“The Ecocritical Carnivalesque of Mason & Dixon: Thomas Pynchon's
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“The Ecocritical Carnivalesque of Mason & Dixon: Thomas Pynchon’s Environmental Vision” By Teddy Hamstra Honors Thesis Fall 2016 Department of English, CU Boulder Committee Members: Karim Mattar (Advisor), Department of English Jane Garrity (Honors Council Representative), Department of English Arne Höcker, Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures Albert Alhadeff, Department of Art History 1 Abstract: Among American novelists since 1945, Thomas Pynchon ranks as one of the most accomplished, with arguably the most fully realized and profound visions of Postmodernity. Therefore, his absence from the field of Ecocriticism is alarming. The aim of my thesis is to demonstrate that Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon ought to be considered as an essential text of American environmental writing. My thesis triangulates the environmental vision of Mason & Dixon by highlighting its affinity with environmental literature on three overlapping levels: the specter of the ancient, the spectacle of the new during the Enlightenment setting of the novel, and the novel’s visions of futurity. These chapters demonstrate that Pynchon’s novel proves to be harmonious with the aesthetic and thematic concerns of Ecocriticism. Of particular note is my attentiveness to the postsecular spirituality in the novel, which presents a framework for expanding the religious dimension of Ecocriticism. Finally, my thesis is synthesized in my concluding chapter on the novel’s “ecological carnivalesque.” Drawing upon the aesthetic of Francois Rabelais, and his most accomplished theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, I demonstrate that while Mason & Dixon proves harmonious with a majority of the core concerns of Ecocriticism, the canonical forms of environmental writing are insufficient for containing Pynchon’s vast environmental vision. This section is the most substantial critical intervention into Pynchon and Ecocriticism thus far, and demonstrates the ability of Pynchon to emerge as a vital voice in the field. Key Words: Ecocriticism; Pynchon; Postmodernism; Mason & Dixon; postsecular; carnivalesque; pastoral; Rabelais; environmentalism; American literature. 2 Table of Contents I. “Introduction: Thomas Pynchon and the Silence of Ecocriticism” II. “The Specter of the Old” III. “The Spectacle of the New” IV. “Visions of Futurity” V. “Conclusion: The Ecological Carnivalesque” VI. Coda VII. Works Cited 3 Introduction: Thomas Pynchon and the Silence of Ecocriticism “ ‘The St. Helena of old had been as a Paradise,’ avers Euphrenia. ‘The Orange and Lemon- Groves, the Coffee-Fields,--‘ ‘Gone before your Time, Euphie.’ ‘Does that mean I am forbidden to mourn them?’”1 The falling of snowflakes in a Vermont forest, the rustling of the wind in an Iowa cornfield, the rattle of a snake in the arid Nevada desert, the echo of cicadas off of the mud of the Mississippi Delta, the pursuit of the grizzly in the Rocky Mountains: nature and the environment have been central thematic foundations for American literature for nearly as long as it has existed. From the most ancient of Native creation stories, through the Puritan Anne Bradstreet, to the early literary generation of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau, to the Modernist innovations of William Faulkner, to the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, to Toni Morrison, Rachel Carson, Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy and onwards into the new millennium, nature has bountifully supplied the American literary imaginary. The full litany of American environmental writers would include nearly all major American authors, and as the field of Ecocriticism expands, the legacy of some like Thoreau continues to be solidified, while authors across the spectrum of American literature are being reconsidered and rehabilitated by Ecocritical re-readings. One glaring absence2 is the writer who, over the course of 4,600 collective pages of novels in a fifty-plus year career, has provided some of the most substantial contributions to Post-1945 American literature: Thomas Pynchon. 1 Mason & Dixon, 105; hereafter, when quotes from the novel are clearly indicated by the analysis, page numbers 2 The notable Ecocritic Ursula Heise proves to be a minor exception, as she briefly mentions Thomas Pynchon on five occasions (26, 75, 161, 176, 212) in her Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, 2008, Oxford University Press, NY NY, but only as an example of American countercultural writing alongside Allen Ginsberg and Williams S. Burroughs, which serves as her launching point for discussing Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang; Heise views Pynchon as typifying 1960’s anti-establishment currents through his questioning of institutions and focus on paranoia, and notably does not consider Ecocritical themes in his writings, nor does she consider Pynchon an “environmental” writer in the least. 