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Thomas Pynchon THOMAS PYNCHON Also by John Dugdale WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, INDIAN SUMMER (editor with Tony Tanner) HERMAN MELVILLE, THE CONFIDENCE MAN, WHITE JACKET (editor with Tony Tanner) WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES (editor with Tony Tanner) NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE (editor with Tony Tanner) FILE ON SHEPARD Thomas Pynchon Allusive Parables of Power John Dugdale Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-10809-1 ISBN 978-1-349-10807-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10807-7 ©John Dugdale 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-49110-2 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-04630-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: allusive parables of power/ John Dugdale. p. ern. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-312-04630-9 1. Pynchon, Thomas-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3566.Y55Z63 1990 813'.54-dc20 89-78245 CIP For my parents Contents Acknowledgements viii Notes on editions, abbreviations and conventions ix Preface X Introduction 1 1 Three Short Stories 17 The White Indian: 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna' 17 Man on the dump: 'Low-lands' 37 A few bugs to work out: 'Entropy' 54 2 v. 77 Things I've read for courses 77 A fierce ambivalence 105 3 The Crying of Lot 49 124 A woman's point of view 124 Almost offhand things 141 Echo Courts 168 Epilogue: Gravity's Rainbow 186 Notes 190 Bibliography 203 Index 212 vii Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to some of the people who have given me guidance and support in the course of my research. Frank Kermode, Adrian Poole, Edward Mendelson and Mathew Winston read pieces of work when my ideas were some way from being fully formed. I am particularly indebted to my Tutor at Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr Martin Cowley, for his patience and practical assistance; and to Eleanora Holiday for her invaluable contribution. Finally, it is no exaggeration to say that without the encouragement and lucid advice of my research supervisor, Tony Tanner, this project would never have been completed. The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to quote from the works of Thomas Pynchon: V. (Copyright© 1961, 1963 by Thomas Pynchon) reprinted by per­ mission of the Melanie Jackson agency and Jonathan Cape Ltd.; The Crying of Lot 49 (Copyright© 1965, 1966 by Thomas Pynchon) reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson agency and Jonathan Cape Ltd.; Gravity's Rainbow (Copyright © 1973 by Thomas Pynchon) reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson agency and Jonathan Cape Ltd. Slow Learner (Copyright© 1984 by Thomas Pynchon) reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson agency and Jonathan Cape Ltd. viii Notes on Editions, Abbreviations and Conventions References to Pynchon' s novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow are to the British Picador (Pan Books) editions, first published in London in 1975, 1979 and 1985 respectively. These are the only editions currently in print in the UK. References to the story 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna' are to Epoch No.9 (Spring 1959), pp. 195-213. References to all the other short stories are to the collection Slow Learner (London: Cape, 1985). References to the article'A Journey into the Mind of Watts' are to New York Times Magazine, 12 June 1966, pp. 34-5, 78, 80-2, 84. The following abbreviations are used: SR 'The Small Rain' MMV 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna' UR 'Under the Rose' 51 'The Secret Integration' Lot 49 The Crying of Lot 49 Journey 'A Journey into the Mind of Watts' GR Gravity's Rainbow SL Slow Learner When a text is the subject of a particular chapter or sub-chapter, page references take the form of a simple number in brackets; in references in the same chapter to other Pynchon texts, the number is preceded by the title or abbreviation. References to the short stories may take the form (Entropy, 95) or (SL, 95), as judged appropriate. Pynchon' s work is peculiarly resistant to quotation, and as a result this convention has had to be adopted: dots within quota­ tions are inserted unless indicated, reversing the usual practice. ix Preface Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., born on Long Island, New York, in 1937, is the author of four novels: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990). 1 The remainder of his literary output consists of five short stories which appeared in various magazines in the years before V., and another which was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. Critical articles and books on Pynchon did not appear in any great number until after the publication of GR, which is centrally concerned with the V-2 rocket, and largely set in London and Northern Germany towards the end of the Second World War. It was immediately acclaimed as a Great American Novel, and its multiplicity of characters, plots, themes and levels provided abun­ dant opportunities for scholarly labour; furthermore, it established a Pynchon oeuvre where previously there had only been an odd assortment of texts, some of them little known, in which patterns were hard to discern. A natural consequence of the bulge in Pynchon criticism after 1973 is that the earlier work is customarily read in the light of GR, with particular attention to the ways in which it anticipates the author's masterpiece. Unfavourable comparisons are made, and words and phrases are used (first sketches, experiments, appren­ tice work) which suggest that these 'immature' works do not merit being considered independently and on their own terms. The most obvious victim of this approach was the debut novel V., a double narrative partly concerned with a group of characters in 1950s New York, and partly with a 'mad time-search' through twentieth century history for a mysterious woman. Working with manifestly inadequate descriptions of a complicated and demanding text, critics who write intelligently on the later Pynchon can be found dismissing it as 'the overgrown elaboration of a simple idea'. A second important factor in the critical reception of Pynchon' s work is that the short stories were not collected until1984, 25 years after the first of them was published, in Slow Learner. Prior to the post-1973 proliferation of criticism and accompanying biblio­ graphies, few were aware of their existence, and they remained difficult to obtain in the following decade. Although pamphlet versions of some of the stories appeared gradually in the UK in the X Preface xi late 1970s, most students and devotees on both sides of the Atlantic were obliged to trace the relevant periodicals in piecemeal fashion and make photocopies. Until the reviews of SL, accordingly, Pynchon was not treated as a writer with a body of work in the short story form, and critics rarely gave extended consideration to individual texts. (An instructive comparison is with Joyce, who gathered his stories together relatively rapidly, and provided the collection with a coherent identity.) Moreover, the stories were not regularly introduced into discussions of V., 2 despite obvious paral­ lels in method as well as theme; and neither were they seen as relevant to an understanding of Lot 49, a novella-length tale of a Californian housewife who discovers a secret postal network, which Pynchon called 'the next story I wrote . which was marketed as a "novel"' (SL, 22). The decision to restrict the scope of the main body of this study to the works written by Pynchon during seven remarkable years between 1959 and 1966 thus has both a practical motive-Gravity's Rainbow is roughly the same length as the whole of his previous work-and a corrective intent. Consisting largely of close readings of three stories and two novels, it attempts to appreciate the fiction he wrote in his twenties in its own right, making use of the opportunities for hindsight understanding provided by GR only when it would be perverse not to do so. In addition to the view that the general tendency of most Pynchon criticism has been awry in the manner outlined above, the approach of the study reflects an assumption that it has not responded adequately to two different areas of the author's work. For the sake of simplicity, these two aspects can be referred to as the 'artistic' and the 'political' Pynchon; though it should be emphasised that the first term comprehends more than the formal qualities of the texts, and the sense of the second includes the representation in them of contem­ porary social phenomena, and of historical forces and events. Pynchon emerges as a remarkably artful writer from the close readings of texts which make up this study, and three features of his work are brought out which have been insufficiently appreci­ ated. First, although it is recognised that allusion and parody occur in his fiction, criticism has not done justice to the extent and sophistication of this intertextual activity. Secondly and similarly, the self-reflexive or 'meta-fictional' content of the texts is generally acknowledged, but is rarely recognised as pervasive. Finally, Pynchon' s use of language has never received the attention it xii Preface merits, and the dearth of critical articles specifically addressed to it is most surprising. The analyses which follow give numerous examples of wordplay in the fiction (often involving etymology, as well as puns and secondary senses), and show how patterning is achieved in it by a technique of internal echo.
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