David Cowart

Pynchon and the Sixties

Abstract Discussions of the literature that began to emerge in the period just after World War II tend to emphasize the element of post-Joycean reflexivity. With Beckett as one kind of pathfinder and Nabokov as another, writers became increasingly committed to the interrogation of their medium—a probing, that is, of language and its epistemological credentials. These credentials had gone largely unchecked by modernist writers, even those who, like Eliot in “Burnt Norton,” recognized and worried over the tendency of words to betray: Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

Pynchon, Genealogy, History: Against the Day

One cannot overstate the centrality of historical questions in the work of Thomas Pynchon. What makes his fictions so compelling—more, perhaps, than any other quality—is the variety and complexity of historical rethinking they invite and perform. Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, in a recent dissertation, locates ‘‘Pynchon’s historic interest’’ in ‘‘the era of modernization we have been living in since the 17th century. . . . Puritanism, the Enlightenment, industrialism, scientific revolutions, global economy, information explosion, simulation—throughout his fiction Pynchon is very much a writer of modernization, of its historical preconditions, aims, and limits.’’ Shawn Smith characterizes Pynchon as ‘‘the pre-eminent American postmodernist writer’’ and ‘‘an innovative and profound historical novelist as well.’’ Replying to critics of Ian McEwan in a letter to the Daily Telegraph in 2006, Pynchon casually affirms that, whatever the license creative artists enjoy, ‘‘most of us who write historical fiction . . . feel some obligation to accuracy.’’ Accuracy, however, may present itself in curious ways, and Pynchon proves, as one might expect, something of an unconventional historian. In a career one might describe as ‘‘a progressive knotting into’’ the problematics of historiography, Pynchon reconceptualizes history as

Thirteen Ways of Looking: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

Far from viewing the aesthetic crafted by earlier postmodernists as outmoded, Jennifer Egan joins them and augments their formal and ideational deconstructions of such vestigial metanarratives (of language, of history, of the unconscious) as continued to shelter in the shadow of that great rock, modernism. Because of her later situation in literary history, however, she can treat the moderns as ancestral figures—as much to be venerated as rebelled against. Like the author of To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, she grapples with the strange imbrication of time and consciousness (the one striving endlessly to integrate the other). Like the Don DeLillo of Cosmopolis or The Body Artist, she perceives temporality and sentience as features of language. But chiefly she reframes the insights of Proust and Eliot at a centurys remove; from the epistemic vantage of her second-generation postmodernism, she reconceptualizes their themes of time lost and problematically recaptured.

Death and the Wastrel: McCarthy’s Suttree

Mark RoydenWinchell speaks of “the sort of book that astonishes by testing the very limits of nihilism.” Referring specifically to Blood Meridian (1985), Winchell captures a hollowness that figures everywhere in McCarthy’s moral universe—a calculated, metanarrative-denying, antifoundational postmodernity. One critic, Matthew Guinn, characterizes McCarthy’s systematic dismantling of modernist tropes, especially those of the Vanderbilt school, as “mythoclasm.” Thus, in part, does one account for McCarthy’s relentlessly dark visions, tempered only by an implicit conception of language itself—and the art it serves—as consolation and solace. The author’s splendid prose otherwise serves only an unsparing truthfulness, a denying of all illusions, a deconstruction of the romance narratives woven around every human enterprise. Amoment inAll the Pretty Horses (1992), which pretends to be a romance narrative itself, distills a great deal of the McCarthy ethos. Passing through a small Mexican town where a wedding is to take place, JohnGrady Cole speaks briefly with a café owner who declines to subscribe to the expected nuptial optimism: “he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.” The reader hardly need ask about the “truths of life.” They provide the uncomfortable furnishings of every fictive house that McCarthy builds. In his 1979 novel Suttree, for example, McCarthy presents a youthful protagonist who would seem to be completely without illusions and not likely to bemisguidedly upbeat about the human condition. Cornelius Suttree’s insouciance and seeming indifference to continued existence do, however, partake of a universal misperception: the young think themselves some-

Norman Mailer: Like a Wrecking Ball from Outer Space

O One cannot read more than a page or two of Mailer without a visceral reaction. Only D. H. Lawrence (or Henry Miller, subject of Mailer’s typically eccentric 1976 anthology Genius and Lust) shocked the middle class with more insouciance. Readers’ initial encounters with “The Time of Her Time” (1959), or Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), or The Prisoner of Sex (1971) leave them appalled, even violated. Some identify, perhaps, with Ruta, the sodomized maid (and household spy) in Mailer’s 1965 novel An American Dream. Those who keep reading, however, often discover in this author a bracing tonic for the uptight, rational, purse-sphinctered, hypercivilized sensibility. Mrs. Grundy notwithstanding, Mailer compelled the respectful attention of the nation’s most thoughtful readers. He won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Armies of the Night (1968). He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song (1979). In 2005 the National Book Foundation presented him its award for lifetime achievement, the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Yet Mailer embraced a variety of dubious ideas, from the heteroclite psychology of Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) to the clinically untenable notion that involvement with the violent mechanisms of state or corporate power sooner or later breeds cancer. As the age of feminism dawned, Mailer seemed actually to revel in the role of sexist troglodyte. In public life, he courted controversy: advocating secession from the state of New York, he ran for mayor of its largest city; he stabbed the second of his six wives, leaving her in critical condition;

Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis.

This book explores some of the ways in which contemporary literary theory can be used to read fiction. In particular, it focuses on Thomas Pynchons three novels to date and his collection of early stories. The theories exploited are concentrated in the work of Jacques Derrida which has been variously labelled deconstructive or more recently grammatological. The boundaries between biography, criticism and fiction are challenged to such an extent that the gentre of the text itself is part of the game that its readers are invited to play. Alec McHoul also wrote Telling How Texts Talk: Essays on Reading and Ethnomethodology and Wittgenstein on Certainty and the Problem of Rule in Social Science. David Wills has also written Self De(con)struct: Writing and the Surrealist Text and also Screen Play: Derrida and Film Theory together with Peter Brunette.