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Thomas Pynchon

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Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd
, 
Gilles Chamerois

Approaching Presence in Thomas Pynchon’s Novels

Anne Battesti

Texte intégral

1In Against the Day, the luminescent afterglow of the Tunguska Event is said to have lasted a month, some terrified witnesses “imagining ever more extravagant disasters . . . . Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor.” As “the phenomenon slowly faded,  . . . most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility” (805). These readers are interesting because they seem to find their books more engrossing than the ominous strangeness of the world, and yet they may be too calm, as if reading did not affect them. It is difficult to decide exactly how good or how poor readers they make, but the truth is that many Pynchon readers have also read more and more calmly after Gravity’s Rainbow, and many others after Mason & Dixon. One of the reasons is a certain weakening of the performative force of the later novels, which I shall discuss. Another one is in the growing sense of repetition and recognition, which I shall examine in relation to the desire for an experience of presence.

Returns

2Inherent Vice (2009) starts with a return, the first of several inconclusive homecomings to the dubious safety of the California shore. It is a kind of ‘Revenance’ (Mason & Dixon, thereafter MD 704), and a hallucination of sorts (“Thinks he’s hallucinating” 1) which the readers are invited to share as they enter the fictional world. It begins as repetition: “She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to.” Of course, she is the same, only different (wearing “straightworld” gear, although for her second return, much later, she appears in the same old clothes). But repetition, rather than difference, is constantly emphasized in this opening scene: Doc has heard her story-telling opening line (“There’s this guy,”) hundreds of times, has heard the husband-wife-mistress-money tale, oh, “once or twice around L.A.” (2). Same old story, and the lover turns out to be “the same Mickey Wolfmann who’s always in the paper” (4). Pynchon’s latest return into the past, this time through the formulaic genre of the thriller and the déjà-vu of film and television, thus exhibits repetition and the possibilities of variation within return as its plot, its theme, and its mode of action: as usual, Pynchon says what he does and does what he says. Whatever remainder of mystery or silence may be glimpsed—here, the murder of the “mystery cop” somewhere within the inconceivable topography of “Gummo Marx Way,” and the eventually opaque character of “Bigfoot”—is interwoven into the spectacular “grotesquerie” (to use Poe’s word) of such repeated coincidence. “Saying,” in addition, is already a mode of repetition, and voices keep quoting other voices heard in films or TV series: “as [so-and-so] always says”, or “sez” (“Like Godzilla always sez to Mothra” 10). The ironic questioning of one’s “own” words, which has always been staged in Pynchon’s other texts, is made even more systematic here, where the numerous dialogues are most often comic pastiches of concocted speeches.

  • 1 A first recycling of the altered stamps from The Crying of Lot 49 already appeared at the end of Ag (...)

3Inherent Vice is also an obvious, self-conscious return to the two previous California novels: not just evidence of an imaginative persistence and cohesion, but an exercise in self-quoting and self-parody, within a text already bent on outdoing the California simulacra through their parody. Mere name-dropping (“Vineland” is casually mentioned on page 43) seems to acknowledge the fact that the plot partly revolves around the fate of countersubversive “turned souls” (301), like Frenesi Gates among “tales of dispossession and betrayal” (Vineland 172). The references to The Crying of Lot 49 are even more conspicuous, with the pervading question of “real estate”, but also with forged bills bearing Nixon’s face, in a reversed parallel with the altered stamps encountered by Œdipa. In a fit of paranoia, the hero imagines a complicated CIA plot around this false currency, involving “time travel of course,” and “a covert special mailbox . . . to send information time-travelling back into the past” (121); the italics, besides comically mimicking paranoid panic, offer an outrageous signal of allusiveness to the reader.1 And what about a similar emphasis on “chums” (“We’ll be chums,  . . . we’ll be chums” 10), as a reminder of Against the Day’s “Chums of Chance”? Is the reader’s memory too encumbered, or predictably alert to such phrases as “just before she singled up all lines” (119), or “the twenty-kilo inconvenience” describing a sizeable package of heroin (338)? All the previous novels are making guest appearances here, if only through a few Pynchon props (a saxophone sounding like “some giant kazoo” p. 37, “horns and bells in the harbour” p. 85, walking through walls, various “screams,” several “A-and,” a comically disgusting menu, zombies, bananas . . .). There is even a potential “rocket strike” (251) and later “a V-8 exhaust by way of a Cherry Bomb Glasspack” (330), while the letter “V” appears in the title initials, later reversed in the name of “mystery cop” Vincent Indelicato . . . whose own initials are echoed by the name of a venerable acid trip mentor called “Vehi”. Many such things just won’t go “down the Toilet of Memory” (297), which in turn reads like a mock-allegorical recycling of one of the songs in Gravity’s Rainbow (Gravity’s Rainbow, thereafter GR 66). “You think everything is connected,” one hippie says to another (108), and indeed a weak or mock-version of paranoid reading seems to be elicited. In any case, the pointed allusiveness to Pynchon’s other novels, more systematic than ever before, is part of the way this text allows repetition, return and recognition to proliferate, which only a continuously defective “Doper’s Memory”, or similar lapses into sleep or unconsciousness, could bypass.

  • 2 “Fang” is one of the names of the “Learned English Dog” in MD (756)... Besides, it is reminiscent o (...)

