, The (film), 75–76; Thrifty Pig, The (film), 75; Mickey Mouse, 74 Dixon, Jeremiah, 15, 25n11, 85–86, 88–92, 95, 97n19 dodoes, 7–8, 27n49, 54–59, 121, 125, 131n48 dogs, 2, 7, 8, 24n6, 51, 53, 71–74, 83–87, 90, 96n3, 104–05, 109–11, 124–26; Desmond, 71–73, 85, 126, 131n60; dog–size steelhead, 69; Fang/Learnèd English Dog, 7–8, 74,

83–87, 90–91, 97n19, 126; Pavlov’s dog, 51; Pugnax, 84–85, 87, 90; sky– dogs, 90, 96; Thanatoid dogs, 120 dolphins, 2, 18, 38–39, 69, 121; dolphin trainer, See O’Barry, Richard; porpoises, 38, 69 Dylan, Bob, 21, 27n57, 111 ecocriticism, 3, 4, 8, 9n1, 33, 107, 123 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 14–15, 22–24, 27n49, 28n67, 28n72,100n76 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 80n39 empathy, 4–5, 16, 39–40, 44n57, 50 environmentalism, 1, 123, Erin Brockovich (film), 118 extinction, 2, 8, 18–19, 48–50, 54, 56–59, 118, 121, 128 fable, 1–4, 8, 21, 31, 59, 75, 93, 110, 119, 123, 125–126, 128; Aesop’s, 99n67, 124; “Fable for Tomorrow, A,” See Carson, Rachel; “Postmodern Fable, A,” 1–3, 8, 58, 128; speculative fables, 93, 95; synonyms of, 9n1 Faulkner, William, 14; “Bear, The” 5 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1, 76, 82n79, 82n80; Great Gatsby, The, 1, 76–77, 82n79, 82n80, 82n84 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 107–09, 114n77, 124, 125, 131n50; Eating Animals, 108, 124; Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, 107–09; We Are the Weather, 107–09 Fumimota, Takeshi, 67, 69, 71, 73 García Márquez, Gabriel, 14 Gates, Frenesi, 11n24, 67, 71–72, 79n20, 81n51, 81n55, 87, 105 Gibson, William, 93 Gilmore, Michael T., 35 Godzilla (film), 67, 78n7; Godzilla, 65–67, 78n13, 79n22 Gottfried, 125, 130n44, 131n45 Gore, Al, 117–18, 122, 128n1

Index

Great Depression, 18, 75 grizzly bears, 5, 119, 121; “Bear, The,” See Faulkner, William; Grizzly Man (film), 4, 119–22; Treadwell, Timothy, 5, 119–22 Guterl, Fred, 2 Haraway, Donna, 6–7, 19, 52, 55, 57, 72–74, 92–93, 95, 99n67, 124, 131n50 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1 Hepworth, Shasta Fay, 67, 75, 77, 105, 112n21 highway, 14–15, 33–35, 69; freeway, 15, 34, 42n19, 43n20, 69; East San Narciso Freeway, 34, 39–40 hippies, 15, 69–70 Hitchcock, Alfred, 103–04 Hitler, Adolf, 75–76 Hutcheon, Linda, 3 Ice, Gabriel, 128 insurance, 67–69, 74, 77, 81n55, 103, 106 Into the Grizzly Maze (film), 119 Inverarity, Pierce, 31–32, 34–36, 41, 47, 65–66, 74–76; Inverarity Land, 35–36, 39–41; Lake Inverarity, 32, 34–36, 38–39, 66 Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis, The, 59 Kakutani, Michiko, 117, 127–28 Kelleher, March, 104, 126–27 Kennedy, John F, 15 Kennel Club, the, 86 Kerouac, Jack, 15–16, 23–24, 70; Kerouac’s ex–lover, 27n55; On the Road, 16, 23, 28n77 King Kong, 5, 52–55, 66, 78n13; and Fay Wray/Ann Darrow, 6–7, 52; King Kong (film), 5–6, 14, 53, 66 Kinsey, Darius, 70, 80n40, 80n42 lemmings, 49–50 Leopold, Aldo, 118

