Some Formal Considerations in the Fiction of Thomas Pynchon
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
RICE UNIVERSITY "ASSERTION-THROUGH-STRUCTURE": SOME FORMAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE FICTION OF THOMAS PYNCHON by GARY THOMPSON A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS Thesis Director's Signature: Houston, Texas May, 1975 ABSTRACT "AS SERTION-THROUGH-STRUCTURE": SOME FORMAL CONSIDERATIONS IN THE FICTION OF THOMAS PYNCHON Gary Thompson Pynchon's early fiction establishes the idea of "social thermodynamics"; events in society are subject to impulses of decay parallel to entropy. The human condition is composed of extremes/ the "street" and the "hothouse," i.e., synchronic and diachronic modes of perception; and both for contrasting reasons are inadequate. The second chapter discusses the problem of metaphor and its limitations in dealing with the world. Metaphor for Pynchon in Vj»_ is a deception; this is contrasted with Emerson's use of metaphor to define human activity. In V., metaphor is the basis of constructing patterns, and patterns ultimately falsify the world they are intended to order. Chapter three discusses "Mondaugen's Story" as a micro¬ cosm of V^_; "Mondaugen's Story" is a parable of Wittgenstein's first proposition; Pynchon's fiction is compared to propositions, since both undergo a projective relation to the world. Both V. and the Tractatus are "hollow" works, denying their own media. Chapter four develops the metaphor of the interface in Gravity's Rainbow; because based on a physical phenomenon, it is an externally observable metaphor, and consequently is not sub¬ ject to the distrust elicited by Stencil's V-symbols. The novel's interfaces appear first in a psychological context, and then are extended to "different orders of reality." Pynchon, through a process of establishing realistic fictional illu¬ sions only to break them, sets up and breaks the interface of his fiction. Chapter five considers an interface of some importance, deferred from chapter four, films film provides a referent inside the novel for the processes of art as they affect the lives and behavior of the characters. By its use of film devices, the novel shapes how we perceive its structure and thus meaning; paradoxically, film is both an expression of communal dreams or fantasies and an individual, one-to-one address. Chapter six develops the concept of the Zone as interface The Zone is the occupied territories after Germany's fall, a system of provisional reality and thus of infinite possi¬ bility, and a means of suggesting the need for systems and the difficulty of constructing them. Slothrop's disappear¬ ance is one mode of dealing with paranoia and limiting sys¬ tems. The Zone finally is a metaphor for contingent existence Table of Contents : Introduction 1 Arabesques of Order: Thomas Pynchon’s Short Stories 8 Country of Coincidence: Metaphor in 27 A Parody of Space: Wittgenstein and the Message of 44 Kute Korrespondences: The Concept of the Interface in Gravity1s Rainbow 6 8 Seeds of Reality: Film in Gravity * s Rainbow 101 The Boondocks of the Brain: On What It Means To Be "In The Zone" 127 Bibliography 151 Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfasts flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intri¬ cacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations ... so the same assertion-through- structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. —Gravity ' s Rainbow INTRODUCTION î Thomas Pynchon's novels demonstrate an intense conscious¬ ness of form: this thesis is a tenuous examination of a unifying principle in Gravity1s Rainbow, Pynchon's 400,000-word novel, published in 1973—a recurrent metaphor, and structural principle, the metaphor of the interface. In order to discuss Pynchon's use of the interface metaphor in Gravity1s Rainbow it will be necessary to examine his early fiction—three short stories and V.—for a sense of his development of the novel form. In order to consider Pynchon's fictional forms the thesis will attempt to encompass the significance of metaphor and the act of metaphor in Pynchon's two large novels. Metaphor in is a process to be inherently distrusted, as we shall see; but in Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon is able to develop a coherent, unify¬ ing metaphor organic to the novel's material. Through metaphor similarities between disparate objects are perceived: thus "the sun is an orange" allows the maker of the comparison to note shape and color, and to visualize a min¬ iscule "earth" around the fruit in his hand. In any literal sense, however, the comparison is an absurdity; and in the fig¬ urative sense, in the quality of the metaphor itself, "the sun is an orange" is an anthropomorphic act, which brings an astro¬ nomical fact into something which can be held in three fingers, tossed, and squeezed into breakfast—in effect brings the thing 2 metaphored under human control. Metaphor in the most general sense enables us to shape things into a coherent, comprehen¬ sible order; it is the fabric whereby web-like patterns of interpretation are built up. Pynchon's concept of metaphor in V. is that metaphor is a human imposition of pattern upon events which themselves exist in no pattern; therefore metaphor is an "artifice," one which contributes to "the Great Lie."^ Nevertheless, it is impossible for us not to impose patterns: to live without a concept of form invites dread, paranoia, insanity. The mind compulsively makes patterns of unpatterned events, just as in sensory deprivation experiments the mind projects the appearance of stimuli. The metaphors in V\_ are not organically related to the perception; rather than rising from perception, they channel the perception, until the book's pattern-maker, significantly named Stencil, sees the world in terms of the initial V: the unity and cohesion derivable from form are characterized for Stencil by the great plot of the century, into which every¬ thing beginning with "V" is enrolled. The uncertainty is com¬ pounded if we note that language assumes a form in the pheno¬ mena which it describes; in bringing the things of the world into consciousness, language arranges them into some ordered form. For Wittgenstein this implies the existence of form in the world, which is imitated by this function of language; for Pynchon the form is imposed by language and by human perception, but form itself does not exist intrinsically in phenomena. There is the danger, then, that metaphor is entirely a trick of the mind, that the relations it perceives between dis- 3 parate objects exist only in the mind of the perceiver. Just as in solipsism, one cannot verify his perceptions because he cannot place himself outside their influence. As Wittgenstein puts it, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."2 But in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon finds a metaphor that is externally verifiable: Pavlov's experiments with conditioning show to another organism that an act of association has taken place. In the experiment a bell is rung, the dog is shown food, and the dog salivates. Eventually at the sound of the bell the dog salivates, without the presence of food. Between the stimulus and the response, an act of metaphor has taken place: the bell is somehow like food. At least one metaphor, then, has been observed from the outside, and therefore the problem of subjectivity implied in the concept of metaphor in V^_ is cir¬ cumscribed. The metaphor of the interface in Gravity1s Rainbow derives from such an account of Pavlovian conditioning in the novel, and from there expands into a unifying concept—I hesitate to call it a symbol—for consideration of the novel as a whole. The interface is not exactly a symbol; rather it is a spatial con¬ struct, just as is the v-symbol in The significance of that novel's Vs is suspect, since they are unified by coincidence, not through organic development, and since they center around the consciousness of one character, Stencil; the interfaces of Gravity's Rainbow, however, are organically developed through the novel and have physical validation in its esthetic space. Indeed, the novel itself is a kind of interface with the ex- 4 ternal world it addresses itself to; consequently the interface allows a more secure grasp on the world itself. Gravity’s Rainbow is not, as V^_ and The Crying of Lot 49 are, threatened with the dilemma between senseless, random data and solipsism. This thesis has grown out of a paper done for a class in twentieth-century American fiction; the thesis' crucial chapter is the expanded version of this paper presented in the fourth chapter. The preceding chapters develop concepts useful in discussing that novel, and the last two chapters expand on two particular uses of the device deserving further discussion. The first three chapters moreover are intended to prepare for the considerable shift in Pynchon's novelistic vision between The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow: the discussion of the short stories in the first chapter introduces Pynchon's adapta¬ tion of literary, historical, and scientific-technological material into his fiction, through a consideration of Henry Adams, and suggests the possibility of fiction as parable.