4Pynchon’s recurrent imaginative motifs seem to be both, or alternately, reactivated and exhausted. The “Golden Fang” is the latest, diminished avatar of V., of Pierce Inverarity’s estate, or of the Tristero (The Crying of Lot 49, thereafter Lot 49), of the Rocket (GR), of the far less integrative “great single Engine, the size of a continent” (MD 772).2 “Wow, this Golden Fang, man—what they call many things to many folks . . .,” as Doc obligingly points out (159). The numerous warnings against its evil tentacles are comically hyperbolic: “Beware of the Golden Fang!!!” (77), which sounds like yet another film title, unless it’s an adventure story for the likes of the Chums of Chance. “Best we not be messin with no Golden Fang” (88). And later, LAPD police officer Bigfoot helpfully chimes in: “What I want to keep you away from is vast, Sportello, vast” (210), echoed by Doc Sportello with, “Because it’s the Golden Fang, man . . . . No, not just a tax shelter, Bigfoot. Uh-uh. Much, much more. What you would call, vast” (214). What would you call it but self-parody, making this novel more derivative than ever before? Out of all the plastic and quotations, the plastic image of Jefferson comes to some sort of life, as though lifted from the rhetoric of Mason & Dixon, and offers to shed light on the master plotters: “So! The Golden Fang not only traffick in Enslavement, they peddle the implements of Liberation as well.” To which Doc answers, “Hey . . . but as a founding father, don’t you get freaked out a little with this black apocalypse talk?” (294). A “gleeful bathos,” as Nabokov might put it (7), keeps deflating the more intimidating loomings of the previous books, and certainly denies the readers the experience of fascinated entrapment offered (and inflicted) in the early works, despite the fact these already included self-parody. The exhortations to perceive, imagine and enact an alternative reality seem equally submitted to ironic reduction: “I swear it’s like acid, a whole ’nother strange world—time, space, all that shit”, placidly marvels an ARPAnet enthusiast, as if pre-empting any academic gravity on the warping of time and space in the works of Thomas Pynchon (195). The statement goes through many modulations, in a virtually endless chain of imitative quotability (“all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be a whole ’nother song,” Bigfoot philosophises on p. 334), or of simulacra (Another World is the name of a TV series, 353).

5The constant reminders of the real “out there,” be it historical violence (the Nixon era and Vietnam, McCarthyism), or the great oceanic “Outside” (99), are tightly wedged into the “unreal” estate of simulacrum, and Inherent Vice is to some extent a Vegas-like object: “a big Disneyland imitation of itself” (240, and the real estate mogul is of course named “Mickey”). Or rather, it is a Hollywood imitation of itself—although including the adverse alertness to the edges of visibility, underlined by the noticeable allusions to Hawthorne’s “haunted verge” of the mirror (Hawthorne 66, “Hawthorne Boulevard” is travelled several times in Inherent Vice). The book, a return to one major source of Pynchon’s utopian imagination (“the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light,” 254), thus reads like a ventriloquist’s recapitulation and bathetic simplification of previous works: a perfect “Pynchon for beginners” (ah, to begin, to read as if for the first time . . .); yet laden with the mediated, the copied and the simulated, so that the experience of the inaugural is at best problematic, at worst confiscated.

6What is a return to the past, a return through past texts? A resurrection, a rehashing? A metaphorical resurrection, that is, a “turning” and reversal of the fatal, is what happens in the one plotline which does not exhaust itself into dead ends or peter out into open-ended, more or less unravelling strands: a young man is ferried out from the underground of surveillance and safely delivered back to “the main herd” (350) and his loved ones. In Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks showed that homecoming is an essential mainspring of plot, itself a movement of “repetition toward recognition” (108), hovering “between reproduction and change” (101), and including a resistance to the end which suggests that “the interminable can never be finally bound in a plot” (108). The casual liberties Pynchon takes with his plotlines here don’t only exhibit the reluctance to tie up all the loose ends into a neat web of elucidation. They also serve his variations on homecoming, from the self-cancellation of exact return to the starting point, to the more dynamic “failure to re-arrive perfectly” which Mason and Dixon already hoped to achieve (MD 775) and which opens the possibility of transmission, and of re-telling (Brooks 27 and 263).

7In Inherent Vice, the act of return, implying repetition, remembrance, re-enactment, and reversal, is essentially dubious. The inherent vice is not only in California, America or humankind, but is possibly claimed as the very operation of the text, for better or for worse: “Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho’s colleagues of marine insurance liked to call inherent vice” (351). It can be irritating, and facile, to let Pynchon’s texts describe our reading experience; but this could serve indeed as a comment on how this fabrication of “revenance” can disperse the text into the many recognitions, imitations and modulated repetitions encountered by the reader. The mosaic does not cohere into a compelling “haunting,” and the fictional illusion is intermittent, self-dispelling like a half-heartedly pursued plotline, but then reinstated by excess—thanks to the persuasive implausibility of comic extravagance. Out of the imitations of imitations which are simulacra, the text often wrenches a comic freshness, and I believe this is much of what “really” happens to the readers of Inherent Vice, which might well be, blessedly, Pynchon’s funniest novel. The countless dialogues, which animate much of the book with the obvious make-believe of “live presence,” collapse distinctions between “life-like” quickness, comic invention and stereotype: “ . . . you have chosen to ice a personal bodyguard of the rather well-connected Mickey Wolfmann. Name ring a bell? or in your case shake a tambourine?” asks Bigfoot to long-haired psychedelic Doc (24). Pynchon revisits, after countless others, the terse or “flippant” dialogue of thrillers and films noirs, in a tribute to and mockery of the inexhaustible fertility of such hackneyed verbal ping-pong. The fake naturalness of TV series dialogues is another model, infiltrating conversations with Sauncho Smilax, who is addicted to soaps and worries about their protagonists: “I mean I always figured she’d end up with Gilligan, somehow.” “Nah, nah—Thurston Howell III.” “Come on, he’d never divorce Lovey.” (89). The discussion then returns as a debate over such dovetailing of fiction into the “reality” of Inherent Vice: “‘But what about Sherlock Holmes, he did coke all the time, man, it helped him solve cases.’ ‘Yeah but he . . . was not real?’ ‘What. Sherlock Holmes was—’ ‘He’s a made up character in a bunch of stories, Doc.’ ‘Wh– Naw. No he’s real . . . . he has to be dead by now’” (96). And better leave out a few memorably “far out” comic episodes: such as the meeting of two paranoid dopers in a supermarket (27–28); the distraught night drive of a motley crew of fools in a car with its headlights off (“Like, it would be so groovy, Japonica, really, to have some lights working is all, seeing’s how Beverly Hills cops are known to lurk uphill on these different cross streets?” 177); stacks of stolen packaged heroin used as a television set because it said so on the box (339–40) . . . I must leave these out, among others, because no matter how much I recognize, and how much I think I know about parody, or about irony, or about farce, only lame comments can be made on what we must call, after all, humour (read, and move on). This is how this novel best suspends the infinite regress into recognitions and neutralises the derivative; this is its excessive animation of the past, which affords the reader an escape from modulated repetition into present energy.

