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Book Chapter Reference Book Chapter Alterity MADSEN, Deborah Lea Abstract Thomas Pynchon's engagement with alterity is thematized psychologically through paranoia, schizophrenia, and narcissism; politically through systems of control that attempt to destroy otherness; economically through monopolistic transnational corporations and cartels that supplant national governments; scientifically through determinism and theories of entropy; aesthetically through film and photography, storytelling and the “routinization” of language. Pynchon thematizes these various aspects of culture as the effort to substitute the randomness of nature with a perfectly controlled, and controllable, version of reality: what, in Gravity's Rainbow, Pointsman describes as “a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth.” This chapter considers how Pynchon's work has represented and complicated, by variously undermining and legitimating, contested understandings of identity and alterity. Pynchon's narrative engagement with liberal humanist ideas of essentialized identities gives rise to much of his narratological innovation and complexity, particularly when his exploration of ontological identity categories [...] Reference MADSEN, Deborah Lea. Alterity. In: Dalsgaard, I. ; Herman, L. & McHale, B. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012. p. 212 Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:92078 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1 “Alterity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, ed. Inger Dalsgaard, Luc Herman & Brian McHale (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 146-155. http://www.cambridge.org/ch/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/cambridge-companion-thomas-pynchon Alterity Deborah L. Madsen Pynchon's engagement with alterity is thematized psychologically through paranoia, schizophrenia, and narcissism; politically through systems of control that attempt to destroy otherness; economically through monopolistic transnational corporations and cartels that supplant national governments; scientifically through determinism and theories of entropy; aesthetically through film and photography, storytelling and the “routinization” of language. Pynchon thematizes these various aspects of culture as the effort to substitute the randomness of nature with a perfectly controlled, and controllable, version of reality: what, in Gravity's Rainbow, Pointsman describes as “a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth.”1 This chapter considers how Pynchon's work has represented and complicated, by variously undermining and legitimating, contested understandings of identity and alterity. Pynchon's narrative engagement with liberal humanist ideas of essentialized identities gives rise to much of his narratological innovation and complexity, particularly when his exploration of ontological identity categories takes place within the context of European colonialism and its New World legacies. Alterity names the process by which an “Other” is constructed. It carries the double sense of both the subject position of “Otherness” in which someone is placed and also the adoption of that subject position as the Other's perspective. Alterity is then a double process of placement and perception. In narrative, consequently, alterity affects the construction of character and also the treatment of narrative perspective or focalization, spatiality, temporality, causality, and truth or authenticity. Thematically, alterity represents an ontological distinction between self and Other where the Other is marked according to categorical differences of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and the like. Alterity is less a thing or noun than it is a process or verb, a process of “Othering”. Cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig writes that “alterity is every inch a relationship, not a thing in itself, and is in this case [of the indigenous Cuna people] an actively mediated colonial relationship meeting contradictory and conflicting European expectations of what constitutes Indianness.”2 I will turn to the issue of colonialism below; here, it is Taussig's characterization of alterity as an interpersonal process that I want to highlight. For in Pynchon's narratives also, alterity is a multidirectional process. The binary oppositions explored in Pynchon's fiction (ones and zeros, in The Crying of Lot 49; “Them” versus the “Counterforce” in Gravity's Rainbow) sketch the contours of this dialogism but do not mark its limits. Characters like “Pirate” Prentice or, in Against the Day, Madame Eskimoff both do and do not “change sides”- as she tells Lew Basnight - and yet they are defined by both. Pynchon's characterization relies on what characters say about themselves and their values, what is said about them and their behavior, and the actions witnessed by the reader in the course of the narrative. As a consequence, characters appear to acquire subjectivity and, for some, a significant degree of personal experience even while they are paranoically speculating about the extent to which their 1 selfhood is a construction directed by powerful external cultural interests. Such speculations are contextualized by the interpretive efforts of other characters, narrators, and the reader, all of whom are engaged dialogically in the construction of identity and alterity, sameness and Otherness. One of the most baffling episodes in contemporary literature is the sequence in Gravity's Rainbow when Tyrone Slothrop, the ostensible protagonist of the novel, disintegrates or disseminates into multiple distinct personae. The fragmentation of Slothrop's character is referenced in a number of separate episodes. In the course of narrating Roger Mexico's experience of Frau Utgarthaloki's cannibalistic dinner party the narrator remarks of Slothrop - “It's doubtful if he can ever be 'found' again, in the conventional sense of 'positively identified and detained'.”3 This remark is presented as an aside; the narrator's primary subject in this scene is Roger Mexico and his realization that he must act: to do nothing would be to accept life on Their terms though his alternative is to die. Thus, Slothrop's disintegration is presented to the reader as the dialogical context within which the characters of both Slothrop and Mexico are developed. In this aside, the narrator returns to the earlier image of Slothrop as a plucked albatross; living alone in the mountains, he is described as “changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then” but still hoping for a way to return home, to America.4 At this point in the narrative, Slothrop is still pursuing the sense of an authentic self by puzzling out his relation to Laszlo Jamf and the conditioning of his infant self even while he is reading for further clues all the phenomena that surround him: from flights of birds to graffiti written amid the ruins of bombed buildings. On the wall of a public toilet he has not visited before he discovers the message “ROCKETMAN WAS HERE” and the narrator reports - “his first thought was that he had written it himself and forgot. […] Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the Combination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the albatross stirred.”5 There are a number of points here worth noting. The first is the fragmentation of Slothrop into “versions” of himself that are separate in time and space. Secondly, these putative disparate selves have no awareness of each other and so do not represent any kind of unifying convergence of identities into a singular and authoritative “Slothrop.” Further, this entire account of Slothrop's early dissemination takes place within the discourse of the extra-diegetic narrator. Slothrop occupies the third-person pronomial position; Slothrop is always “he” and never “me.” Thus the narrator places Slothrop in a position of Otherness or alterity and then adopts that “Othered” point of view, though in the subjunctive mode of what might be - not what unquestionably is - the case. Other characters besides the narrator express their uncertainty concerning Slothrop's identity, as he appears in various disguises such as Rocketman, then the pig-hero Plechazunga. That other characters refer to Slothrop as fragmenting into alternative identities encourages the reader to adopt the narrator's interpretation of Slothrop's fate as a character. The recurring albatross metaphor, which alludes intertextually to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), belongs to the narrator's discursive lexicon (not Slothrop's) and is used pejoratively to evoke the image of selfhood as a source of anxiety, a burden of responsibility and also a liability: the narrator remarks late in the novel that “The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit.”6 2 Slothrop's final mountaintop appearance as a seemingly unified character prefigures elements of the episode that follows the explosion in the Transvestites' Toilet, when the narrator reports that, although he doesn't remember it, Slothrop studies a newspaper image of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima: “a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white public bush,”7 an image that echoes the narrator's description of Slothrop's transformation into a “crossroad,” when he “sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven
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