4 Ecocriticism, essentially the literary wing of environmentalism, which traditionally traces its birth to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, must be broadly defined before moving forward. Evan Berry, in a recent study of the religious roots of environmentalism, defines the movement/theoretical field as the “unique historical fusion of romantic ideas about the soteriological potency of nature with newfound understandings about the human capacity for environmental destruction.”3 This unprecedented “fusion” of environmentalism encompassed “agrarian sentimentalism, romantic naturalism, and Progressive conservationism.”4 Louise Westling, defining Ecocriticism for The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment (2013), uncannily mirrors Berry. Ecocriticism “[is] in some ways reviving pastoral and romantic attitudes about the natural world,” thus continuing canonical literary approaches to the environmental while also being “informed by modern science and responding to alarm about the fragility of biological environments increasingly devastated by human technologies.”5 Westling’s Companion is indicative of the ease with which the field could accommodate an author like Thomas Pynchon, displaying broad-sweeping, truly Pynchonian areas of interest such as tackling new understandings of canonical genres like the pastoral, the influence of European Critical Theory, feminist and gender studies approaches, contemporary environmental policy- political issues, while also expanding the conversation to encompass non-Western influences such as Native American, East Asian and Subcontinental literary traditions and perspectives on the environmental crisis. A brief survey of other companions to Ecocriticism reveals a similarly encyclopedic attentiveness to a truly Pynchonian catalogue of special interests, discussions of Heideggerian eco-philosophy, the real and/or imagined “wilderness,” the centrality of 3 Berry, 61 4 Berry, 76 5 Westling, 5 5 apocalypse, and the literature of animals;6 to the question of genre in regard to environmental (non)-fiction, post-humanist theory and the Anthropocene, and the role of anthropomorphism in Ecocriticism7. As is quite obvious by this point, Ecocriticism contains within itself a cornucopia of approaches, and for the purposes of this investigation, the Ecocritical emphasis upon the pastoral, Heideggerian eco-philosophy, non-Western influences, questions of wilderness, and the apocalypse will provide a number of the theoretical windows. Determining the “canon” of Ecocriticism is problematic, given that it encompasses not simply “world literature,” but crisscrosses the disciplines of poetry, novels, philosophy, scientific writing, and environmental-activist non-fiction. For Ecocriticism and American literature, it is worthwhile to consult the contents of the Library of America’s 2008 reader, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Edited by no less than Al Gore and Bill McKibben, two of the United States’ most visible environmental activists, the collection reveals an approximation of the American Ecocritical canon. Thomas Pynchon is absent from this tentative “canon” in American Earth, which is greatly frustrating, and discouraging, given the truly Pynchonian kaleidoscope of authors the volume encompasses. While no doubt incomplete or flawed to certain Ecocritics, American Earth presents the striking potential of Ecocriticism to forge new literary canons, wherein popular musicians like Marvin Gaye or Joni Mitchell can co- exist alongside presidential speeches by Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, which in turn cohabit a sphere with the speculative science fictions of Philip K. Dick and the ancestrally- charged narratives of Silko or Momaday (older, in many ways, than “America” itself), where the sprawling poetics of “Song of Myself” can be called upon to compliment the strident activism of 6 A selection of chapter/section topics from Ecocriticism (The New Critical Idiom), by Greg Garrard, Routledge, NY NY, 2012, print. 7 A selection of chapter/section topics from The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, by Timothy Clark, Cambridge University Press, NY NY, 2011, print. 6 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Thus, it is imperative to note that he absence and/or exclusion of Thomas Pynchon from the Ecocritical conversation is among the greatest shortcomings of the field thus far. When Hanjo Berressem claims, “if Henry James has written The Portrait of a Lady, Pynchon, I would argue, has always been, and still is, writing A Portrait of America,”8 his absence from the tentative American Ecocritical canon found in American Earth becomes all