Maximalism in Contemporary American Literature

The Uses of Detail

Nick Levey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317205029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows that while these novels are preoccupied with detail and description, they are relatively unconcerned with the traditional goals of representation. Instead, they use detail to communicate particular values and fantasies of intelligence, enthusiasm, and ability attached to the management of complex and excessive information. Whether reinvigorating the banal and trivial in mainstream culture, or soothing anxieties of human insufficiency in the age of automation and the internet, these texts model significant abilities, rather than just objects of significance, and encourage readers to develop habits of reading that complement the demands of an increasingly detailed culture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theoretical schools and cultural texts, including Thing Theory, Marxism, New Formalism, playlists, blogs, and archival manuscripts, the book proposes a new understanding of maximalist writing and a new way of approaching the usefulness of literary objects in contemporary culture.

1 Giants and Junk

Power-Reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Clash of the Titans

I have a friend who’s trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow for the third time, having been unsuccessful on her previous two attempts. What is it about this book that, despite having not enjoyed it on two other occasions, makes her willing to persist with it yet again? What makes it worthwhile? What pressures her to read it “successfully” when there are so many other books on which to spend one’s limited time?

She’s certainly not lacking in company though. Of the most “liked” reviews of Gravity’s Rainbow on the online community Goodreads, many foreground the concept of reading, reflecting on the activity’s challenges and benefits as they relate to Pynchon’s novel. One user helpfully lists “advice for a first time reader” struggling to make it through.¹ Another employs the metaphor of wrestling to declare that after three months she “pinned this sucker down for the count of ten.”² The novel also prompts a reviewer to investigate the reasons why he reads at all.³ As if responding to this introspection, one user worries “that someone would read books like this purely in order to show off or impress people.”⁴ For a user whose reflections seem the most typical, it took “a couple of tries to make it through Pynchon’s Great Thing; the first time I began it eagerly enough, only to smash headfirst into an impenetrable wall of thick, viscous prose that so entangled and bewildered me that—after some seventy-odd pages—I said Enough!” But, like my persistent friend, they found themselves drawn back to “give it another try. Determined to see it through.”⁵

Professional critics approve the feelings of these readers when they confirm that the most common relation to the poetics of this novel is indeed one of insufficiency—a felt lacking of power, size, perspective, or erudition required to “successfully” encounter or account for the work. To feel dwarfed or at least partly overwhelmed by the gigantic text is something akin to its proper reading. As Tony Tanner put it:

I think it is important to stress that the novel provides an exemplary experience in modern reading. The reader does not move comfortably from some ideal “emptiness” of meaning to a satisfying fullness, but instead becomes involved in a process in which any perception can precipitate a new confusion, and an apparent clarification turn into a prelude to further difficulties. So far from this being an obstacle to appreciating the book, it is part of its essence.⁶

Brian McHale echoes these thoughts: “Pynchon’s readers have every right to feel conned, bullied, betrayed. Indeed, these responses are the essence of the aesthetic effect of Gravity’s Rainbow.”⁷

It’s one thing for a book to be difficult, but it also needs to offer readers the right amount of motivation to persevere if reading is to seem more than just hard labor. And if a book is difficult in the manner Gravity’s Rainbow can be, the force of attraction pulling readers through needs to be especially strong. We can infer that something must be distilled by Gravity’s Rainbow that, more than most other books, makes people keen to persist with it beyond what they might otherwise feel is reasonable.

Looking at the experiences recorded on Goodreads and elsewhere, it’s clear that Gravity’s Rainbow encourages readers to reflect on the activity of reading—question its purpose, theorize its strategies, and relate it to personal narratives of achievement and growth—often before matters related to its narrative interests. If the novel tells a story about anything, then, an investigation into how and why some of us read books today surely forms a large part of its plot, as it seems to ask readers to engage in some degree of self-reflection. The “impenetrable wall[s] of thick, viscous prose” that fill Gravity’s Rainbow force many readers to articulate—either in the positive or negative—the value they attach to the time spent sitting down in their homes, on public transport, or in cafes with their eyes attached to (and often attacked by) Pynchon’s prose.

