Abstract
Still an important question then for the reading of Lot 49: how to refuse (to cop) the lot? Reading the secondary literature on Pynchon — for example that cited in the notes to the previous chapter — it is easy to notice that the same text fragments are quoted time after time. There is almost a canon of such fragments. Excluded middles being ‘bad shit’ (136) is a case in point (and of course we have not failed to use it either). The ‘direct, epileptic Word’ (87) is another. The ‘hieroglyphic streets’ (136) are a third. But the list is longer.
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Notes
An obvious cross-reference here would be the type of chance cross-fertilisation and dissemination provided for in Derrida’s Glas. Just as the organising principle of that text has its own logic which is germane to the argument, so ours follows a different logic — a ‘postal’ rather than a botanical one. See J. Derrida, Glas, trans. J. P. Leavey and R. Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
Here we are alluding to Barthes’ argument that the unloved lover, for example, ‘identifies’ with anyone of the same ilk regardless of other differences. See R. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (London: Cape, 1979), p. 129. The identification is no longer psychological or subjective but structural: ‘The subject painfully identifies himself with some person (or character) who occupies the same position as himself in the amorous structure’.
See G. Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Berlin: Mouton, 1982).
The term is Eagleton’s. He means phenomenology, hermeneutics, reception-aesthetics and related transgressions of economic determinism. For all that, his fictional reconstruction of ‘the consumers’ revolution’ as a macro-political movement is not without its occasional Pynchonesque humour. It appears just prior to his other satire, the ‘Ballad of English Literature’ (to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’). See T. Eagleton, ‘The revolt of the reader’, in his Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 181–4.
This assumes that Derrida is a candidate for the Mysterious Bidder, though it may be Genghis Cohen. He does apologise to Oedipa for showing up, after all. Yet it must be admitted that this could be an apology merely for showing up and not for being ‘He’. Nevertheless, a note of caution should be sounded about reading the text such that it’s definite we don’t know who ‘He’ is. But if it is Jacques, one could also speculate over the identity of the one called ‘Loren Passerine’. Again, beginnings and ends furnish a clue, as do syllables. Such speculation is, let it be noted, something of a department within the Pynchon criticism industry. Witness Cowart’s identifications of Orson Welles as the Kenosha Kid, Werner von Braun as Blicero, etc. See D. Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).
J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Henceforth: OG. References given in brackets in the text are to pages and lines of this edition of the translation. This translation is taken to be a single text rather than a text with another text in the form of a translator’s introduction. The collective subject held responsible is called ‘Spivak/Derrida’, sometimes ‘Spivak’, ‘Derrida’, ‘Derrivak’ or ‘Spida’ for short, although a number of other proper names could be added to this agglutinated name, including those of publishers, printers, editors, proofreaders and so on. By means of these devices we telegrammatise issues of authorship and the original/translation relation, which will receive further treatment in the discussion following.
Glas is referenced in note 1, above. ‘Tympan’ appears in J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982, pp. ix–xxix. Envois is a major segment of J. Derrida, The Post Card, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
A. J. Friedman and M. Pütz, ‘Science as metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow’, in R. Pearce (ed.), Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981), pp. 69–81.
There is also an error on the blurb of that edition and directly relayed into the endpapers of all the British Picador editions of Pynchon. ‘Genghis Cohen’, it reports, ‘likes his sex with the news on’. In fact telesexuality is the penchant of Nefastis not Cohen, the latter being one of the most disputed characters in Pynchon, after the New York Times Book Review debate with Romain Gary over ownership of the name (NYTBR, 12 June 1966, p. 35; 17 July 1966, p. 22). Gary himself, it turns out — 21 years after his initial letter, and in the same publication — was a very successful novelist both under his own name and in the person of Emile Ajar, a fact which only surfaced after ‘their’ suicide. No doubt there will be Pynchonian speculations following this; especially since it’s, again, the NYTBR which published the latest piece of prose under the signature of Pynchon, including the following note with its splendidly ambiguous use of the continuous perfect: ‘Thomas Pynchon, author of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” has been working on another novel’. See J. C. Oates, ‘Success and the pseudonymous writer: turning over a new self’, New York Times Book Review, 6 December 1987, p. 12 and T.R. Pynchon, ‘The heart’s eternal vow’, New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1988, pp. 1, 47, 49.
R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981).
One of the few critics to notice the misprint is Hite, though she doesn’t make much of it. See M. Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), p. 74. And on the topic of misprints, Hite carefully notes (p. 107) how the ‘R’ in ‘rocket’ gets capitalised and then suggests that the person responsible is called ‘Punchon’.
Again the list of secondary Pynchon material could be lengthy, perhaps as lengthy as our Bibliography. However some instances are more punctual than others. Clerc, for example, writes wonderfully definite (and arrant) nonsense about a ‘Pynchon’ who ‘gets inside his characters as much as, if not sometimes more so than, other novelists’, who is ‘a put-inner … rather than a take-outer’. It is apparently he who speaks (who ‘playfully inserts’ such things as ‘oh me I’m hopeless, born a joker never change’) on page 122 of Gravity’s Rainbow. And more. See the Introduction to C. Clerc (ed.), Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), pp. 12, 17.
J. Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
S. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968) pp. 41e–43e.
For an accessible guide to Gödel, see D. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980). The hard stuff is K. Gödel, ‘Some metamathematical results on completeness and consistency, on formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I’, in J. van Heijenoort (ed.), Frege and Gödel: Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 83–108; or K. Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of ‘Principia Mathematica’ and Related Systems, trans. B. Meltzer (New York: Basic Books, 1962).
What we are here calling the ‘signature of grammatology’ is to be compared and contrasted with the question of the signature of the author that we shall take up in a later discussion. For if the author signs a text (of theory) with the anagrammatical mark (both inscription and dissemination) of the proper name, so we suggest that a theory here named grammatology (or ‘grammatology’) inscribes its proper name in the ideas we have come to associate with it, and disseminates that name in typographical errancy. Thus also, the motto or ensign of ‘sous son s’ complements a ‘derrière-le-dos’ sometimes read as the name of Derrida. See Derrida’s Glas and Envois and the discussion of autobiography as autography in G. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 132–6.
While the act of ‘naming the father’ has a long history, its most immediate father, in this case, was John Hartley. His list of fathers includes at least one mother; and we are ashamed not to be able to match. See J. Hartley, Videology (London, Methuen, forthcoming). By way of coincidence, perhaps, Alice Jardine names the section of her book which deals with Pynchon, ‘I can get along without you mother’. This is analysed more fully in ‘A V’, Chapter 7 below. See A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 247–52.
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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills
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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). Telegrammatology. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_5
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