Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon - Rilegato

Mattessich, Stefan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0822329794 ISBN 13: 9780822329794

Casa editrice: Duke Univ Pr, 2002

Riassunto

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism—the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media—all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.
Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time—subjective displacement—dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre. In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape. He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, crisscrossing, and erasure of his writing. Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Stefan Mattessich is Professor of English at Santa Monica College.

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Lines of Flight-CL

By Stefan Mattessich

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Stefan Mattessich
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822329794

Chapter One

IMPERIUM, MISOGYNY, AND POSTMODERN PARODY IN V.

Broken lives, broken strings, Broken threads, broken springs, Broken bottles, broken heads People sleeping in broken beds. Ain't no use jivin' Ain't no use jokin' Everything is broken. -Bob Dylan

No one who reads Pynchon can deny the force and inventiveness of his prose. His prolix imagination verges on the uncanny, and his mastery of various discourses has awed all who have experienced it. But if Pynchon is an exuberant writer, he is so only by virtue of a counterforce acting on that forcefulness, interrupting its flows in particular ways-cutting into a dramatic sequence with an absurd song, modulating from a clipped comic diction and tone to epic sentences a page long, mingling tragedy with pornography, melodrama with slapstick. The diffraction of modes and genres through the disjointed narratives of Pynchon's first novel, V. (1960), reflects a highly organized, crystalline structure that is nonetheless anarchic, patterned and intricate yet loose-jointed, expansive, at the same time. A subversion of expenditure takes place within the mutations of narrative form, undermining the illusions of continuity and depth, frustrating the possibilities of coherence and closure. A peculiar emptying out of content attends this subversion in V., marking in the language a lightness and strange insubstantiality that is often difficult to gauge.

This quality in Pynchon's prose corresponds to what Baudrillard calls a logic of simulation, in which, through successive orders of abstraction, the "real" withdraws into a permanent elsewhere, and systems of meaning (signs, images, discourses) no longer bear any relation to a stable referent but instead float in the medium of their own "divine irreference," a hyperreal that "envelops the whole edifice of representation" (Simulations, 11). This breakdown of meaning is variously described by Baudrillard as a process of "satellitization" (10), as a proliferation of signs incapable of dissimulating their own hollowness, as an implosion or a "non-distinction of active and passive" opposites (58), as a neutralization or "annihilation of stakes" in the political and social spheres (60). In the postmodern world Baudrillard describes,

All events are to be read in reverse, where one perceives ... that all ... things arrive too late, with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they have exhausted their meaning long in advance and only survive as an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events follow on illogically from one another, with a total equanimity toward the greatest inconsistencies ... thus the whole newsreel of the "present" gives the sinister impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at the same time. (71-72)

Although Baudrillard is here speaking about the effect of the news media on contemporary culture, it could be said that V. exemplifies this exhaustion, this artificial effervescence of signs exactly. Pynchon's novel enacts a search for meaning or substance behind the initial "V.," which stands for a whole range of possible signifiers, partial objects, fetishes, puzzles, secret codes, and for the novel itself, V. as the signifier of the desire for "real" or authentic writing. But in what critics Alec McHoul and David Wills call V.'s "eternal condemnation to the signifier" (Writing Pynchon, 168), the necessary failure of this voicing becomes an obsession of the text, and in this sense V. can be seen as a simulacrum in the particular "phase" Baudrillard singles out as modern-that is, in which "strategies of the real" or "a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential" become a predominant feature (Simulations, 13).