But the primary reason Gravity’s Rainbow maintains its status as something of a literary litmus test is because of its maximalism—that commitment to prose “thick” with detail. These details tend to be drawn from a wide range of cultural discourses—music, economics, politics, philosophy, mathematics, engineering, pop culture—so that the novel’s author seems like a team of experts rather than a lone individual typing away in a beachside shack in California. Pynchon is arguably the most “taught” postmodernist author in university English programs, and so the reading of his work is perhaps motivated by the sense there is some tangible educational benefit to be had from it, the author’s polymathy describing him as an ideal academic model, fluent in the full range of educational disciplines. As I’ll argue in this chapter, one possible explanation for why readers feel moved to persist with this strange and dense novel is that Pynchon’s maximalism draws them into fantasies of intellectual and critical ability enmeshed with the postwar American landscape. Although the novel’s subject matter—the complex social, psychological, and political aftermath of World War II—is important for the insights it provides into the shaping of the contemporary world, there are other texts from the disciplines of history, economics, and politics that would do just as good a job. What’s most useful about Gravity’s Rainbow today is that it has become a tool that helps articulate how some readers go about using literary novels in the contemporary landscape, as well as what value they put in the very human qualities of perseverance, patience, learning, erudition, and intelligence that the novel seems to throw into relief, and that have an increasingly uncertain value in an age where we are often asked to consider the limitations of human intellectual power.

But this is all to come. First, we need to jump into the midst of the novel and look at its sometimes-protagonist Tyrone Slothrop as he stands with Geli Tripping atop the Brocken, a mythically charged mountain in northern Germany. The Brocken has featured in other literary works before Pynchon’s, but what makes it especially useful in Gravity’s Rainbow is the peculiar illusion it is known for producing: the Brockengespenstphänomen.⁸ If you stand in the right place atop the mountain at the right time of morning, when the sun rises and crests the mountain’s peak it will cast your shadow far across the landscape below, as if you were a giant. As the troubled characters Slothrop and Geli look down from the mountain across the war-ravaged landscape of Germany, the sun hits their backs and throws their immense shadows before them, and they experience this illusory gigantism not just as a trick of the light, but as a fantasy that they are small individuals no longer—that they have a giant reach, covering a wide landscape, able to hold the complexity of postwar Europe in their fists, unfettered by the usual constraints of human perspective and dimension. They have “God-shadows.”⁹ Slothrop indulges the fantasy by raising his arm and letting his fingers play over the towns below, finding in this action a salve for what has been the progressive loss of his identity throughout the novel. In this moment of play, he sees himself as a relative of the mythical Titans thought to inhabit the mountains, those beings “impossibly out of scale,” untroubled by the constraints of human size and strength (330). To corrupt the words of Oedipa Maas, an earlier Pynchon character, these characters don’t “project a world” so much as project themselves over one.

Edward Mendelson has suggested that the titans and giants roaming the pages of Gravity’s Rainbow provide an image of the novel’s own scale.¹⁰ But I would add that they are involved in a more complex dynamic of projection and identification that is representative of readers’ experiences of the novel. The paranoid strain of Gravity’s Rainbow would have it that Slothrop actually is something of a giant, that his body effectively extends over the landscape of war-torn Europe in the manner of this enlarged shadow, influencing and influenced by a multitude of others. With his supposed control (or at least precognizance) of the V2 rocket strikes in London, where his penis is akin to a missile-guiding beacon, his body overlays and affects a whole city of other matters and beings. The responsibility of this gigantic influence is something he could probably do without, but to be such a giant or titan is also surely a pleasing fantasy, for small moments of abandon at least. As another character, Oberst Enzian, worries just a few pages before Slothrop appears on the mountain, the “thousands of details” that flood the text and its world, swirling “like fog, each particle with its own array and forces and directions,” threaten to overwhelm anyone of average dimensions, leaving them desperate to become titanized:

Enzian would like to be more out of the process than he is—to be able to see where it’s going, to know, in real time, at each splitting of the pathway of decision, which would have been right and which wrong. […] he can’t handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with any he’s in danger of losing others … (326–27)¹¹

To solve the difficulty, Enzian resorts to fantasies of gigantism—of being “more out of the process than he is,” of not being an individual restricted to a singular perspective, a defined location in time and space. He wants to occupy a position above the events that are above him—the perspective of the giant, the titan, the Slothrop-atop-the-Brocken. And, as we will attempt to study here, the text’s maximalism, its commitment to searching out and including those “thousands of details,” has often left readers contemplating similar methods of escape.