Simulations

  • 3 Tony Tanner used the term “miniature” a long time ago, discussing the description of “a roughly tri (...)
  • 4 This sounds like a comic recycling of Œdipa’s “odd religious instant”: “As if, on some other freque (...)

8What do you do with twenty kilos of stolen heroin planted in your car trunk? First, turn them into two similar-looking objects: Doc finds “two cardboard cartons about the same size,” fills one with the heroin and the other with garbage and “renovation debris” (335). He then phones a friend to ask for “a untraceable ride”, his voice being at first mistaken for a woman’s, and he finds himself “screaming” on the phone “like Kirk Douglas in Champion (1949)” because of background noise. At the airport, he buys a ticket to Honolulu and checks in “the dummy carton,” and then enquires about another destination: “the Land of the Pygmies,” where apparently there is no runway. Doc barks “orders to an imaginary Pygmy construction crew” (336) into a microphone, and then proceeds to wander through the airport crowd singing in a “not-totally embarrassing lounge-voice”, hat “at a jaunty Sinatroid angle” (337). The song is a typical Pynchon interlude, inane and redundant, and conspicuously allusive to the prose text as a whole; it is a song of love and loss which Doc has recently heard on the radio: “ . . . All us bit actors/ Me him and you, / Playing our parts, In a skyful of hearts . . .” etc. Doc then tosses the microphone to someone in the crowd, and runs. This whole scene is a grotesque miniature of the cunning idiot’s strategies, and of Pynchon’s mode of representation.3 Such miniatures, comic or otherwise, abound in all the novels, lending each of them a somehow isomorphic structure within a nonetheless dissipative profuseness. Here, being untraceable (complete with debunking self-mockery: “a untraceable ride”) involves the production of doubles, their redirection and the complication of destinations, and an excessive visibility in play-acting, which is an operation of both dissembling and fiction-making: Doc yells into the microphone “as if it were on some shortwave frequency” perceived by “an imaginary Pygmy construction crew” (italics mine).4 Play-acting is, more precisely, impersonation: Doc impersonates the insulting white man by calling one imaginary Pygmy “shorty” (but of course he is short himself), before imitating a crooner while repeating a song heard before. More swapping of cars and drivers will then take place with the “real” carton of heroin, in a comic expenditure of make-believe and doublings, while leading us back again to “the interesting question, how does one keep twenty kilos of heroin hidden and safe for a short period of time . . .?” (338). The carton ends up hidden, that is, exposed in the village idiot’s apartment, and is used as a TV set, through the sheer authority of naming (what is written on the carton). Naming is effective, as “minute modulations of color and light intensity” start appearing “if you watch long enough” (340): changes do begin to take place in the hallucinated “documentary,” within the despairing return of social control and oppression which is Pynchon’s experience of recent American history. And yet, an idiot in his right mind is no fool (Denis knew all along what was in the carton, 348): he won’t fully give in to oppressive authority, which indeed Pynchon exposes while ever asserting the utopian reach of renaming our collective experience. The imaginative ‘bricolage’ that reassigns the object’s use and turns stupor (heroin, television) into a deviant re-description of the world affords a comic celebration of the transformative illusionism arising from simulation.

  • 5 In one of his letters to Faith and John Kirkpatrick Sale, the young author of V. begged to be prote (...)
  • 6 Here is the advice given in MD by an “ominous Shadow”: “Your only hope, in this room, is to imperso (...)
  • 7 King Kong becomes the sign of duplication and bifurcation, spawning the “Kenosha Kid”, the “Komikal (...)
  • 8 Reviewing AD, Heinz Ickstadt argued that it “lacks the centripetal pull of such structural firmness (...)
  • 9 This can also be seen as an extreme form of irony, if one takes irony as “a simulation” consisting (...)

9Impersonation is the continued metaphor of narration as simulated discourse in Pynchon’s works.5 It involves the creation of characters and dialogues, and also applies to a recurrent mode of relation among those characters: they most often impersonate their opponents, as well as their opponents’ view of themselves.6 In V., the name of Stencil (“a quick-change artist” doing “eight impersonations”) establishes the kinship between impersonation and copy, in the sense of a radical mimetic identification with others: a kind of pathology, inseparable from his compulsive quest for signs and their paranoid totalisation. Simulation without proper distance (but property and propriety are ever under attack in Pynchon’s works) is explored and carried out in V., and later in Gravity’s Rainbow, more or less continuously: the latter, especially, in its vast, borderless theatre of voices and their urgent pathos of desire, fright, and violence, is for the reader a most destabilizing experience of immersion into “others”. We are always too close, always inside the ventriloquist’s belly, despite the many distancing tricks played by the grotesque and by (self-) parody: despite, in other words, all the aping performed by Pynchon’s Luddite “badasses” and by the text itself, under the shadow of King Kong.7 “Impersonation” is the whole range of imitation, from a somehow mad or maddening sympathy of complete identification, to extravagant theatricals of pretence. Each of Pynchon’s books offers a different dosage and interweaving of these two modes, of their tensions and their mutually distorting mirror effects. Inherent Vice certainly leaves little room, if any, for Stencil-like contagion, espousing instead the “Hollywood” simulacra of its setting. Even before Inherent Vice, there has been a loosening of the readers’ capture into others’ fantasies or bewilderment, allowing us more leeway (and less captivation) in the carnival of historical nightmares and hopes. Gravity’s Rainbow was both a film and “all theatre” (3) with no safe retreat outside, into mere spectatorship. In Mason & Dixon, the audience of the “Jolly Theatrickals about the Past” (350) is still “inside this House” (759), just as bystanders appear on the film in Against the Day (1038). But in these two novels there are breaches in the maze, glimpses into the open air—or for many readers an erosion of “mystery”.8 A slightly different relation to the other, starting with the reader, has emerged and strayed from the sideration of becoming the other, of becoming even the antagonist.9 There seems to be, after the first three novels, a disenchanting of the hidden master or mistress or shadowy counter-master, be it V. or Pierce Inverarity or the Tristero, or Blicero and his Rocket. Reverend Cherrycoke’s “Impersonation that never took more than a Handful of actor’s tricks” (MD 8) is thus a more genial and hospitable appropriation of the other’s discourse (eighteenth-century English) than ever before, because we do not experience from inside the yearnings, nor the fragmented omnipresence, of a seducing oppressor. History here “needs to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government” (Ethelmer, MD 350).

