From David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History, Chapter 7:
The Historiographer Historicized: Pynchon and Literary History
CULTURE WARS REDUX
The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns survives today as a nagging doubt, on the part of some critics, regarding the legitimacy of a politicized standard of literary achievement. That is, some judge writers by their sensitivity to issues of race, gender, and class, while others persist in preferring Oscar Wilde’s simple criterion for excellence: “Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” To determine a writer’s place in literary history, in any event, one must consider the validity of current criteria for literary achievement and compare them to an older and perhaps more durable aesthetic chastened – where not elbowed aside altogether — by perspectivist thinking about canonicity. One can, as it happens, make the case for Pynchon either way.
Certainly he can lay claim to the traditional prerequisites of permanence: he writes beautifully and creates humane, insightful fictions that grapple resourcefully with history and the passions that make it. Shapely, sublime, and verbally rich, his imagined worlds vie for legitimacy with what Tyrone Slothrop, in Gravity’s Rainbow, calls “the authentic item.” Dispensing, early on, with traditional handling of character and plot, Pynchon eventually came to engage what in the introduction to Slow Learner he calls the “deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.” Early and late, however, his fictions merit the praise famously uttered by the Jane Austen heroine who defends the novel as a “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” Happily, current criticism — for example, Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) — has begun to feel its way back into aesthetic categories that Austen’s Catherine Morland would have recognized. Indeed, as a connoisseur of the Gothic, Catherine Morland would share Pynchon’s appreciation of “beauty as Rilke defined it, the onset of terror just able to be borne.” The beautiful becomes intrinsic again to evaluation and judgment and merit.
At the same time, Pynchon’s readers discern as much sensitivity to questions of race, gender, class, and the colonial or postcolonial fate of “pigmented populations” as the politicized criticism of the age could wish. Always sympathetic to the struggle of the colonized (as the reader sees in the Egyptian and South-West African chapters of V.), Pynchon can take credit for insisting that the world remember what the Herero suffered in German South-West Africa in 1904. With great subtlety, Pynchon allows the Herero and Bastard communities in V. to remain virtually faceless amid the horrors perpetrated by their colonial masters — only to make his account of the hapless “Sarah” the more harrowing. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s sympathy for the oppressed or marginalized (he calls them the preterite, those passed over) leads him to an elaborate counter-Freudian play on the blackness of Enzian and his fellow Schwarzkommando. Erecting the great 00001 rocket just after V-E Day, the black rocket troops reassert, among other things, the manhood compromised by their colonial history.
Pynchon represents ethnicity with great compassion, wit, subtlety — and a saving irreverence. In Vineland particularly Pynchon charms readers with clever experiments in the representation of ethnic accents in English — not to mention what the reader grasps as an English rendering of foreign speech. The explosive, exclamatory statements of the Japanese characters capture the quality of their language as experienced by Western patrons of art cinema. More common is the effect of foreign typography, spelling, diacritical marks, and punctuation imported into English. Deft and aurally precise, this technique never becomes tendentious or patronizing. That is, even as Pynchon captures the locutions of Chicanos by writing “i” as “í” (or with Spanish style bracketing quotation marks and exclamation points), he never descends to the Speedy Gonzalez/José Jiménez stereotype. That said, Hector or Vato is, in his way, every bit as comic as that travesty of Gallic naughtiness, the Marquis de Sod (the lawn entrepreneur of local TV commercials).
Depicting African Americans, on the other hand, Pynchon blends irreverence with warmth and sensitivity. Readers encounter Cleveland “Blood” Bonnefoy (another Vineland character); McClintic Sphere in V.; Carl Barrington, the imaginary friend, and McAfee, the musician, in “The Secret Integration”; and Gershom, George Washington’s resourcefully impertinent slave in Mason & Dixon (at one point in that novel Jeremiah Dixon relieves a slave-driver of both whip and human property). Elsewhere, the author exposes stereotype and the subconscious dread behind it. Under the influence of sodium pentothal, Tyrone Slothrop, in Gravity’s Rainbow, becomes a self-disclosing tabula of bizarre racial fears: “‘Good golly he sure is all asshole ain’t he?’ . . . ‘Grab him ‘fo’ he gets away!’ ‘Yowzah!’” (64).
In all of his fictions, Pynchon scrutinizes history’s omissions and misrepresentations. Nor does he neglect the history of letters. One can make what may seem an extravagant or hyperbolical case for Pynchon’s importance by arguing that the ontogeny of his career recapitulates the phylogeny of literary history. In his immense ambition and in the encyclopedic or Menippean energies that he deploys, Pynchon performs the very idea of literature — from its primitive beginnings through the capillary branchings of postmodern and post-postmodern practice. By turns comic, satiric, ironic, and romantic, he effortlessly shifts, too, between lyric and epic expression. The Courier’s Tragedy, in Lot 49, reveals his grasp, even, of dramaturgy. A burlesque of Jacobean revenge drama, it is an especially assured performance, its language, its double couplets, its archaic diction, its assemblage of plot elements across a wide spectrum all conspiring to reveal an iceberg's worth of highly specialized literary knowledge. It also prompts consideration of whether Pynchon engages the possibilities of tragedy in a less antic vein. He seems in fact to defy the pundits who think the conditions of modern life inimical to real tragic elevation. To be sure, one discerns nothing so splendid as tragedy in the unheroic fate of a Leni Pökler, who probably does not survive the Dora slave labor camp’s liberation, or a Brigadier Pudding, who dies not with a bang — not at some grand moment of ambition frustrated or fated reversal — but literally with a whimper: “Me little Mary hurts.” From Victoria Wren to Webb Traverse and from Enzian to his half-brother Tchitcherine, however, Pynchon also presents figures who, in mythic stature and fate, rise to a tragic level. In their stories, readers may trace most of the features Aristotle laid out in the Poetics: the pity and fear, the elevated language, the moral stature of the protagonist, the flaw, the reversal and recognition. Like Sophocles, whose greatest tragic protagonist he feminizes as Lot 49’s Oedipa Maas, Pynchon shows the source of a nation’s anguish in one oblivious heart. Oedipa, like Oedipus, wanders an “infected city,” herself the bacillus carried “to its far blood’s branchings.”
Cambridge University Press
Reprint Permission
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon
edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and, Brian McHale
Hardback ISBN 9780521769747
Paperback ISBN 9780521173049
Published 16 January 2012
Selection: Culture Wars Redux" pp. 86-89, 1281 words only, from Chapter 6,
pp. 83-96, Pynchon in literary history, by David Cowart
Rights/Acknowledgement
Pynchon in literary history, by David Cowart
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard,
Luc Herman and, Brian McHale
Copyright © 2012 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Cambridge Companion to Thomas
Pynchon
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S U M M E R
2012
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