Orwell and Pynchon V. Bazooka Joe

Orwell and Pynchon v. Bazooka Joe Vladimir Tasić Here is a strange idea. Thomas Pynchon writes historical novels; political novels, in a sense. His oeuvre is a literary inquiry of the longitudinal kind, lasting almost four decades and spanning thematically two or three centuries. There is certainly a strong ludic element in his writing: dazzling linguistic virtuosity, florid plot lines, scenes reminiscent of the inane bravado of the dudes who conceived the cinematic masterpiece known as Jackass. But Pynchon’s choice of material indicates that the unabashed literary hedonism, for which he is known and admired, functions also as a cloaking device that permits him to explore the attitudes of Alternative America toward History and Power. Evidence of this is fairly clear in Vineland, where Pynchon treats the dissipation and state-assisted demise of the countercultural movement. The lost ideal assumes the unsur- prising name of the People’s Republic of Rock’n’Roll, with Sex & Drugs present in large quantities as a matter of course. But the countercultural trinity is only the stage-setting of a larger political drama involving everyone from ‘rogue’ G-men to union activists of yore: at stake in Vineland are the very principles of the American republic. Not coincidentally, the main narrative thread unfolds in the year 1984, which in fictional history has obvious ‘Orwellian’ connotations and in real time bears the mark of Ronald Reagan’s second coming. In the following novel, Mason & Dixon, Pynchon delved deeper into the past in search of the founding principles of the republic, and envisioned the era of the American Enlightenment. The project continues in Against the Day, which takes on several sensitive decades, approximately from the 1890s to the late 1910s. The period may reasonably be regarded as the beginning of the ‘American Century’—the time when the republic became intrigued by the role of Empire. Abroad, there were the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the military intervention in China, eventually World War One and migration of global financial power from London to New York; at home, the industrialization of the Western frontier, ‘pacification’ of labor, the trading boom on the New York Stock Exchange, the rise of William Randolph Hearst and growing influence of yellow journalism on the public opinion. Writers sympathetic to conventions of the historical genre—Gore Vidal comes to mind as a sort of literary Gibbon—would perhaps have chosen to create an imperial epic marbled by celebrity scoops on the lives of politicians, generals, industrialists, media moguls, and other stock characters populating the corridors of power. Other authors, for instance Jayne Anne Phillips, might have written a hard-boiled realistic narrative from the perspective of small-town folk, the homegrown fodder of Empire’s incomprehensible machine. Pynchon chooses a more complex strategy, politically ambitious and aesthetically risky. Against the Day relies heavily on the correlation of political history and the history of popular and mass culture. It is almost as though Pynchon wishes to repeat the grand gesture of Joyce’s Ulysses, but in a framework more American and hence more global. Like in the U.S. itself, the 1 Greek and the Irish elements of Ulysses, represented in Against the Day by Pythagorean mysticism and Hamilton’s quaternions, are to be taken in along with a host of worldwide contributions; whether European or borderline European, such as Tesla, or more exotic, like the Shambala, they are all to be transformed, infused with a new spirit—a sense of untarnished idealism, of boyish dreaminess and the proverbial innocence of America— and recast in a more popular and exciting form. The daunting accumulation of cultural references is therefore not just an arbitrary obsession of the author: it plays an important role in the novel’s literary strategy. It is widely appreciated (perhaps only too widely) that political history can be read in comic books, movies, cartoons and other imagery intended for mass consumption. The character of Fu Manchu, a suitably exaggerated image of the enemy of the international law and order, appears in dime novels not long after the Boxer Rebellion in China and the subsequent military intervention of a ‘coalition of the willing,’ the Eight Nation Alliance. Mass culture of roughly the same era also gave rise to the term ‘yellow journalism’, named after the Yellow Kid, a racially profiled character in a comic published during the late 1890s in one of Hearst’s jingoistic newspapers. Pynchon, however, takes only a passing interest in the microscopic level of the correlation between world and image. Unlike, say, Vidal, he could not care less whether Teddy and The Rough Riders actually took