Evocative Objects in Pynchon's Fiction (Through GR)

In the photographic technique of contre-jour, the camera is pointed directly at a source of light. The intervening figure is registered in sharp contrast that elides detail, concentrating the image on a play of borders that focuses on shape and line. In Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon employs contre-jour (and titles the novel as such) to stage an encounter between the visual and the literary. Sean Cubitt’s digital theory of the cinema is used in this essay to investigate the possibility of representation and effects sought by Against the Day’s Futurist painter and anarchist, Tancredi. Working in Venice, Tancredi rages against the “damnable stillness of paint” (AtD 586) in his efforts to create an Infernal Machine of destructive transformation. Three pictures by Luigi Russolo, René Magritte, and Umberto Boccioni currently hang in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and resonate with Pynchon’s representation of visual culture and the work of Tancredi. Moving through these paintings and the Futurist and Cubist movements, the association between “wound culture” (Mark Seltzer) and photography is forged. The pataphysical and cinematic technology of the “Integroscope” then animates photography, (re)producing the Barthesian punctum that comes with the temporal aberrance of what Pynchon thematizes as “bilocation” (that is, being in two places at the same time). Akin to Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” what I call Pynchon’s “graphic impulse” plays out the tension between the moving and the still image. Further, the content and form of Pynchon’s representation of visual culture reveals the historio-graphy of his graphic impulse. His focus on other sensorial modes of apprehending the visual—smell and sound—complicates the encounter between the visual and the literary, coloring the ending of the Against the Day with a darker tone."

2013

This PhD thesis focuses on the relations between literary poetics, theories of reading, and the interpretive criticism of an author's work. My approach to this field is through the abundant scholarly writings on the American author Thomas Pynchon, and, in particular, academic readings of his novels. I am trying to study the protocols of reading involved in literary study by mapping out the space between the individual and often idiosyncratic scholarly interpretations and the theories of literary poetics. To this end, poetics is reframed in this work as a theory of reading. In this I am taking my cue from Jonathan Culler, literary phenomenology, and Reader-Response critics. Thus understood, poetics studies those processes of perception, understanding and cognition that underlie textual interpretation and analysis. Within this orientation, the questions of poetics closely resemble those that are today posed in cognitive literary studies, the empirical studies of reading, and postclassical narratology. The present study rereads the theory of poetics and shows that many devices and textual strategies it describes can be usefully understood as procedures of reading. This is done by looking at the analytical choices made in readings of Pynchon and describing them in terms of reader-oriented poetics. This method zones in on the empirical observation made by many Pynchon scholars. While we generally consider the author’s thematic scope as singularly eclectic as his repertoire of literary means, time and time again we seem to reach the same conclusions: the same themes emerge as crucial, the same devices are regarded as significant, and the same passages from the novels are cited because of their capability to encapsulate something of the elusive whole. But what makes certain themes more or less central? How do some of Pynchon’s structural experiments become so decisive in determining what the novels mean or what they are about? Why are certain key passages so crucial to interpreting the novels? In answering these questions, the study toes the line between conventions of reading and the cognitive processing of texts. It is discovered that the procedures of reading identified as structural metaphor, miniature analogy, and thematization straddle the heuristic divide. These procedures are, on one hand, institutional and cultural, in how they appeal to convention and tradition. Yet, on the other hand, they contain a component that can be only described as cognitive or perceptual. The latter part of the study focuses more firmly on Pynchon’s debut novel V. (1963) and its scholarly readings. The theoretical interest in the protocols and procedures of reading is employed as a method for reading the novel and studying how it has been read. As literary scholar Robert Scholes has written, our protocols of reading will yield to methodization only up to a point. This study approaches that point through terrain on which the reading procedures of literary scholarship are entangled with the more general processes of cognition, perception, and interpretation.

Transatlantica: American Studies Journal, 2010:1., 2010

Dissertations of the Third Cycle on Thomas Pynchon.

English Studies from Archives to Prospects: Volume 1 - Literature and Cultural Studies, S. Grgas, T. Klepač and M. Domines Veliki (eds.), Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016

Paradigmatic of a frustratingly ever more complex and ever less accountable world of the early twenty-first century, both American literature and its corresponding, ever-growing bulk of literary criticism and/or cultural theory seem to have arrived at the point where the quantitative immensity of available information/production, instead of quenching the proverbial thirst for knowledge, too frequently causes nausea and metaphorical hangover. This statement, often heard and reiterated in academic as well as non-academic contexts, is sometimes used by the detractors of postmodernist literature, postmodernist literary criticism and postmodernist cultural theory as a welcome argument in their attempts to prove postmodernism's obscurantism rooted in neoliberalism and political reactionarism that allegedly hinders any effective and meaningful social or political critique, and, ultimately, any form of activism. Thomas Pynchon's work certainly represents an overwhelming illustration of the postmodernist excess. The paper examines whether Pynchon's narrative and thematic complexity (e.g. in Gravity's Rainbow), including the problematization of history, multiplicity of potential meanings of events and phenomena, the triumph of systems and of the inanimate, merely reflects the world's complexity in the sense that reflecting equals justifying or even relishing in its obscurity, or whether Pynchon's literary assessment of Western culture's condition might point at the possibility of challenge in some form, in line with Tom LeClair who, in The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction (1989), classifies Pynchon as American postmodern naturalist for his successful representation and comprehension of the hegemonic master systems, suggesting that comprehending the forces that shape our world might mean saving it.