  • 10 Mimesis and Alterity (1993) is a dense anthropological and political investigation of the mimetic, (...)
  • 11 The notions of “magic of contact” and “magic of imitation” come from James Frazers The Golden Boug (...)

10Nevertheless, the “speech nimble enough” of impersonation and disguise seems driven by a “passion for othering” which is one of the most extraordinary features of Pynchon’s art, and one of its most haunting themes as well. I borrow the phrase from Michael Taussig’s book on mimesis and alterity,10 which starts with a discussion of the “mimetic faculty” defined in 1933 by Benjamin, in a short article on the mimetic machinery of the cinema, as an ancient compulsion to become the Other. The mimetic faculty, Taussig continues, is essential to operations of sympathetic magic, seeking an affective and affecting knowledge of the other (something else, someone else) by merging copy and contact, or similarity and contagion, thus affording a “radical displacement of self in sentience” (35).11 In Gravity’s Rainbow, the narrative voice mentions “a sympathetic magic, a repetition high and low of some prevailing form” (232) which seems to define the range of the mimetic response to otherness. This very mimetic permeability weakens the distinction between self and other, and also, to take up Œdipa’s vocabulary in The Crying of Lot 49, between “projection” and discovery. The mimetic faculty can of course be put to destructive uses, such as Fascist collective rituals, which are “the organized imitation of magic practises, the mimesis of mimesis” (Adorno quoted by Taussig 63). Or it can be put to normative uses of re-enchantment and social control through the mass production of mimetic images: Adorno believed that western civilization had “replaced mimetic behaviour proper by the organized control of mimesis” (Taussig 210). Both ways of reviving and channelling the mimetic impulse have preoccupied Pynchon. Parody and grotesque imitation (the “low” repetition, unless it be the “high” one) may supply an antidote, as “parody is where mimicry exposes construction” (Taussig 68). Pynchon’s simulations and impersonations, with their distorting efficacy in outdoubling commodified simulacra and lethal parodies, have to do with the virtues of such “mimetic excess”, which creates reflexive awareness as to the mimetic faculty, but nonetheless invites us “to act as if the magical power of the signifier were real, to live in a different way” (Taussig 255). Mimetic excess thus pursues some effective power of alteration, an “othering” of our world and historical situation which Pynchon’s novels have always sought.

  • 12 Taussig discusses Darwin’s account of his landing in Terra del Fuego, when the Fuegians soon began (...)
  • 13 See Valérie Déshoulièress Métamorphoses de l’idiot (2005): from the helpless idiot to the trickste (...)

11I am also struck by the probably “tight fit between surprise and mimicry” (Taussig 81), or the mimetic reaction to the unknown other—friend or foe?—which is both a mocking challenge and an attempt to appropriate the other’s power, a defense against the other and a becoming-other.12 Some “idiotic” chameleon’s duplication seems to be at work, where the respective parts of stupefaction and of tactics cannot be safely measured. I have discussed elsewhere (Battesti 2008 and 2009) the figure of the idiot in Pynchon’s works, in which a historical stupefaction (or even post-apocalyptic stupor) converges with the resourcefulness of the trickster. The fine line between being a fool and playing the fool has always been porous,13 and Pynchon’s heroes have all embarked on some “fool’s errand” (Inherent Vice 204) which can only be survived with “Fool’s luck” (MD), and an increasing capacity to dissemble. Denis and Doc (who once answers the phone with, “Idiots Unlimited, First to Go, Last to Know,” 202) and other Inherent Vice “dopers” continue the long line of motley fools and dazed Harlequins perfected from Pynchon’s initial schlemihls, via Slothrop the Fool, Carnival pig and imitative “Rocketman.” The idiot, in his passive or active resistance to power and control, can be as plastic as his pursuants and adversaries, and as duplicitous. He is a more or less grotesque Keatsian “chameleon,” as well as a “double agent”, or literally one of those spies and infiltrators ever lurking in Pynchon’s novels, between betrayal and “counter-feinting” (AD 676). Such are duplicates and comic comperes Neville and Nigel in Against the Day (“impersonating British idiots” 685), or Cyprian Latewood, whose imitative handwriting (“a lurid carnival of identities” 698) is a tribute to Dostoevsky’s idiot and his exceptional gift of protean calligraphy; while dumb Reef Traverse, with an “I” for “idiot” chalked on his back, is almost prevented from coming home to the USA until an unknown “Obliterator” wipes off what is also the letter of first-person identity, to let him through (1074).

  • 14 Maskelyne is of course the real name of the English “Astronomer Royal” from 1765 to 1811. This name (...)

12A more ambiguous, enigmatic figure can be found in a previous “Nevil,” Mason & Dixon’s astronomer Nevil Maskelyne, whose very name suggests both duplicity, and the effacement of dividing lines (and “evil”, “devil” . . .).14 It is never quite clear to Mason whose side “Old Masky” is on, this “brotherly rival” (729) who is unfamiliar with Mortal Sin but has “learn’d to simulate it, however, by committing a greater than usual number of the Venial ones” (727). He likes to wear a specially made garment, “all in striped silk, a double stripe of some acidick Rose upon Celadon for the Trousers and Waistcoat, and for the Jacket . . . a single stripe of teal-blue upon the same color, which is also that of the Revers . . .” (728). “Double” and “single” are combined, the reverse side looks the same as the outside, one color is an anachronistic fragment of Inherent Vice’s acid trips. This emblematic suit is one of “a collection of sportive outfits” following “Maskelyne’s increasingly eccentric specifications,” and when later he takes up an assignment in Scotland instead of Mason, he dons a wondrous Tartan:

And ‘twill be Maskelyne who goes to Schiehallion, after Mason refuses the Assignment again, and becomes famous for it, not to mention belovèd of the Scots people there, the subject of a Ballad, and presently a Figure of Legend, in a strange Wizard’s turnout bas’d upon an actual Observing Suit he will wear whilst in Perthshire. A plaid one, in fact, of Maskelyne’s own Design, —“A Tartan never observ’d in the World,” he explains, “that no one clan up there may be offended.” “Or ev’ryone,” Mun is quick to point out. (748)

13The syntax encourages a momentary confusion between Maskelyne and Mason: “and becomes famous for it” first appears as the continuation of the previous clause, “after Mason refuses the Assignment again,” whereas the semantic coherence consolidated by the rest of the sentence redirects our reading towards Maskelyne. This may well be, in addition to the ‘otherworldly’ Tartan of dubious allegiance, one of the effects of Harlequin duplicity: within discourse itself, the glimpsed emergence of doubles and doubling presences, or more precisely of the one who is not there (Mason doesn’t go to Scotland) together with the one who is. In fact, in the next paragraph, Mason is said to be reputed elsewhere “as a Sorcerer, a Sorcerer’s apprentice;” in his own English “Golden Valley,” the reverse counterpart of Maskelyne’s Scottish “Mountain,” he has indeed “become famous,” although he may just be “another small-town eccentric.”

  • 15 “Who is the third who always walks beside you?/ When I count, there are only you and I together/ Bu (...)
  • 16 See Peter Buse and Andrew Scott ed. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (1999). The boo (...)

14Maskelyne remains slippery because he is the doubling “brotherly rival,” and the figure of a reversal with no difference (“the same color, which is also that of the Revers . . . .”), and also the third party, the shadow lining of the duettists Mason and Dixon. In his redemption from scheming hypocrite to eccentric, he might even stand for whatever warps and thwarts neat symmetries and reversals (“someone must break that damn’d symmetry,” Mason protests about his own postings North and South, 718). The doppelgänger is also the ghostly “third” such as it appears in T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, such as it keeps returning in various guises and simulations in Pynchon’s texts.15 “Where is the Third Surveyor?” someone asks Mason and Dixon, after “reported sightings of the Supernumerary Figure” (604). As for Maskelyne, he is initially experienced thus by Mason: “Long before they met, Mason felt his sidling Advent, cloak’d as by Thames-side Leagues of Smoke and Mists. At last—at first—he saw the introductory letter,  . . .” (141). Such a “sidling Advent” is ghostly, and ghosts are indeed a disturbance of the distinction between beginnings and returns, as well as between life and death: at last, at first, and again.16 It is also the recurrent advent of an incalculable presence, which is a source of anguish and wonder in Pynchon’s novels.

Presences

  • 17 In his letters to Faith and John K. Sale, written at the time of the publication of V., Pynchon cal (...)

15I wish to bring together two different sets of questions which may, not too forcibly, I hope, intersect: on the one hand, the way Pynchon’s texts represent the many “presences” they conjure up or recall; on the other hand, the reading experience and the reader’s desire for presence, for something else than meaning—and also for something more than recognitions. We want something to happen to us as we read, what may be called “events” of reading or reading as event: literary works are “temporal events rather than static objects,” and produce their effects in the present of reading (Attridge 103). This efficacy has also been termed “performative,” and been understood, for instance, as “a force of presentation” which is “in some way inaugural” (Hillis Miller 2); or as “a complex linguistic (but also, and inseparably, a conceptual, emotional, and physical) event” experienced as “a miracle in language” (Attridge 99). If we are content with a minimal definition, all of Pynchon’s texts are strictly speaking performative (they do what they say, as I pointed out earlier). But they are not all equally persuasive, or “miraculous”: some of them are obviously extraordinary events in a reader’s life (GR but also MD, and even V.),17 and some are less powerful interludes in his literary career. And then there is the now wondrous, now tedious monument of anarchic and anamorphic déjà-vu which is Against the Day, a rare mixture of the persuasive and the unpersuasive—which we would find amazing had we not read the previous works. But “persuasiveness” is extremely difficult to describe and account for (although it is essential to the study of the literary) and I wouldn’t want to rely too confidently on “reading impressions”, even fortified by Attridge’s invocation of the “enigmatic quality” of a literary work: “one cannot put one’s finger on the sources of its power, one does not know where its meanings end,” unless it be “a work that has lost its inventiveness through over-familiarity” (Attridge 77) . . . I hasten to add that whatever “enigmatic” aspect can be unreservedly endorsed has to do, I imagine, with the energy of desire presiding over the creation of the text, and contagiously mobilised in the reader (but this “would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go”—Melville, 158).

16Be that as it may, Pynchon’s texts all seem more or less tempted to threaten their own “eventness” through modulated repetition “high and low”, which nonetheless takes a crucial part, precisely, in the reading event they create. Modulated and distorted repetition is also a feature of “advent” such as these texts unfold it, in both senses of an event, and a waiting for the event—which has somehow already happened, as its trail or traces are felt everywhere: “Advent” is the paradox of the return of the inaugural (the first or the second coming of Christ). Gravity’s Rainbow, initially set in the imminence of the Nativity, starts with the terrible surprise of a “screaming” which “has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now” (3). The rocket is then, throughout the book, a proliferating absent presence, in the sense of a phantom and phantasmatic production which lifts it out of the historical past and launches it into the endless “now” of trauma, obsession, and desire. Such seems to be the seminal model of persuasive “presence” in Pynchon’s imagination, including analogous counter-models of human presence, just as insistent and ungraspable: spectral visitors (redoubled by or reversed into thundering Luddite badasses), “fugitives, exiles, mourners” who are most liable themselves to “sense the visitors” (AD 659); a disreputable “population of kind of roving ambassadors” (AD 360) who are indeed agents of anamorphosis, and whose passage or flight can only be “angled” obliquely amid appearances and vanishings. How can one re-present what is “gathering presence and energy like a ghost slowly becoming visible” (IV 289)? The almost exclusively grotesque way of going about it adopted in Inherent Vice is one major reason why no compelling haunting can happen to the readers, immersed in simulacra and self-quotations which exile them further and further from effects of presence. Neville and Nigel at the theatre, in Against the Day, discuss a similar experience:

Waltzing in Whitechapel turned out to be one of those modern works in which a group of players are struggling to put on a musical comedy about Jack the Ripper, “Rather than letting old Jack just go carving about under his own steam,” as Nigel began to complain during the applause for the first number.
“But honestly Nigel, it would be an actor up there in any case, wouldn’t it,” objected Neville.
“Well that may be so Neville,” furtively removing from his coat a silver flask of Morphotuss cough preparation and taking a belt or two, “but as it’s an actor playing an actor playing Jack, why that’s so artificial don’t you agree?”
“Yes but it’s all artificial Nigel, including the blood everyone’s come for, and one must simply get over that mustn’t one?”
“If you’d prefer real blood,” advised a quiet voice from a seat behind them, “I’m sure something could be arranged.” (679–680)

  • 18 I am translating from the French translation. Agamben also comments on the well known etymology of (...)

17One way of trying to “get over that” is to embrace the artificial and give away the name of the game. In a short essay entitled “Parody” (2006), Giorgio Agamben sees an essential link between parody and mystery: “of mystery, only a parody can be offered” (45), and “in the face of mystery, artistic creation must become caricature” (46); so that “what cannot be represented is indeed the foundation of parody” (54).18 He also insists on how seriously parody acknowledges the real, unlike fiction, which he even sees as its “symmetrical opposite”, with both “affinities and distance” between these two poles: “parody does not question the reality of its object—on the contrary, the latter is so unbearably real that it must be kept at bay” (55). There is indeed, beyond the “postmodern” mimesis of the artificial simulacra that exile us from the real, a wariness of real presence in Pynchon’s writing, to the point of fright: because the real is unnamably inhuman, or prodigiously Other, or both. This is not incompatible with a both nostalgic and prospectively utopian activation of unheeded, uncanny modes of presence, which keeps extending and diffracting the official maps of a “reality” monopolized by manmade forces of greed and domination. And finally, it is equally true that there is a reverence for human incarnate presence, for the tangles of flesh and ghost lately called “ensouled bodies” (AD 837), and which are another challenge to representation.

  • 19 For example, “I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death and life, will be gath (...)

18But everybody tends to come for real blood, or the real feel of blood. When Gottfried is about to unite with the Rocket, he anticipates a transport into presence: “At last: something real” (GR 754). It is yet another illusion of presence, a monstrous one, and a masochistic perversion of the yearning to be affected and to seize at last—for the first time—the object of desire: or what Melville’s Ishmael can only name with a paradox, “the ungraspable phantom of life”. Unto death, while dreaming of an escape from death, and thus “opposites together” as Blicero keeps promising in his grandiloquent lyricism.19 Gravity’s Rainbow produces countless modulations of the eroticised flight towards the intensity of presence, the departure “at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright” (396). And while the Rocket is ultimately a “betrayal” of flight and a travesty of the erotic, imaginative, and poetic energies, an exceptionally moving force (“our desire is wind and motor . . . .” 472) seems to drive the persuasive eloquence of the text. The reader’s disorientations in space and time, the shifts between voices and frantic “othering” of impersonation, the convolutions of syntax, the munificence of ‘meta-phor’, all tend to effect or simulate ecstatic transports which carry the reader onward, on the sheer thrust of language, just as often as they can mire and suffocate. An experience of affecting “presence” is thus offered to the reader, alternately reinforced and weakened by the “paranoid” proliferation of allusive “signs and symptoms,” and their labyrinthine meaning effects.

19In Production of Presence (2004), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht reformulates and further explores the ideas of “eventness” and performativity. He defines the aesthetic experience as an oscillation, and sometimes interference, between “meaning effects” and “presence effects”, which “always appear together . . . and are always in tension” (105). In Pynchon’s early novels, in fact, both effects appear so much “together” that the very distinction seems to collapse: the innumerable “meaning effects” are converted into “presence effects” for the reader, more or less rapturously imprisoned in the textual labyrinths; while presence is experienced as apocalyptic, that is, as the imminent presence of revealed Meaning by characters searching for a way out of the maze of signs. But breakthroughs outside the tyranny of Meaning are also sought and encouraged: by the dispersal of meaning through excess, by the “mindless pleasures” of comedy and idiotic singing, and by the aesthetic experience thus wrenched from the web of significations. Gumbrecht further defines this experience as “moments of intensity” (97), “nonhermeneutic”, marked by the “suddenness” of appearance (101), and thus by “an element of violence” which actualises the power of performance (114): “Suddenly, Pan—leaping—its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful Serpent, its coils in rainbow lashings in the sky—into the sure bones of fright” (GR 720). The quarrel with meaning is armed with such problematic suddenness; or with the frightful, sublime limits of representation which much later Pynchon could still associate with the experience of beauty: “beauty as Rilke defined it, the onset of terror just about to be born” (foreword to Nineteen Eighty-Four, 2003). But there are, of course, other forms of beauty –and for Katje, after all, Pan “was a lousy lover” (GR 657): so many exquisite events at the edge of night, on the edges of the war. “A skulk of foxes, a cowardice of curs are tonight’s traffic in the yards and lanes” (GR 58) . . . Or it can be the passing of the “perishable”, echoing Rilke’s ninth Elegy:

 . . . there will be one time, one dyed afternoon (coaltar-impossible orange-brown, clear all the way through), or one day of rain and clearing before bedtime, and in the yard one hollyhock, circling in the wind, fresh with raindrops fat enough to be chewed . . . one face by a long sandstone wall and the scuffle of all the doomed horses on the other side, one hair-part thrown into blue shadows in the turn of her head—one busful of faces passing through in the middle of the night,  . . . . (693)

20The elegy of our presence, only once, both individual and collective in the ruinous history of Gravity’s Rainbow, suddenly crystallizes on an unexpected “her” (“in the turn of her head”), which just as soon disappears from the rest of the sentence. Such a turning and such a surprise of irruption and vanishing are synecdoches of a haunting evanescence, of what we keep losing and seeing as it turns away. Presence can only be an “effect” because it “can never be something that, so to speak, we would be able to hold on to” (Gumbrecht 58). Presence, at least under contemporary conditions, is in Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation “the coming that effaces itself and brings itself back” (quoted in Gumbrecht 58). Its emergence and vanishing is akin to “magic,” or “the practice of making things that are absent present, and things that are present absent” (Gumbrecht 82).

