Thomas Pynchon

Simon Malpas, Andrew Taylor

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784992392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

A comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature, Thomas Pynchon

1

Refuge and refuse in Slow Learner

With the publication in 1984 of Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon made easily available some of his earliest writing. At least one of the stories, ‘The Small Rain’, had been published (in the Cornell Writer in March 1959) while Pynchon was studying for his undergraduate degree at Cornell University. The other pieces in the collection are: ‘Low-lands’ (published in New World Writing in March 1960); ‘Entropy’ (in the spring 1960 edition of the Kenyon Review); ‘Under the Rose’ (in The Noble Savage in May 1961); and ‘The Secret Integration’ (written after V. and appearing in the Saturday Evening Post of 19 December 1964). In addition to the interest that the appearance of these early works generated, Pynchon’s decision to include an autobiographical introductory essay in which he described the genesis of his literary style and offered evaluations of the stories the reader was about to encounter set in train some feverish critical speculation about the author and his writing career. For a figure who had so successfully maintained a level of invisibility within the public sphere that had become part of our fascination with him, the confessional tone of the volume’s introduction was startling. By placing the stories in a biographical frame, Pynchon proposes a reading of them as essentially juvenilia and of himself as a ‘slow learner’ who had failed to acquire the necessary skills and strategies of the successful writer of fiction:

It is only fair to warn even the most kindly disposed of readers that there are some mighty tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent too. At the same time, my best hope is that, pretentious, goofy and ill-considered as they get now and then, these stories will still be of use with all their flaws intact, as illustrative of typical problems in entry-level fiction, and cautionary about some practices which younger writers might prefer to avoid. (SL 4)

Yet, as we will argue towards the end of this chapter, the apparently artless tone of the ‘Introduction’ conceals forms of narrative posturing that the unwary reader might miss. Pynchon offers a strong authorial judgement and watches as we are foolishly tempted to collude with it.

Of the stories reprinted in Slow Learner, this chapter discusses three in detail: ‘Low-lands’, ‘The Secret Integration’ and ‘Entropy’. These have been selected because they best represent Pynchon’s earliest articulations of some of the tropes and ideas that have preoccupied him throughout his writing career: spatial instability, the regulation of systems (bodily, social, political), the eruption of the fantastic into the quotidian, and the usefulness of waste. All three tales are also especially concerned with allusiveness, and show a writer aware of and, at times, struggling with his literary and cultural inheritance, whether that be the high modernism of T. S. Eliot in ‘Low-lands’, the entropic patterning of Henry Adams in ‘Entropy’, or the Mark Twain-like delight in children’s imaginations in ‘The Secret Integration’. While it would be foolish to claim that these stories are fully rendered, neither is it wise, as the chapter goes on to show, to accept the wholesale critique of them that Pynchon, in his guise as unhelpful introducer, offers. Although often uneven in execution, they nevertheless seek to excavate some of the submerged aspects of an American culture determined to present a face of contented conformity to itself. Pynchon’s stories are fascinated by our reliance on structures of rational control – systems of containment through which we aim to organise ourselves – as well as those moments of disruption via fantasy or violence whereby we attempt to contest the inexorable narratives of convention. Slow Learner, then, allows readers to see more clearly how the canonical (if still mysterious) writer of Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day emerges, for while the subjects and locales of each of the stories in the volume varies widely, their concern with, amongst other things, consumerism, social instability and the possibilities of imaginative rebellion marks them, in retrospect, as typical of their author.

Relentless rationality: ‘Low-lands’

Of all the pieces republished in Slow Learner, ‘Low-lands’ concerns itself most explicitly with the pressures of American conformity as they exert themselves at mid-century, and the possible paths (real or imagined) that might lead to liberation or transcendence. In its narrative of Dennis Flange’s withdrawal from the illusory comforts of a bourgeois marriage to an explicitly marginal, and increasingly fantastic, space of escape, the story participates in a contemporary cultural anxiety around questions of autonomy and resistance. Underneath the veneer of middle-class contentment, of the economic boon of a post-war economy, cultural critique of the 1950s was frequently preoccupied with the implications of conformity and containment within the body politic. The success of American capitalism had led, it was argued, to the occlusion of dissenting voices from debates about national identity. The marginalising of such forms of social grievance and division by the ‘vital center’ (a term coined in 1949 by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger whose book of the same name advocated a centrist liberalism untainted by the extremes of left and right) helped to foster repressive images of cultural homogeneity in post-war American life. Such repression in turn met with criticism in works such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and C. Wright Mills’s White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951). Riesman declared that there had been a gradual transformation in the conception of selfhood, so that American character had become ‘other-directed’ in ways that had brought about a generic identity that was continually susceptible to ‘signals from others’, ‘the mass media: movies, radio, comics, and popular culture media generally’.¹ Inner-directed persons, Riesman argued, had a complex interior life, indicative of the conception of character imagined to be the norm under a politics of liberal individualism. Moreover, he imagines the transition from inner to outer in explicitly class terms:

