Musings of an English Teacher: Thomas Pynchon

WARNING: Postmodern Literature ahead.

It's no secret: I'm a little bit of a literary snob. Yesterday an 18-year-old who lives in my dorm asked me who some of my favorite authors are. After he had heard my answer he responded with "But those are all school books. Who do you read for fun?" I don't think he believed me that "school books" and "fun" could be the same thing.

The Master's degree I'm working on in London is in Modern and Contemporary Literature. I feel comfortable with Modern Literature, largely because of what I've gotten to teach over the last decade, but Contemporary/Postmodern literature has never been my focus. When I started teaching CIS Literature (College in the Schools: the first-year Literature course at the University of Minnesota) a few years ago, I was woefully behind my new colleagues and had to quickly read fifteen novels that summer, and I feel like I've been playing catch-up ever since.

In pursuing this Master's degree, it's my goal to fill in some of what I feel is lacking from my own experience as a reader. This week's assignment: Thomas Pynchon's second novel The Crying of Lot 49. I've never read any Pynchon before - I've been debating with myself all day whether I own a copy of Gravity's Rainbow; it seems to me it's on my shelf, but I don't know then why I would never have even attempted to read it. I didn't even know that much about Pynchon until today (and I still don't know much about him as a person, but that's apparently the way he prefers it) except that he's appeared on a couple episodes of The Simpsons.

When I finished this novel today, I didn't feel like I knew much more about it than when I started. The opening sentence, which begins in a fairly straightforward and unassuming manner, quickly turns into the labyrinthine prose that characterizes much of the rest of the book: "One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary." "Tangled" is an apt choice in this first sentence; not only does it characterize Inverarity's finances, but also the journey upon which Oedipa is about to embark and Pynchon's language through which it is told. This passage is neither the longest nor the most confusing, however. That (somewhat dubious) distinction belongs to the plot of the play "The Courier's Tragedy" which is narrated twice in the novel. The first time, it is relayed by the members of the band "The Paranoids" (a group with "Beatles haircut[s]" who sing with English accents because their "manager says [they] should"(16-7)) and their girlfriends, all of whom are smoking pot and trying to collaboratively relate the convoluted plot. The second time, Oedipa goes to see the play, and the telling of the plot is no less confusing (and it stretches for seven pages). The most memorable part of the play (though not the scene Oedipa explicitly went to see) occurs right before intermission: one character entices another into "foolishly bending over and putting his head into a curious black box, on the pretext of showing him a pornographic diorama. A steel vice promptly clamps on to the faithless Domenico's head and the box muffles his cries for help. Ercole binds his hands and feet with scarlet silk cords, lets him know who it is he's run afoul of, reaches into the box with a pair of pincers, tears out Domenico's tongue, stabs him a couple of times, pours into the box a beaker of aqua regia, enumerates a list of other goodies, including castration, that Domenico will undergo before he's allowed to die, all amid screams, tongueless attempts to pray, agonized struggles from the victim. With the tongue impaled on his rapier Ercole runs to a burning torch set in the wall, sets the tongue aflame and waving it around like a madman concludes the act by screaming"(45). When the lights go black Oedipa distinctly hears someone else in the audience say "Ick."

Thomas Pynchon is funny, there is absolutely no doubt about that. I laughed aloud several times while reading, but mostly the laughter was coupled with clapping my hand over my mouth in horror/disgust/disbelief. That's the thing about Postmodern fiction: dark humor isn't uncommon, but it comes with a multi-centered narrative, contradictions, and nonlinear movement of plot. While students reading Samuel Beckett would complain that "nothing happens," the opposite is true with The Crying of Lot 49. This book is full of events, characters, clues, and ideas - more than I could keep track of in only one reading, as a matter of fact.

What did I like about this book? First, there were several references to The Great Gatsby (one of those "school books" I find inexplicably "fun"), from subtle comparisons of Pierce Inverarity to Jay Gatsby to more obvious language choices (the "grey dressing of ash" covering the cars Mucho once sold(8)) to the overall theme of wastefulness in America. I was also captivated by the overall thematic idea of Oedipa's journey from a typical suburban housewife to a woman who hopes she's gone crazy and half-heartedly attempts suicide, rather than dealing with some of the things she's learned. Because, as she puts it to herself with some dismay, perhaps Pierce Inverarity's "legacy was America itself"(123).

What was challenging about this text? Many of the things that define Postmodern literature (as problematic as that term is). There are no either/or solutions, rather there's a continuum of both/and. This is a difficult thing to reconcile for a person looking for "the answer" at the end of the book; fortunately, that's not me. I've read enough contemporary literature to know better than that. I think my favorite, and the most telling, passage comes right in the middle of the novel: "Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back"(66). There are many and varied ideas, there are no direct answers. At the end of that same paragraph Oedipa "saw, for the very first time, how far it might be possible to get lost in this." Ultimately, it is that labyrinth of possibilities in Postmodern fiction which is both intriguing and daunting (or frustrating) for a reader.

The reclusive Thomas Pynchon on The Simpsons

Will I read more of Mr. Pynchon? Absolutely. I am one of those who finds the nonlinear and multi-centered in literature intriguing. This was not my favorite book ever, but I am certainly looking forward to learning more about Pynchon through his work.

In the meantime, I'll head back to the slightly more certain footing of Modern literature.