21There will be other vectors of desire than the leaping Rocket, and although in Mason & Dixon Reverend Cherrycoke acknowledges “Desire in all its true and terrible dimensions” (415), less desperate transits of Venus are sought, with less sinister “Rapture” and “Vertigo” on the way (MD 731). Vanishing acts of transatlantic transports and of passages and mobilities both swift and slow, dreamlike, are performed in the text amid the many returns and recognitions encountered by the reader. In Against the Day, Kit’s magic translation or bilocation (1080–85) is memorable, before the final dizziness of an absolutely unlocatable flight “to grace.” Others keep appearing in excessive or tenuous “presence,” like caricatures or synecdoches of an unnamable reality, and animate Mason and Dixon’s Line into endless complications of trajectory and effect. Faces proliferate, more than ever in Against the Day, impossible to congeal into a representation, never quite faced but always somehow averted like the head of the “young slippery knife” towards the end of Gravity’s Rainbow (680), or appearing in waves and trees and mountainsides. Here is one, another face against the wall, that of Dally Rideout posing for a kitsch sculptor of Angels of Death for London graveyards:

Like the face of Fiona Plush before her, Dally’s was too specific for prolonged viewing. We have seen these faces, at the changes of daylight, against the long, featureless walls of suburban warehouses, on days of fog or of distant fire whose ash drops unseen, steadily, accumulating like white frost . . . their faces seem to require this derangement in the light, and perhaps a willingness to see them, however anxiously denied by those of us who do. (AD 895)

  • 20 Gilles Chamerois offers a stimulating discussion of the missing faces revealed in their very invisi (...)

22“These faces” cannot be seen but fleetingly, against the faceless (“featureless”) walls, and by perceiving their outskirts: fog, distant fire and its ash, which are agents of impaired visibility or even disappearance (“whose ash drops unseen”). A white veil is forming somewhere, unseen ash “like white frost,” from a distant fire felt or imagined rather than actually seen. What we have “seen,” reading this sentence, is the vanishing appearance of a face, confiscated and yet multiplying: not only from “Dally’s” (whose “face” is only named elliptically through the use of “’s”) to “these faces,” but then to “their faces” (“their”? the faces of “these faces”?). Too many faces, but too little presentation, like in a haunting on the edge of the visible, across time boundaries (from “we have seen” to the final present “do”).20 Besides, Dally’s face is all the more “specific” as it is “like” another’s face (Fiona Plush, the previous sitter), and as it soon spawns the plural of “these faces.” There are at least two other occurrences of the “specific face” in Against the Day (749, 841), and the adjective “specific” has two meanings, one referring to the collective, and the other to individual singularity: “pertaining to a species,” or “specifying, precise.” Agamben, in a commentary of the related word “special,” writes that “the special being is the common or generic being, and the latter is somehow the image or the face of humankind” (Agamben 73). “Special, indeed, is the being (the face, the gesture, the event) which, without resembling any other resembles all the others” (75). In Pynchon’s texts, the staging of the felt and glimpsed presence of others is a tribute to the singular and to what we have in common. Some of the things we have in common are the force of desire, our historical ghosts, and our possible destination as democratic-anarchic subjects of resistance to domination. In this respect, the faces of Pynchon’s rovers, fugitives and dissenters are all idiots’ faces, if we take the etymology of the word seriously and consider its echoes in contemporary disempowerment (the Greek idiotes referred to a private person, who does not hold public offices and does not participate in public affairs). These brotherly others are vanishing “presences,” agents of both suddenness and lingering, because despite being mere verbal simulations, they point to the real human presence of perhaps “ensouled” bodies, promised to damage and (to use a pleonasm) real death.

23Of course, “one must tell and tell again, hoping one’s voice will re-echo because certain ghosts are never laid to rest” (Brooks 263). Within such returns of Pynchon’s historical imagination and impersonations, the suggested presence and elusiveness of a desired or dreaded “nonverbal reality” (preface to Slow Learner 24), disturbing and warping the familiar orders of representation and discourse, is what most affects. This happens when the lines of return, simulation and presence coexist and cannot be disentangled, making Pynchon’s texts effectively uncanny despite including their own parodies of the uncanny, and saving them from the mere fabrication of familiar strangeness and recognitions. Or else, there is the idiocy of fleeting laughter, leaping from within discourse and its many recognitions, outside discourse.

Bibliographie

Works Cited

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Battesti, Anne. “Spectres du sujet démocratique chez Thomas Pynchon, de Gravity’s Rainbow à Mason & Dixon et Against the Day.” L’impersonnel en literature. Ed. Hélène Aji, Brigitte Félix, Anthony Larsson & Hélène Lecossois. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009, 223–236.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984.

Buse, Peter & Andrew Scott. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Literature. London: MacMillan Press/New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1999.

Chamerois, Gilles. “La ligne et le verbe: Mason & Dixon de Thomas Pynchon.” Diss. Université Paris 3, 2006.

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Notes

1 A first recycling of the altered stamps from The Crying of Lot 49 already appeared at the end of Against the Day (1081).

2 “Fang” is one of the names of the “Learned English Dog” in MD (756)... Besides, it is reminiscent of Mc Teague’s sign above his dental parlor (“It was the tooth—the famous golden molar with its huge prongs- his sign, his ambition,” Norris 147), and therefore of Von Stroheim’s Greed.

3 Tony Tanner used the term “miniature” a long time ago, discussing the description of “a roughly triangular” stain in V, (V. 89): see Tanner 34. Gilles Chamerois, in his PhD dissertation on MD, studied such “figures” or miniature models of representation (including, for instance, Pynchon’s elaboration on Vaucanson’s duck), and showed they function as mediations between the text and the world, or between language and the unnameable. I shall be returning to this in the third section of this chapter.