[W]e could say that inner-direction is the typical character of the ‘old’ middle class – the banker, the tradesman, the small entrepreneur, the technically oriented engineer, etc. – while other direction is becoming the typical character of the ‘new’ middle class – the bureaucrat, the salaried employee in business, etc.²

The notion of other direction articulated a crisis of agency, reified as a conflict between Self and Society in which changes in economic conditions are configured as threats to private property. In White Collar, Mills had similarly diagnosed a post-war self suffering from the loss of a privatised identity within the machinations of capitalist bureaucracy: ‘The decline of the free entrepreneur and the rise of the dependent employee on the American scene has paralleled the decline of the independent individual and the rise of the little man in the American mind’.³ Riesman and Mills desire to recuperate Enlightenment conceptions of the individual, and, as Timothy Melley points out, both men ground their ideas in the assumption that ‘persons are self-made and acquire their own attributes through the labour of self-creation’.⁴ Our introductory chapter has already noted that Pynchon was appreciative of the countercultural impulses of Jack Kerouac and the Beats, and the structural antagonism between conformity and dissent, social incarceration and creative self-determination, is obviously key to the ethical debates played out in novels like On the Road (1957) and Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966, and for which Pynchon provided the introduction in a 1983 reprint). As we will show in ‘Low-lands’, the kinds of freedom possible in Pynchon’s story are aligned with a movement down into interior space that is increasingly removed from the demands and expectations of the everyday. The rhetoric of interiority and exteriority that underwrites Cold War narratives of decline like those of Riesman and Mills is central to ‘Low-lands’, where spatiality – sometimes constricting, sometimes protective – provides the tale’s organising trope. But the assurances of a renewed privatised space and a reconstituted individuality are ambiguously treated, for the story concludes on a note of escape that might also be a descent into madness.

‘Low-lands’ opens with Dennis Flange, a lawyer, who has decided not to go to work, but is instead drinking with his friend, Rocco Squarcione, the garbage man – much to the disapproval of Flange’s wife, Cindy. Pynchon provides the reader with an efficiently detailed description of Flange’s domestic arrangements, suggesting the degree to which his marriage has become stultified by routine and commercialism. Flange, Pynchon writes, ‘sat with Rocco for the rest of the day drinking muscatel and listening to a $1,000 stereo outfit that Cindy had made him buy but which she had never used, to Flange’s recollection, for anything but a place to put hors d’oeuvre dishes or cocktail trays’ (SL 55). Cindy hangs paintings by Mondrian in a police booth in the front yard, to which Dennis is relegated whenever they argue. He begins to suspect an affinity between his wife and the painter, ‘both austere and logical’ (SL 61) in the way that they regard the world. The two-storey marital home on Long Island is carefully positioned above sea-level – the sea itself becomes a central trope in the story – and within its conventional mock English cottage exterior there are more oblique spaces, ‘priest-holes and concealed passageways and oddly angled rooms’, and a cellar containing ‘innumerable tunnels, which writhed away radically like the tentacles of a spastic octopus into dead ends, storm drains, abandoned sewers and occasionally a secret wine cellar’. Underground, then, are to be found alternative spaces, some of which are redundant, others lead to potentially interesting rewards, but all suggestive of something that runs counter to the uniformity of Flange’s surface domesticity. We learn that the original owner of the house himself embodied a multiplicity of aspect, being ‘an Episcopal minister who ran bootleg stuff in from Canada on the side’ (SL 56).