a Cuban hill or did so only in a politically motivated piece of tabloid writing. For Pynchon, yellow journalism is too obvious an example of how fictional worlds create and reflect political realities. The novel does contain a scene in which a protagonist barely avoids drowning in mayonnaise, which could be construed as a color-coded message even though the offending condiment is Belgian-made. But in a text containing nearly half a million words, chosen and arranged by a writer who has ‘appeared’ on The Simpsons sporting a paper bag on his head, one expects difficulties with sorting out the signal from the noise. Against the Day has 1085 pages of relatively small print, and a long roster of meticu- lously named characters of whom a dozen or so might be regarded as principal. Its plot defies all known compression algorithms but may be described as asymptotically nuts. At first it appears that the book could well have been accompanied by Mark Twain’s famous disclaimer: ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’ Yet there seems to be more to Against the Day than the sort of pop-culture hipsterism that finds ironic glee in endless recombinations of genre chlichés, in the man- ner of DJs who ‘mash’ Blondie with The Doors simply because it can be done. There is as always that element in Pynchon, the original master of the obscure and sublimely ridicu- lous reference. But beneath all the flouting of the expectations of high literature—‘high’ as understood by Michiko Kakutani, not by Cheech or Chong—there appears to be a system and a serious intention; even a political program of sorts. The first axiom states that the images of a certain period available in popular literature, including some forms of fantasy writing, act as historical reality. The characters inhabit the space-time of genre representations of America and the world at the turn of the century; that is reality. Consequently, it is a given that American boys might suddenly produce a blimp and set out on a thrilling adventure on the global-historical stage. Also present are time machines, along with the usual logical problems they pose. The second axiom attempts to limit their effects on the narrative: we are supposed to remain anchored, or somehow tethered, to an era when America has not yet lost its innocence (though it is 2 curious). The notion of the innocence of America-in-the-World, its self-perception as a morally immaculate agent, is part of the puritan heritage and was an important trope of both the popular imagination and high literature of the period that Against the Day is delimiting. The title of Mark Twain’s travelogue, Innocents Abroad, cleverly plays with this stereotype, but it would not be out place as the title of a Henry James novel. Pynchon is interested in the popular imagination, and Twain is thus a more appropriate guide than James. Indeed, James appears in Against the Day only in a cameo role, as the author of a book read by a fairly sophisticated canine. Twain’s writing, unlike that of the doggedly highbrow James, reflects a certain shift in the ‘horizon of expectations’. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, Tom and friends are exploring Missouri; in the sequel published in 1894, Tom Sawyer Abroad, the boys embark on a Verne-style extraordinary voyage in a futuristic balloon and go as far as Africa, where they encounter lions and fleas. At the close of the nineteenth century, Tom and Huckleberry can fly off in search of an intercontinental adventure because the reception of their experiences is now underpinned by an awareness of America’s economic might and its growing significance in world affairs. Empire is infiltrating the realm of imagination. It whispers: ‘The world is your playground.’ But the conquest of imagination is only beginning. We are still far, for example, from Fitzgerald’s world-weary hero, to whom the caterers of vice in Montmartre appear childish and Parisian Left Bank hopelessly provincial; who evokes the bygone glamour of the Sec- ond Empire—ironically, of course—while reminiscing on the swell decade following World War One, when a modest amount of dollars could buy royal treatment at The Ritz. That day has not arrived. In the popular imagination that is the reality of Pynchon’s characters, the world is within reach of ‘every’ boy from Missouri, Minnesota, or Colorado, but it is still mysterious, exotic, full of electrifying possibilities and packed with spine-tingling ac- tion, like the setting of a dime novel. It is a place where one can encounter brilliant thugs, princesses at once telepathic and hot, ingenious scientists and their evil twins, monsters and ray-guns galore, wizards good and bad, masked avengers and hilarious savages of a more or less noble kind.

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