What I hope to show here is that pursuant to the insufficiency enforced by the novel’s maximalism is a felt pressure to grow oneself to gigantic dimensions to contain or at least glimpse the full range of its landscape, as Slothrop does atop the Broken. Goodreads shows that some readers get there, others do not. But the effect of the novel’s maximalism—its inclusion of enough detail to develop strategies to manage it all—is always to be considered in relation to certain pressures of dimension and ability it places on the comparatively small subjects who enter the text, and those readers who let it loose in their lives. In this chapter, I’ll engage the novel and the work of readers particularly invested in its explication in order to show that what Gravity’s Rainbow continues to offer is a way to test what claims of identity and power are able to attached to the act of reading a novel—an outwardly passive activity that is pursued with patience and perseverance that outweighs any objective gain to be had through its performance. There is no prize awaiting those who finish the novel; no guaranteed revelations that occur after its final page. But there’s something that pulls readers through nonetheless.

Evensong

Before we get to any of this, we need to work harder to set the basic scene of Gravity’s Rainbow’s maximalism to get a sense of exactly what makes Slothrop so ready to enjoy his projected gigantism and readers so keen to persist with the novel. There are examples of Pynchon’s maximalist approach to writing on every page, but a particularly illustrative passage occurs early on in the novel when Jessica Swanlake is with her wartime lover Roger Mexico at a church, and she soon becomes swept up in the nostalgic mood of caroling performed by a roughly assembled choir (129–36). In this scene, Pynchon demonstrates the theme of this novel’s maximalism in both form and content. The passage begins conventionally enough, describing the temperature and smell of the church and initially focalized through Jessica, but it soon opens out into a rhapsodic and vertiginous accumulation of details, at first briefly, as if being fought, before becoming completely overrun. As in Yeats’ widening gyre, the center cannot hold and the grounded consciousness from which the experience begins falls away, is left below, soon unable to be heard. What starts out as nostalgic reflection for Jessica, the original focalizer of the passage, is soon overtaken by a cacophony of other minds clamoring to speak, “voices overlapping three- and fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church” (136), desperate to force themselves into the scene.

The accumulation of details and other voices carries the passage away from Jessica’s control—it is too much for any one mind to synthesize, so the novel adopts a more distanced, but also more chaotic, perspective. Soon enough, the novel is listening to the scene from a perspective that either dwarves the characters in it—a giant’s view—or else is no stable perspective at all, is perspective’s collapse. Jessica’s point of view becomes crowded by the presence of surrounding voices, if not overtaken by them. The uncertain focalization of the passage responds to what Alan Clinton describes as the fear, typical in encyclopedic novels, that “the individual may literally be crowded out” by the proliferation of rival objects in the text.¹² Clinton is specifically speaking of commodities, but the presence of other voices evokes much the same anxiety. Jessica is crowded out of her own passage by rival voices and objects.

The resulting cacophony of competing voices tends to be difficult for the prose to extricate itself from—indeed, it seems addictive for the novel, which is constantly pulled toward a sort of rhapsodizing that threatens endlessness. The only way these riffing passages seem able to resolve is to reach either, as in Yeats’ “centerless” poem, the moment of a question, a crossroads, or else some vision of death or stillness, a pause in which an individual consciousness is able to be recast, allowing the ordinary mode of narrative presentation to resume. The pauses in the present passage are as follows. First, a mind chasing voices is returned to briefly before being left behind, unable to keep up and hear everything, reminded only of its insufficiency:

the fear that she was beginning to lose them, that one winter she would go running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far as the trees but in vain, their voices fading … (128)

Roger’s image is here beyond Jessica’s descriptive power:

he wasn’t looking nihilistic, not even cheaply so. He was … (129)

Here an intractable ambiguity dominates:

Is the bab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Giants and Junk: Power-Reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
• 2 On Flunking: Maximalist Description in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
• 3 Data-Sickle: Maximalism and White-Collar Aesthetics in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
• 4 Just Maximalist Things: Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Objects of Curiosity
• 5 Housebound: Domestic Excess in Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature
• 6 Mindless Pleasures: Playlists, Unemployment, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice
• Conclusion: Overflow: The Margins of American Maximalism
• Bibliography
• Index