Cindy orders Dennis and his friend down to ‘the rumpus room’, an early indication that the figures of disruption and non-conformity will relocate to spaces below the ground-level of society. But when Pig Bodine also arrives at the house, Cindy tells them all (‘the weird crew’ [SL 56]) to leave, Bodine having been responsible for interrupting Flange’s wedding night to take him on a two-week drinking session. Much of the information we learn about Bodine is repeated in V. (Pynchon was writing that novel as he worked on ‘Low-lands’), where he is a friend of, and foil to, Benny Profane.⁵ His importance to the tale lies in his embodiment of a homosocial world that represents a retreat from the responsibilities of marriage and a career; Bodine’s is a chaotic and unpredictable lifestyle. In this, Pynchon’s story explores the impulse to equate conformity with heterosexual relationships, suggesting that the (re)construction of male bonding is one strategy through which the containments of a mainstream culture might be resisted. This notion had been most influentially articulated by Leslie Fiedler in a 1948 essay on Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn (and later expanded to provide the organising thesis of his book Love and Death in the American Novel [1960]). For Fiedler this movement away from what he regarded as the representation of complex sexual encounter into a realm of homosocial innocence was an indictment of the immaturity of American literary culture.⁶ Pynchon’s tale choreographs fantasies of escape as they present themselves to Dennis Flange, but it withholds from offering the kind of outright critique that Fiedler levels, choosing instead to be more circumspect about its judgements. Flange certainly regards his earlier, pre-domesticated self as an idealised ego, one formed by the experience of communal masculinity during his navy service in the Second World War. In his memory this figure – his ‘peculiar double’ (SL 59) – is ‘Fortune’s elf child and disinherited darling, young and randy and more a Jolly Jack Tar than anyone human could conceivably be; thews and chin taut against a sixty-knot gale with a well-broken-in briar clenched in the bright defiant teeth … [T]here he had been, Dennis Flange, in his prime, without the current signs of incipient middle age’ (SL 59–60). As David Seed astutely notes of this passage, Flange’s depiction of his ideal self here is constructed with an awareness of its own artificiality: ‘Although the story is narrated in the third person we rarely sense a sharply defined ironic gap between narrator and protagonist … because Flange demonstrates a humorous self-consciousness about his own fantasies’.⁷ What is clear, though, is that sexuality is allied with youthful vitality, ‘disinherited’ from the ageing protocols of marriage and freed from the constraints exerted by a wife back in the United States.

Flange’s recollection of his time in the Pacific is just one of many references to water in the story. Geronimo Diaz, Dennis’s crazed psychoanalyst (and the forerunner of Dr Hilarius in The Crying of Lot 49) encourages his impulse away from domesticity through his ‘wonderful, random sort of madness’ (SL 58), one which nevertheless offers a version of Freud’s theory of the centrality of the sea (‘the true mother image for us all’) to life’s development; and the story also references a connection between water and amniotic fluid (‘the sea was a woman’ [SL 59], ‘the snorings of one’s wife are as the drool and trickle of amniotic fluid somewhere outside the blankets’ [SL 58]). The sea becomes, as Seed notes, an ‘imagistic core’ (SL 58) at the heart of the story,⁸ and is the subject of a complex meditation as Flange remembers a ‘Filipino steward’ (SL 64) during the war who would sing sea shanties, one of which provides the title of the story:

A ship I have got in the North Country
And she goes by the name of the Golden Vanity,
O, I fear she will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee,
As she sails by the Low-lands low.

Flange translates the term ‘Low-lands’, meaning the south of Scotland, into a spatial metaphor for the sea:

Anyone who has looked at the open sea under a special kind of illumination or in a mood conducive to metaphor will tell you of the curious illusion that the ocean, despite its movement, has a certain solidity; it becomes a gray or glaucous desert, a waste land which stretches away to the horizon, and all you would have to do would be to step over the lifelines to walk away over its surface … (SL 65)

In a compressed form this passage articulates the story’s consideration of the non-literal as the means by which convention in all its forms might be avoided. The perspective here is refracted through the distorting/illuminating lens of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: ‘the fork in the road’
• 1 Refuge and refuse in Slow Learner
• 2 Convoluted reading: identity, interpretation and reference in The Crying of Lot 49
• 3 Disappearing points: V.
• 4 ‘A progressive knotting into’: power, presentation and history in Gravity’s Rainbow
• 5 Cultural nostalgia and political possibility in Vineland
• 6 Mason & Dixon and the transnational vortices of historical fiction
• 7 ‘I believe in incursion from elsewhere’: political and aesthetic disruption in Against the Day
• Conclusion: Inherent Vice as Pynchon Lite?
• Works cited
• Index