Political Ontology and Ontol

Burget, Jasper 2018 English Thesis Title: "When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It": Political Ontology and Ontological Narrative in Pynchon's Against the Day Advisor: Christian Thorne Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No “WHEN YOU COME TO A FORK IN THE ROAD, TAKE IT”: POLITICAL ONTOLOGY AND ONTOLOGICAL NARRATIVE IN PYNCHON’S AGAINST THE DAY by JASPER BURGET Christian Thorne, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts APRIL 16, 2018 Acknowledgements Above all I would like to thank my advisor, Christian Thorne, for his invaluable assistance with this project. I could not have asked for a better adviser, and I gained more from our meetings than I can possibly say with words. I would also like to thank: my readers, Anita Sokolsky and Stephen Tifft, for approaching my excessively convoluted arguments with such enthusiasm; Gage McWeeny, for his guidance in all things honors over the past year; Stephen Fix, for sharing with me his contagious excitement about Pynchon’s fiction; Andrew Cornell, for pointing me towards helpful sources in field of anarchist literary theory; my fellow honors students, for their helpful criticisms and examples; and all of the incredible professors and teachers whose have influenced this project in ways both obvious and obscure. Of this last category, a few deserve special mention: Chris Pye, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Walter Johnston, Bojana Mladenovic, Paul Scott, and Andy Spear. I especially want to thank Professor Sokolsky for all of her guidance in matters intellectual and otherwise. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my family and friends for all of their support—especially to Eric Muscosky for asking such challenging questions, to my father for all of his encouragement, to my mother for being the only person I know who read my entire thesis for fun, and to the lovely Lily Sorrentino for putting up with me while this project took over my life for almost an entire year. Air, and ye elements the eldest birth Of nature’s womb, that in quaternion run Perpetual circle, multiform; and mix And nourish all things, let your ceaseless change Vary to our great maker still new praise. — Milton, Paradise Lost, V.180-184 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: What was he thinking? ………….…… 1 Pynchon’s Politics .…………………...……………. 4 Pynchon’s Ontology …....………………………… 25 Pynchon’s Narrative ……………………………… 47 Bibliography ……....……………………………… 67 INTRODUCTION: WHAT WAS HE THINKING? Since the publication of Vineland in 1990, scholars and critics have increasingly turned their attention from Thomas Pynchon’s stylistic bravado to his serious engagement with history and politics. In 1988, Steven Weisenburger published A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, in which he provides page-by-page annotations to Gravity’s Rainbow, explaining its elaborate puns and obscure references. To read Pynchon’s novel alongside Weisenburger’s Companion is to enter into a playful postmodern daydream in which the reader becomes lost in the author’s giddy erudition. In 2013, the same Steven Weisenburger, with Herman Luc, published a book titled Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom, in which the authors locate Gravity’s Rainbow firmly within the radical political tradition of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Between 1988 and 2013, in other words, Weisenburger’s Pynchon metamorphosed from postmodern trickster to political theorist. This is not an isolated phenomenon, as a brief perusal of other major works of Pynchon criticism post-Vineland will attest.1 This is not to say that there were no scholarly treatments of Pynchon’s politics prior to 1990, nor that more recent Pynchon criticism is single-mindedly political; even so, there has been a pronounced shift in the scholarly discourse on Pynchon in the last two and a half decades. Lacking in this new scholarly engagement with Pynchon’s politics has been a satisfactory account of the relationship between his politics and his distinctive literary style. Many scholarly accounts of the politics of Pynchon’s fiction have essentially treated Pynchon as a political philosopher who has almost inexplicably chosen the postmodern novel as the medium for communicating his ideas. Martin Paul Eve’s otherwise excellent book Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno is in this respect representative. While Eve offers a 1 See, for example, Samuel Thomas’s Pynchon and the Political (2007) and Sean Carswell’s Occupy Pynchon: Politics after Gravity’s Rainbow (2017). 