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Authority and Authenticity In AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN GRAVITY’S RAINBOW AND MASON & DIXON by MICHAEL J. CROWLEY (Under the direction of Hugh Ruppersburg) ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s two major works in the context of postmodern encyclopedic novels and argues for a new understanding of how such novels are constructed. Examining Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon as paradigmatic examples reveals a pattern common to other major instances of the form as well. I begin by examining various conceptions of encyclopedic narrative. Pynchon’s novels, though consistently described as encyclopedic, necessitate a revision of the concept. Encyclopedism provides a means of establishing narrative authority. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s narrator both cultivates authority through encyclopedism and subverts that authority through self-parody. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon’s narrator claims an unwarranted authority for his encyclopedic tale. Both narrators, however, wield their authority with an eye toward guaranteeing the authenticity of their narratives. Lubomír Doležel’s concept of authentication authority provides a framework in which to analyze Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke in greater detail. After considering style and narration, I proceed to the plot structure of the two novels. In each case, the organization contributes to the overall representation of authenticity. Pynchon frames the central narratives of both works within events that combine elements of technological apocalypse with the possibility of the miraculous. Pynchon describes events of this nature as singular points, moments of radically undetermined potential. In doing so, he joins a long line of diverse thinkers who have similarly associated singular points with authenticity. Pynchon and other postmodern encyclopedic novelists have appropriated singular points as a means of resisting technological determinism. By using singular points to mark moments of discontinuity, they paradoxically frame their novels as unframed and undetermined. Within this frame of authenticity, their encyclopedic style allows them to suggest that the events function as a synecdoche for history at the same time that they are discontinuous from history. Having developed this model with reference to a number of variations on the notion of singular points and several prototypical postmodern encyclopedic novels, I offer detailed analyses of how Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon establish and modify the pattern. Previously overlooked, Pynchon’s representation of authenticity comes to the foreground. INDEX WORDS: American literature, Authenticity, Authority, Encyclopedic narrative, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN GRAVITY’S RAINBOW AND MASON & DIXON by MICHAEL J. CROWLEY B.A., Columbia College of Columbia University, 1993 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2002 © 2002 Michael J. Crowley All Rights Reserved AUTHORITY AND AUTHENTICITY IN GRAVITY’S RAINBOW AND MASON & DIXON by MICHAEL J. CROWLEY Major Professor: Hugh Ruppersburg Committee: Douglas Anderson Kris Boudreau Barbara McCaskill James Nagel Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2002 iv DEDICATION With love and gratitude: for my parents, Mike and Bernadette Crowley, Alexis Hart, and in memory of Ellen McGrath (1917-2002) v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of committee for their help and advice in writing this dissertation: Douglas Anderson, Kris Boudreau, Barbara McCaskill, James Nagel, and especially Hugh Ruppersburg, my major professor. I would also to thank my colleague Bruce Borowsky for his careful reading of several chapters. Many friends were kind enough to offer encouragement and to listen to me talk about Pynchon. Most importantly, I would like to thank the members of the extended Hart, McGrath, and Crowley families. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 “[C]ompulsively [A]ccurate”: Authenticity in Literature......................................................................................................1 2 Encyclopedism and Authority...........................................................................17 3 “A Representation of Authority”: The Role of The Narrator ...........................84 4 Authentication Authority in Mason & Dixon .................................................118 5 Singular Points and Authenticty .....................................................................172 6 A Cosmology of Singularities: Gravity’s Rainbow ........................................215 7 A Cosmology of Singularities: Mason & Dixon.............................................270 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................299 Chapter 1 “[C]ompulsively [A]ccurate”: Authenticity in Literature “A mechanickal Duck that shits? To whom can it matter,” Mr. Whitpot, having remov’d his Wig, is irritably kneading it like a small Loaf, “—who besides a farmer would even recognize Duck Waste, however compulsively accurate?”—Thomas Pynchon In the introduction to their recent collection of local color short stories, American Local Color Writing,1880-1920, Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy place the issue of authenticity at the center of their account of local color writing. In doing so, they draw on the essays of practicing local colorists Hamlin Garland and Mary Austin: “Local color celebrates the lived experience of what Garland calls the ‘native’; as Austin notes, it valorizes ‘authenticity’ (106) above all” (Ammons and Rohy vii). For Austin, the authenticity that is central to regional writing rests on the “two indispensable conditions of the environment entering constructively into the story, and the story reflecting in some fashion the essential qualities of the land” though these qualities make it somewhat difficult to “put one’s finger on representative regional fiction” (106). Garland is more specific when he insists upon the defining attribute of local color writing: “Local color in a novel means that it has such a quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native” (53-54). The 2 authenticity of fiction that meets these demands rests on the authority of experience: the events could “not . have happened elsewhere” (Austin 100); in short, authors must know firsthand the lifestyles about which they write and must have inhabited the settings they describe. Interestingly, local color has often been dismissed by critics for its failure to produce the very quality of authenticity that Ammons and Rohy identify as central. One version of this criticism holds that most of the stories parading under the banner of local color fail to incorporate regional elements organically in the manner Austin and Garland describe. Instead, they exploit “the picturesque for its own sake” and engage in “the curious pursuit of the unique, idiosyncratic, or grotesque” as ends in themselves, thus “laps[ing] into mere formula writing” (Baker 860). Another version of the argument maintains that despite Garland’s contention that “the tourist cannot write the local novel” (54), the mode lends itself to “preservationist and reactionary” purposes (Ammons and Rohy xvii). As Ammons and Rohy recognize, when employed for these purposes, local color is, in fact, “touristic, and like turn-of-the-century anthropology . obsessed with cataloging and control” (xvii). After all, despite Garland’s and Austin’s insistence to the contrary, many local color writers had not lived the lives they sought to represent in their stories; many were responding to marketplace demands for more sketches of increasingly exotic locales. One solution to the dilemma raised by these criticisms is simply to classify local color writing into two categories. The first, published by the “few writers of the first magnitude” who engaged in the mode (Baker 859), consists of the “successful” or “classic” local color stories that still engage the interest of readers and critics today. The 3 second category, on the other hand, consists of mechanical genre exercises that are today largely forgotten. The former successfully cultivates the authentic representation of a particular region through the organic incorporation of details of character, custom, dialect, and other elements determined by setting, while the latter degenerates into formulas and stereotypes through the inept, condescending, or exploitative inclusion of such details. Although just such a distinction has long been promulgated—as in Carlos Baker’s treatment of local color in the Literary History of the United States, for instance—its subjectivity vitiates its usefulness. Another response is the one offered by Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse in the introduction to their 1992 anthology of regionalist writing by American women. Fetterley and Pryse employ the phrases “local color” and “regional realism” interchangeably but contrast both terms with their definition of regionalism. They base their distinction on the belief that regionalist stories, written almost exclusively by women and people of color according to their formulation, adopt a sympathetic perspective on the characters and traditions of the regions in question,
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