4 This sounds like a comic recycling of Œdipa’s “odd religious instant”: “As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken.” (Lot 49 15). The metaphor of the “other frequency” is a legacy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

5 In one of his letters to Faith and John Kirkpatrick Sale, the young author of V. begged to be protected from the inquisitiveness of journalists: “please, please, help me stay under cover” (9th March 1963); and “either (a) tell them nothing at all, or (b) better, tell them something far out, like I’m a Negro living in Ft. Wayne with my grandmother and keeping her in narcotics by working as a freelance jobber in auto accessories. And very fat, though I subsist on nothing but saki and raw Brussel sprouts. Or something in that line” (2nd June 1963). This oscillation between missing identification and excessive identification is an enduring feature of Pynchon’s construction of characters, and of his strategies of representation in general.

6 Here is the advice given in MD by an “ominous Shadow”: “Your only hope, in this room, is to impersonate so perfectly what they assume you to be, that instincts of Predation will be overcome by those of Boredom.” (414).

7 King Kong becomes the sign of duplication and bifurcation, spawning the “Kenosha Kid”, the “Komikal Kamikazes,” “Kute Korrespondances”... He returns in AD as the “Kieselguhr Kid,” the mysterious dynamiter who causes “identity itself to change” (172). In his early letters, Pynchon exchanged “Ferdinand Feghoot” stories and outrageous puns with Sales (for example, “a strayed lion is the shortest distance between two pints”): a different double consonant (but GR also stages the “Floundering Four”), and a seminal attraction to aping and excess.

8 Reviewing AD, Heinz Ickstadt argued that it “lacks the centripetal pull of such structural firmness” as we experience in the first three novels and above all in GR, so that the text is “less mysterious, therefore less ‘difficult’.” To him, “both MD and AD lack the intensity as much as the semantic density of the earlier novels” (223 and 237).

9 This can also be seen as an extreme form of irony, if one takes irony as “a simulation” consisting in “playing the opponent’s game”, and “an art of being dissimilar to oneself” (Jankélévitch 68 and 74, my translation). Jankélévitch eventually attempts to combine humour and irony after contrasting them, as Deleuze did later: “humorous irony” (“l’ironie humoresque”) “simulates simulation and ironizes irony” (173). This offers a good description of many aspects of Pynchon’s novels, and of the whole of Inherent Vice.

10 Mimesis and Alterity (1993) is a dense anthropological and political investigation of the mimetic, and is not about literature specifically, but it is an essential contribution to the understanding of the mimetic faculty in fiction.

11 The notions of “magic of contact” and “magic of imitation” come from James Frazers The Golden Bough: AStudy in Comparative Religion (1890-95), mentioned in V. together with Robert Gravess The White Goddess. “Frazer traced what he claimed to be the evolution of human thought from the magical through the religious to the scientific . . . . Pynchon’s intention in evoking these two particular texts is difficult to judge,” but the two authors may well be “satirically employed as prototypes of the misguided Stencil” (Grant 37).

12 Taussig discusses Darwin’s account of his landing in Terra del Fuego, when the Fuegians soon began to imitate the white men’s every gesture and facial expression: “the odd mixture of surprise and imitation which at any moment these savages exhibited,” Darwin wrote (quoted 81, see also 92).

13 See Valérie Déshoulièress Métamorphoses de l’idiot (2005): from the helpless idiot to the trickster to the figure of the poet (Keats’s “chameleon”) and artist, there are many passages, and intersecting modes of plasticity. She also discusses the figure, in literature and film, of the contemporary idiot as the witness ‘par excellence’ of twentieth-century horrors. The dynamics of ‘dépense’ (excess, expenditure) disrupting the regulated exchanges of self-interest are equally emphasized.

14 Maskelyne is of course the real name of the English “Astronomer Royal” from 1765 to 1811. This name appears again in AD, the double refraction system called “la Doppiatrice” being a variation on “the classic Maskelyne cabinet of forty years ago.” (571): oh, yes, two Maskelynes then, the second one being a nineteenth-century magician...

15 “Who is the third who always walks beside you?/ When I count, there are only you and I together/ But when I look ahead up the white road/ There is always another one walking beside you/ Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded/ I do not know whether a man or a woman/—But who is that on the other side of you?” The Waste Land, lines 359–365. There are numerous echoes of such arctic ghostliness in AD’s Iceland spar, and in the fertile “waste” of all Pynchon’s works.

16 See Peter Buse and Andrew Scott ed. Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (1999). The book includes an analysis of the untimeliness and anachrony of ghosts, drawing on Derridas formulation: the ghost “begins by coming back” (in Spectres de Marx).

17 In his letters to Faith and John K. Sale, written at the time of the publication of V., Pynchon calls it “the worst novel in decades” (9th March 1963), or “that wretched novel of mine” (2nd June 1963): lacking suspense, and relying too heavily on “the crazy-assed surrealistic passage when I’m too lazy to engage or keep the reader’s attention”; unlike what happens in “the only kind of novel that is worth a shit, i.e. the traditional realistic kind” (29th June 1963). His judgment was obviously far less severe twenty years later when he wrote the preface to Slow Learner (1984), whereas he is quite dismissive with his second novel: “The next story I wrote [after ‘The Secret Integration’] was ‘The Crying of Lot 49,’ which was marketed as a ‘novel,’ and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up till then” (25).

18 I am translating from the French translation. Agamben also comments on the well known etymology of the word, and discusses the discordance produced when the musical accompaniment strayed from the rhythm of the chanted Homeric verse and created a “counter-singing” or “side-singing” (para-). Agamben sees in this divergence between melos and logos the origins of artistic prose. He explains that parody later became a series of comic interludes in a rhapsody, which “turned upside down” what had previously been recited by the rhapsodist (41).

19 For example, “I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death and life, will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become . . . .” (GR 724).

20 Gilles Chamerois offers a stimulating discussion of the missing faces revealed in their very invisibility towards the end of Mason & Dixon, and points out Pynchon’s continued reference to the model of the Holy Face which cannot be looked upon (340–43).

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