American, British, and Canadian Studies, 2019

On two recent books about what distinguishes post-Vineland Pynchon, which focus on a putative new Politicalness. Ends with a consideration of 3 ways that the shared limitations of two worthwhile books illuminate the shape of current Pynchon Studies more generally. Online here - https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/abcsj/33/1/article-p233.xml

Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon, 2013

This article interrogates the demarcation of modern and postmodern literature within the context of a critical and inter-textual reading of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Approaching Pynchon's text from what is essentially a formalist perspective, this reading readdresses the question as to whether or not The Crying of Lot 49 breaks through to a mode of fiction beyond modernism itself. Critics such as Brain McHale have forwarded The Crying of Lot 49 as a paradigmatic late modernist work; a work that does not break through to a mode of fiction beyond underlying epistemological presuppositions. Via a comparative reading that draws on the work of Paul Auster, Bret Easton Ellis et al., it is argued herein that McHale's otherwise scholarly reading is somewhat myopic. In short, it is argued that although Pynchon's heroine is driven by an epistemological agenda, the text-scape she inhabits is postmodern. 2 As with the debate centred upon the apparent demise of postmodernism, arguments interrogating the demarcation of modern and postmodern literature abound. Such discussions are often partisan and entrenched, if not internecine in nature. As McHale has recently suggested, period concepts are 'moving targets'-they are 'elusive and malleable,' and none perhaps more so than postmodernism. 3 By way of qualification, McHale asks, 'When did postmodernism begin (if ever it did), and has it ended yet?' 4 McHale is surely right when he concludes that such questions remain largely unresolved. 5 However, within his own terms, his claim that The Crying of Lot 49 fails to break through to a mode of fiction beyond modernism is more debatable. 6 In fact, I would suggest that in figurative terms allied to its thematic content, Pynchon's novella can be read as an unresolved case that demands further critical analysis. With the embers of postmodernism perhaps still warm, it

1990

This thesis considers the opposing, but integrally connected themes of linearity and return as a starting point for a discussion of the novels of Thomas Pynchon, from The Crying of Lot 49 to his most recent novel Vineland (1990). The recurrence of these two basic tenets in his fiction are indicative of a preoccupation with the conflicts that characterize a civilization built upon the Cartesian basis of subject/object duality. These conflicts are overseen in Pynchon's writing by a cyclical, unified cosmos against which the accelerating evils of technology and industrialization are representative of a doomed impulse to achieve transcendence in material terms. Pynchon's writing emphasizes the everbalancing nature of the universal forces that lie behind this complex scenario, and places the current global situation of ecological, sociological and technological crises inside a larger recurring whole. The potential for transcendence exists in Pynchon's fictive world, albeit tentatively so, but whatever universal absolute is in existence, i t cannot be approached by premeditated design, and respect for a balanced, regenerative universe is at least suggested as the most immediate object for our attention. These are most conspicuously the concerns present in Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland. Chapter One examines the idea in less complex form in The Crying of Lot 49, and focuses on Pynchon's use of music as metaphor and supporting device in his delineation of the difficult boundaries of the Cartesian dichotomy. Chapters Two to Six consider the ideas as they are present in Gravity's Rainbow, Chapter Four using the findings of LSD research to suggest a possible framework for some of the novel's most difficult aspects. Chapter Seven serves as both a consideration of Vineland and as a conclusion to this study, since Pynchon's latest novel restates the fundamental preoccupations of his previous writing in a fresh and vivdly contemporary form. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged.

This book marks the first in-depth examination of Pynchon's debut novel, which was immediately recognized as a breakthrough masterpiece. The eight essays collected in the volume provide both scholars and avid readers with new and original insights into a too-often underestimated work that, probably even more than Gravity's Rainbow, established Pynchon as one of the great masters of twentieth-century American literature. This book deliberately privileges a multidisciplinary and transnational approach, encompassing collaborations from a particularly international and diverse academic context. As such, this volume offers a multifaceted pattern of expanding investigation that tackles the novel's apparent chaotic but meticolously organized structure by rereading it in the light of recent US and European history and economics, as well as by exploring its many real and imagined locations. Not only are the essays brought together here revelatory of Pynchon's way of working, but they also tell us something about our own ways of approaching his fiction.