All of this may seem an overly elaborate introduction to a discussion of parody and the parodic in Pynchon's first novel, but it is necessary to broach the issue of how to read, or how to hear, that peculiar displaced tonality so original to it. Parody. Para-ode. Beside, beyond, or past another text; an echoing, and also a damping out of sound, an effect of distance, an entropic repetition, a doubling that in its attenuation becomes increasingly aware of an emptiness it cannot revoke, a speech that reveals in its midst a growing silence. It is here that the uncanny character of Pynchon's prose finds its dramatic voice, but not before transgressing as many rules of dramatic order and serious discourse as it can. Whether in the more obvious scandal of transposing the rituals of psychoanalysis into Eigenvalue's psychodontia, or in the brutal rape and suicide of an African slave described from the perspective of her Afrikaner assailant in the context of a two-month-long "Siege Party" limned with an almost comic-book flatness, a determined antiseriousness prevails in the novel at almost every level and becomes its point. The question of how to take seriously a nonserious discourse has implications for postmodernism in general. The usual criticisms leveled at its practitioners-that they reduce historical phenomena to language games, that they leave no way of talking about value, truth, or morality, that they collude in the "annihilation of stakes" Baudrillard describes-have their source, I believe, in a cultural confusion over how to read a particular kind of parodic refusal to mean within norms of cultural intelligibility. There is no common syntax capable of teaching how to read with a full awareness of the essentially generic nature of norms, and "parody" in its more contemporary form forces this issue directly. Pynchon's V., as an early example of this contemporary form, encapsulates these problems, and it is with this in mind that I would like to proceed with a discussion of tone and voice in the novel.

The historical is one register at which reference and the real are thematized in V. It is across history, and in particular a history of European imperialism in the early twentieth century, that Stencil "hunts" the elusive figure of the woman V. The mystery of her identity and historical function is incarnated in a series of scenarios that provide the novel with one of its two central narrative axes. These scenarios are fictional or "Stencilized" elaborations of historical fields only partially recovered in the form of evidence or fact. The only thread tying them together is the recurrence in Stencil's "archive" of the initial, which may or may not be a particular woman, or a woman at all. As a "remarkably scattered concept" (389), one of whose attributes is "disguise" (388), V.'s very indeterminacy is an invitation. "She" draws into being Stencil's successive impersonations of historical characters and re-creations of historical scenes. "She" compels, by being absent, his imaginative distortions of the past and underwrites a strategy of "soul-transvestism," the effect of which is to fracture the narrative into subchapters, and the narrative voice into a host of different identifications.

Stencil thus becomes for Pynchon a means of calling into question the nature of historical objectivity. This problematic, taken up again in Fausto Maijstral's confessions near the end of the novel (included as a sort of chronicle of events at Malta during World War II, in which V. figures), injects an ambiguity into the process of constituting a past, collective or individual, an ambiguity that is figured as expressly "feminine." "Memory," says Fausto, "is a traitor: gilding, altering ... based as it is on the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous" (307). Rather than accept the gilded representation of a unitary past apprehensible as such, Fausto and Stencil fracture identity in a succession of "identities taken on and rejected ... as a function of linear time [and] treated as separate characters" (306). But this strategy of fracture is itself a gilding and an altering of an already gilded, already altered, unitary text. That is, their "ungilding" of that normative, unitary structure (of identity, of the past) is itself a (parodic) gilding, literally a masquerade, a series of disguises they take on. To gild is to "give (to someone) an attractive but deceptive outward appearance," to embellish, brighten, or excessively ornament. It's a word Shakespearean in its overtones and active within a male discourse on women and on the artist. The novel's critique of objectivity is couched in this discourse, as is the writing strategy (of polyvocal subversions of the single and continuous) that Stencil, Fausto, and Pynchon exemplify.