151

Luddite, 4, 6, 23, 28n72, 98n40; “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” 6, 66, 94, 103; Luddism, 66, 76, 98n40 Lyotard, Jean–François, 1–3, 8, 58, 128 Maas, Oedipa, 31–32, 34–41, 42n5, 42n12, 43n34, 44n40, 44n53, 44n57, 81n55, 82n79, 94, 112n28 McCarthy, Cormac, Road, The, 2, 9n5 Maijstral, Paola, 15, 20, 27n55 Martel, Yann, 123 Marx, Leo, 1, 32 Mason, Charles, 25n11, 85–92, 95, 97n19, 98n28, 98n37, 106, Mason, Rebekah, 87, 97n21 Matrix, The (film), 105, 107 Melville, Herman, 1, 14, 93, 119; Moby–Dick, 1, 5, 25n18, 119 Miami Metrozoo, 7 Miami Seaquarium, 38 Michaels, Walter Benn, 73 Moore, Jason W., 65, 92 Moore, Michael, 67, 127; Sicko (film), 67; Fahrenheit 9/11 (film), 127 Morton, Timothy, 3–4, 123, 128 nature writing, 35–36, 42n10 Nazis, 75–76, 110, 114n77; See also Hitler, Adolf Nixon, Richard, 65, 67, 100n76 nostalgia, 8, 9n3, 37, 40, 55–59, 66, 72, 79n29; phony nostalgia, 25n22; revised nostalgia, 79n29 O’Barry, Richard, 38–39, 118, 121–122; Flipper (film), 38, 119; The Cove (film), 38–39, 118, 121 octopuses, 21–24, 51–54, 59, 61n36, 61n43, 62n46, 91; Grigori/Grischa, 51–53, 59, 61n40, 62n46, 91 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty– Four, 82n80, 94 Owlglass, Rachel, 15, 19, Ozeki, Ruth, 110

152

Index

paranoia, 13, 16, 19, 36, 38, 44n40, 76, 79n29, 117 Phillips, Dana, 3 pigs, 2, 48–50, 58, 60n8, 75–76, 109–10; Gadarene swine, 49–50; Pig Bodine, 27n55, 114n78; Three Little Pigs, See Disney Plastic Man, 53, 61n43 Poe, Edgar Allan, 93 postmodernism, 3–4, 8, 9n1, 13, 43n20, 124; postmodernist, 3–4, 31, 66, 86, 124 Powers, Richard, 93 predators, 66, 74–77, 91–92; predatory Animal, 89 Preterite, 8, 49–50, 57, 60n15, 67–68 Profane, Benny, 5, 7, 14–24, 25n18, 26n34, 27n55, 29n81, 31, 38, 47, 50, 78n18, 79n24, 91, 93–94, 97n24, 104, 106, 119 Pynchon, William, 49, 106 Quammen, David, 54, 58 Reagan, Ronald, 41n3, 65, 67, 72, 75, 80n39, 100n76 reciprocity, 49, 72–73, 92 redwoods, 65–66, 68–70, 73, 77n2, 100n76; Redwoods, The (film), 65; See also Whitman, Walt, “Song of the Redwood–Tree” reincarnation, 17, 69 representation, 3, 9n3, 21, 23–24, 27n49, 28n77, 33, 41n3, 52–55, 71, 75, 84–87, 122–23, 126, 128, 130n34 River, The (film), 122 roads, 15–17, 22, 34, 36, 42n19, 50, 87–88, 106; crossroad, 95; On the Road, See Kerouac, Jack; Road, The, See McCarthy, Cormac, Road, The; See also streets Robbins, Tom, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 20, 27n49, 27n56