1 compelling account of Pynchon’s political thought in relation to the titular philosophers, he engages primarily with the political content of Pynchon’s novels, largely indifferent to the ways in which form, too, carries a politics. Of course, the many overtly political asides and parables in Pynchon’s fiction are important; indeed, they are central to my own interpretations of his work. What I want to suggest, however, is that Pynchon scholarship ought to offer not only an analysis of Pynchon’s political commitments and stylistic hallmarks, but also of their interrelationship. An excellent opportunity for testing this approach presents itself in Against the Day, Pynchon’s enormous and under-appreciated 2006 novel. Unlike Pynchon’s other long and ambitious novels, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow and 1997’s Mason & Dixon, Against the Day was not met with widespread critical acclaim. The common theme in early reviews of the novel is confusion. One reviewer writes, “Pynchon must have set out to make his readers dizzy and, in the process, become a little dizzy himself” (Menand). Another is far harsher, writing that Against the Day “Reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex” (Kakutani). Even critics who recommend Against the Day often admit to being baffled by it; one otherwise favorable review describes the novel’s prose as an “overwhelming, unstable” form of “disconnected pointillism” that “induces memory loss” (Cape). The general critical response to Against the Day, whether positive or negative, is perhaps best summed up in one reviewer’s incredulous question: “What was he thinking?” (Menand). My aim in the pages that follow will be to provide an answer to that difficult question. The first chapter charts the evolution of Pynchon’s political thinking, from the critique of empire in V. and the abstract anarchism of Gravity’s Rainbow to the more concrete social criticism and 2 anarchist politics of his later fiction. I argue that Against the Day is the novel in which Pynchon again takes up the positive political project he began in Gravity’s Rainbow, this time giving more serious attention to historical methods of resistance and to the ethics of political violence. The second chapter attempts to construct a bridge between Pynchon’s explicit political concerns and his narrative style by examining the radical political ontology that he develops in his fiction. I identify two key tenets of this ontology: a rejection of the distinction between the actual and the potential, and a rejection of the boundary between subject and object. The third chapter traces the evolution of Pynchon’s approach to narrative before arguing that the method many critics find so off-putting in Against the Day is the result of Pynchon’s remarkably ambitious attempt to give literary form to his political and ontological commitments. 3 PYNCHON’S POLITICS 1. The Kingdom of Death Too often ignored in discussions of Pynchon’s politics is one of the most persistent preoccupations of his fiction: empire. This may be the result of the (often justified) stereotype of (white, male) American literature as essentially insular in its concerns. In a 2014 review of a Denis Johnson novel, Olufemi Terry writes, “I’ve got nothing against Roth and Pynchon, but, for all these authors’ playing with form and style, they’ve scarcely ever strayed in their work from western milieus.” As a claim about Pynchon, this is simply wrong. In V., Mason & Dixon, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Against the Day, Pynchon makes lengthy visits to Southern Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia. One can certainly ask whether Pynchon is writing in a neo-colonial mode, but to accuse his fiction of insularity is almost absurd. It is odd, then, that the perception of Pynchon as a parochial writer, which is hardly limited to Terry, has been so little altered by the growing scholarly interest in his politics. It is not that no one has noticed Pynchon’s obsession with empire.2 Instead, what seems to be missing is an account of Pynchon’s politics that centers his persistent critique of imperialism. Without such an account, Pynchon’s fiction is in danger of appearing to reproduce a certain imperialist perspective in which empire, when viewed from it metropolitan center, appears to be a peripheral concern. Despite the (in)famous opacity of Pynchon’s texts, it is certainly possible to extract from them a coherent critique of imperialism. While the particular argument I am going to outline is most legible in V., Pynchon’s first and most explicitly anti-imperialist novel, is also comes across 2 Particularly compelling critical treatments of Pynchon’s engagement with empire have come in chapters from John McClure’s Late Imperialist Romance (1994) and Keith Booker’s Literature and Domination (1993) as well as in articles by Ronald Cooley (1993) and Douglas Ivison (1997). 4 fairly clearly in Gravity’s Rainbow and remains very much alive in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.

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