Abstract
The idea of a book on Thomas Pynchon ends right here: with a bookend, the first of a pair — with the second, its matching half, coming naturally enough at the (other) end of the book. At least, that’s how things ought to fall. But then there is always the risk, the hope even, that the leaves contained between the bookends will, in another sense, fall out, spill beyond their confines, arriving at unforeseeable destinations. More specifically, however, this bookend, this block supporting our book and the books it contains and matches, is also an end in the sense that something is, more or less, over.
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Notes
Cf. Molly Hite: ‘I was astonished to learn … that Pynchon is frequently criticized for being the academic’s academic, the writer whose books are intended to be taught, not read. For a long time, the most ardent Pynchon fans that I knew were a weight lifter, a short-order cook, and a pizza deliveryman’. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. ix.
T. Moore, The Style of Connectedness: ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ and Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), p. 1.
C. E. Nicholson and R. W. Stevenson, Notes on Pynchon’s ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (Beirut: Longman/York Press, 1981), p. 7.
D. Fowler, A Reader’s Guide to ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1980), p. 47.
Plater writes in his preface the most honest refusal to cope with obstacles of this degree of difficulty: ‘Conspicuously absent are a number of hermeneutic, new textual, or structuralist critics, in addition to Barthes and Moles, whose strategies offer a great deal for the analysis of Pynchon’s fiction’. From that point on Barthes, in any of his guises, is conspicuously absent and, from what we can tell, Moles is a minor American information theorist. See W. M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. x.
A paradigm case of this sub-genre of Pynchon criticism is the fourth chapter (‘Pynchon’s Cosmos’) in P. L. Cooper, Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 110–30.
D. Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980) is an exceptionally high-quality example of this genre. Although we have not been able to consult it before this work goes to press, we imagine Steven Weisenburger’s A ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ Companion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988) to be similarly well-informed. Another example is Fowler’s Reader’s Guide (see note 5).
C. Clerc (ed.), Approaches to ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 20.
Derrida has summed up his analysis as a series of devices designed to ‘detect not only in the history of philosophy and in the related socio-historical totality, but also in what are alleged to be sciences and in so-called post-philosophical discourses that figure among the most modern (in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis), to detect in these an evaluation of writing, or, to tell the truth, rather a devaluation of writing whose insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive character was the sign of a whole set of longstanding constraints’. See J. Derrida, ‘The time of a thesis: punctuations’, in A. Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 34–50. This quotation, p. 40.
F. Kermode, ‘The use of codes’, in S. Chatman (ed.), Approaches to Poetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 51–79; T. Tanner, Thomas Pynchon (London: Methuen, 1982).
B. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (Methuen: New York, 1987). The exception is where McHale reads the character, Slothrop, from Gravity’s Rainbow, as the model of a character ‘under erasure’, p. 105.
See J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), on Rousseau; ‘White mythology’, in his Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 207–71, on Plato; Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey and R. Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), on Genet and Hegel; Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986), on Blanchot; and Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. R. Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), on Ponge.
J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 90.
J. Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 122ff.
Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 559.
See for example, ‘Structure sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’, in his Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278–93. Any number of later texts by Derrida take the idea of play further than this essay, but as always, the play takes place within a carefully constructed set of reading strategies. Derrida is very wary of ‘unlimited play’ or play for its own sake, and uses the term more in the sense of the ‘give’ in a machine. See his informal comments in C. V. McDonald (ed.), The Ear of the Other (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), pp. 67–9.
D. R. Young, ‘Acoustic guitar construction’, in T. Wheeler (ed.), The Guitar Book (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 46–53. This quote, p. 46.
Alice Jardine nicely captures some of the components of book-matching with her four-term expression, ‘Intersections — Interfacings — Intertexts — Interferences’. See A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Interference with Pynchon’s novel V. is bookmatched with another form of contemporary feminist literary theory in our Chapter 7, ‘AV’.
An interesting example of the extension of grammatology into adjacent social science fields is J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
G. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
See Plater, Grim Phoenix; L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961); and his Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968). For a commentary on Wittgenstein and his contribution to contemporary debates about textual interpretation, see A. McHoul, Wittgenstein On Certainty and the Problem of Rule in Social Science (Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle, 1986).
Hite, p. 69. She refers to G. Hartman, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 211.
See C. H. Werner, ‘Recognizing reality, realizing responsibility’ in H. Bloom (ed.), Thomas Pynchon (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 191–202; also in Bloom’s Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ (New York: Chelsea House, 1986) pp. 85–96.
See R. Barthes, S/Z (London: Cape, 1975).
Ulmer, p. 89; and the attribution to Derrida, in parentheses following the quote, is from Ulmer’s blurb. The point about the duality of Freudian discourse is made well by Barbour who writes that it is ‘confessional/symptomatic of romance/fantasy, but analytic/controlling in its publications’. See J. Barbour, ‘Oedipa and the Scottish Demon’, in T. Threadgold (ed.), SASSC Working Papers, Vol. 2 (Sydney: Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, 1988), pp. 55–63. This quote, p. 55. Also highly pertinent in this respect is Derrida’s ‘To Speculate — on “Freud”’ in his The Post Card, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
See P. de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
M. Quilligan, ‘[“Thomas Pynchon and the language of allegory”]’ in R. Pearce (ed.), Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 187–212. All quotes so far from p. 187.
One of the main sources for Quilligan’s theory (that ‘Literature …’, not just allegory, then, ‘… is language which “arises for its own sake”’) is Foucault’s The Order of Things. While we have some sympathy with her reading, we find it constantly dogged by her failure to read Pynchon and Foucault in a wider framework that would have to include, most pertinently, Foucault’s own ‘What is an author?’ See M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970); and ‘What is an author?’, in his Language, Counter-memory, Practice, trans. D. Bouchard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) pp. 113–38.
Our formulation is taken from D. Silverman and B. Torode, The Material Word: Some Theories of Language and its Limits (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
J. Derrida, ‘The Double Session’ in his Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). We take up some of the ideas discussed in that essay in our seventh chapter, ‘AV’.
At least one of us has encountered this before. See D. Wills, ‘Post/Card/Match/Book/Envois/Derrida’, Substance, 43 (1984), pp. 19–38.
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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills
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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). Introduction. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_1
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