rocket, 5–6, 48, 55, 59n4, 79n29, 87, 91, 92, 125, 130n44, 131n45; rocket– centered city, 130n44 rodents, 2, 51, 87, 96; mouse, 105; rats, 17–18, 26n35, 38; rodent life, 105 Roosevelt, Franklin, 75 Roosevelt, Theodore, 123; Roosevelt in Africa (film), 130n34 Schlosser, Eric, 110 Schwarzkommando, 5–6 Scott, Randolph, 21–23, 91; Abilene Town (film), 22–23; Haycox, Ernest, Trail Town, 22 September 11, 2001 (9/11), 10n24, 11, 95, 100n79, 103–04, 106–08, 111, 113n51, 127, 128; Fahrenheit 9/11 (film), See Moore, Michael Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 6, 66; Frankenstein’s creature, 4, 66, 78n11 significant others, 71–73, 131n50 Sinclair, Upton, 110 Singer, Isaac B., 110 slavery, 72, 88, 90, 98n37, Slothrop, Tyrone, 4, 6–7, 9n3, 10n17, 15–16, 25n18, 48–54, 58–59, 60n15, 61n37, 71, 73, 78n18, 79n24, 95, 101n86, 101n87, 128; Slothrop, William, 49–50, 58 Slovic, Scott, 3, 10n14, 55–56 Snyder, Gary, 70 Sontag, Susan, 55–57, 71 soy–extenderspace, 107, 109–10, 125; “soy–extender” version of Tristero, 112n28 Spivak, Gayatri, 31 Sportello, Larry “Doc,” 65, 67–68, 74–77, 79n24, 112n21 Stencil, Herbert, 18–20, 23, 26n39, 93–94, 97n24 streets, 14, 16–19, 21–22, 26n36, 31, 47, 79n24, 94, 126, 128; See also roads Tarnow, Maxine, 103–08, 110–11, 112n21, 112n28, 123–27

Index

Thanatoids, 40, 68–69, 73, 97n21, 101n87, 120, 122 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, 1, 32–36, 42n10, 42n12 toxic discourse, 1, 32, 34–36, 39–40; See also Buell, Lawrence transformation, 28n67, 47–50, 57–59, 69, 79n18, 95, 97n19; Kastoranthropy, 97n19; metamorphosis, 101n86; Metamorphosis, The, See Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis, The Traverse, Frank, 87–88, 90 Traverse, Jess, 80n39 Traverse, Kit, 87, 90 Traverse, Reef, 90–91, 119 Traverse, Webb, 90, 98n40 trees, 2, 4, 7–8, 10n17, 54, 65–66, 69–71, 73, 80n40, 82n84, 90; Calvaria major, 54; “Song of the Redwood–Tree,” See Whitman, Walt; tree–slaughter Animal, 15; See also redwoods Trump, Donald, 127–28 Twain, Mark, 109–10

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 20, 58, 59; Cat’s Cradle, 20

Varo, Remedios, 41, 95 von Braun, Wernher, 48, 50, 59n4 Vond, Brock, 67, 71, 79n20, 81n51, 105, 131n60

Yurok, 69–70

153

Walpole, Horace, Castle of Otranto, The, 66, 84 Wheeler, Prairie, 70–73, 124, 131n60 Wheeler, Zoyd, 67–68, 70–73, 77, 78n18, 131n60 Whitman, Walt, “Song of the Redwood– Tree,” 69–70, 80n39 Wiener, Norbert, 21 wilderness, 4, 36, 90, 95, 121, 130n34; Man in the Wilderness, 119; See also Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (film) Windust, Nicholas, 104–08, 111, 112n21 Wiseman, Frederick, 7, 51–52, 61n34 Wolfe, Tom, 70 Wolfmann, Michael Zachary “Mickey,” 66–67, 74–77, 105 worms, 2, 91–93; Kekulé’s serpent, 92; ouroboros/Uroboros, 91, 99n52; Lambton Worm, 91–93; Tatzelwurm, 91–92, 119

Žižek, Slavoj, 61n34, 107

About the Author

Keita Hatooka joined the faculty of Meiji University in 2007 after studying at the Keio University Graduate School of Letters, where he received a PhD in literature. He was a visiting researcher at the Graduate Program in Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a visiting scholar at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He became a professor in 2018 while at Meiji University, where he currently teaches adaptation studies in the Graduate School of Science and Technology. He has published nine books in Japanese, including Why Adaptation Matters to You: From The Great Gatsby to Inherent Vice (2017) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Novelization (2020).

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