In this light, it is something of an equivocation either to suggest (as Pynchon does through Stencil) that V. isn't necessarily a woman or to rely on that suggestion as even his best critics (McHoul and Wills) do, by way of countering a feminist critique. V. functions as an example of Virginia Woolf's "looking glass ... possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice his natural size" (A Room of One's Own, 35), and it is easy to miss the extent to which readerly complicity is a preoccupation of this text. Stencil and Fausto serve Pynchon as vehicles for a parody of that male discourse on women (and on the artist). As parodies of writers and writing, the novel in which they function becomes a parody of its own production within that discourse. As Fausto says, "Writing itself even constitutes another rejection [of identity], another character added to the past" (306). Pynchon's narration, then, as one "character" among others in the text, deserves to be looked at as an example of a writing always already caught up in its determinations, aware of itself as a constituted object, attempting to think (or write) itself into its own "objectness." V. belongs to a literature drawn to questions of technology, tools, and instrumentalities in their relation to humanist discourses, and as such it features its own inanimateness to an unprecedented degree. This particular self-consciousness produces semantic and syntagmatic encounters with the inhuman as an inner as well as an outer limit of the human. The interpretive armamentarium of personalities and character analysis feels distinctly out of place in this context as a result.

Perhaps the most conspicuous characteristic of Pynchon's narrative style is that he almost never writes in any other than the third person. When the narrative shifts into a Stencilized chapter, the voice does not change, except to limit its omniscience to particular characters. Where Pynchon does violate this general rule, in Fausto's confessions, Fausto explicitly refers to himself in the third person, a characteristic he shares with Stencil as well:

Herbert Stencil, like small children at a certain stage and Henry Adams in the Education, as well as assorted autocrats since time out of mind, always referred to himself in the third person. This helped "Stencil" appear to himself as only one among a repertoire of identities. "Forcible dislocation of personality" was what he called the general technique, which is not exactly the same as "seeing the other fellow's point of view"; for it involved, say, wearing clothes that Stencil wouldn't be caught dead in, eating foods that would have made Stencil gag, living in unfamiliar digs, frequenting bars and cafes of a most non-Stencilian character; all this for weeks on end; and why? To keep Stencil in his place: that is, in the third person. (62)

"Forcible dislocation of personality" aptly describes the techniques used in V. insofar as it highlights a qualitative difference between "seeing the other fellow's point of view" and the impersonations that undergird that third-person omniscience. The latter involve a systematic defamiliarization of the self to the point where its resolution into a series of disguises in effect displaces its priority, as the narrative voice is invaded from within by its own multiple personalities.

This is seen, for example, in the sequence relating the Afrikaner Foppl's experience with the African woman in the chapter "Mondaugen's Story." Foppl's reminiscence of the events in Southwest Africa following the Great Rebellion of 1904, in which Hereros and Hottentots fought unsuccessfully against the German occupying army led by Lothar von Trotha, comes as part of a narrative Stencil hears from Mondaugen and reworks into the textual form it takes as chapter 9 of the novel. Four temporal moments are invoked: the time of the writing (by Stencil and/or Pynchon), the time of Mondaugen's telling, the time of Foppl's reminiscence, and the time he remembers. Each moment is laid over one another in a palimpsestic effect that comes increasingly to distort and fragment the narrative. Foppl's siege party (the time of the reminiscence) becomes a disjointed sequence of events (mysterious seductions, voyeuristic overhearings, dreams, potential conspiracies) while the language of the text modulates through a range of tonal variations and generic forms (historical fact, low comedy, melodrama, and epic story). Foppl's reminiscence, which starts out plainly enough as a dialogue with Mondaugen, is slowly taken over by the omniscient narrator and is inter- woven with the text in the form of a limited omniscient narration not signaled by any markers (breaks or ellipses). The narrative voice takes over Foppl's story, but Foppl also to some extent invades the narrator, with the effect that the voice must be heard through a quadruple mediation: Pynchon impersonating Stencil, who impersonates Mondaugen, who impersonates Foppl, who impersonates his younger self. Each tonality and each tense is given a parodic resonance, and this is true even in the description of the woman's rape and eventual suicide. The following extended passage recapitulates the interlocking themes of time, nostalgic reflection, and colonial violence in a clear parody of a Conrad-like diction.

If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done ... on that terrible coast, where the beach ... was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was no more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog. (273-74)

Continues...

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Duke Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0822329794
• ISBN 13: 9780822329794
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 291
• Redattore: Fish Stanley Eugene, Jameson Fredric