Pynchon and History

Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

Shawn Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135492717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

First Published in 2005. While many previous books on Pynchon allude to his fictional engagement with historical events and figures, this book explores Pynchon as a historical novelist and, by extension, historical thinker. The book interprets Pynchon's four major novels V., Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon through the prism of historical interpretation and representation. In doing so, it argues that Pynchon's innovative narrative techniques express his philosophy of history and historical representation through the form of his texts.

Chapter one
“Truth or Falsity Don’t Apply”¹: V. and the Historiographic Method

In V., Pynchon’s first novel published in 1963, postmodern narrative technique and an abiding concern with the problems of representing and interpreting history precociously entwine in a labyrinthine and dense text. It is a remarkably assured debut, both formally and intellectually. The hallmarks of Pynchon’s style, including his alinear, open-ended narratives, his anti-realism, the dense blanket of allusions that inform his prose, and the plots which aren’t quite explained by the events we read are already fully developed in this first novel. So, too, is Pynchon’s innovative use of historical facts to support his literary and philosophical concerns. During the course of V., Pynchon alludes to the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Bondelswaarts rebellion which occurred in Southwest Africa in 1922, the riotous premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring in 1913, World War I and II, and the 1919 riots for independence on Malta. Pynchon never explains exactly why these particular events appear in the text, although a common thread of violence or upheaval connects them tenuously. All we know—and whether this is really “knowing” anything at all is an open question—is that a recurring pattern, denoted by the letter V., seems to unify these otherwise wide-ranging events within the text. Establishing a more substantive connection among these events is a greater challenge, especially since Pynchon refuses to editorialize, or indeed to establish an authoritative textual voice whose judgement we can trust. As George Levine notes in his essay “Risking the Moment,” one of the difficulties of Pynchon’s prose is its “almost sullen resistence to judging the various horrors it coldly narrates. It is almost impossible to locate the narrator, who refuses to protect us with his own disgust, or with ironies that don’t cancel each other out” (63).

This point is axiomatic in V., which is split formally between the “cold” point of view Levine describes and more subjective, and hence even more problematic, perspectives on events. “If there is any political moral to be found in this world,” muses Sidney Stencil, “it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future” (486). This famous passage neatly summarizes the novel’s dichotomous approach to point of view, which divides along temporal and ideological lines. For the novel’s “real time” chapters, set mostly in late 1955 and 1956 and which focus on the adventures of Benny Profane and a motley cast of characters Pynchon dubs “The Whole Sick Crew,” Pynchon employs an omniscient narrator. In contrast, all but one of the chapters which take place in the past, and which deal in one way or another with the mystery of V., appear to be omnisciently narrated but are actually the work of Herbert Stencil, Sidney’s son. Stencil, the text’s primary “historian,” attempts to solve the mystery of V. in a series of narratives which trace a woman, whose many aliases include Victoria Wren, Veronica Manganese, Vera Moroving, and the “Bad Priest,” across time and space. The metafictional question that Pynchon poses, but refuses to answer, is exactly how these two time schemes and points of view fit together. This formal indeterminacy severely complicates the reader’s ability to determine what, to use Hayden White’s phrase, “it all means” in the end.

Of course, this uncertainty is an important facet of V.’s anti-systemic rhetoric. In Molly Hite’s words, “V. duplicitously fosters the epistemological assumption that experience is somehow a story that will yield up its significance when it is given” (49). Or, to use Profane’s more prosaic words, by the time we get to the end of the novel, we may suspect that we “haven’t learned a goddamn thing” (454). As Hite suggests, the ideological subtext which runs through the text’s twinned perspectives is the value both assign to the production of knowledge. Pynchon uses the form of his text to question the assumption that truth, in Jean-François Lyotard’s words, “is always indirect knowledge [that is] composed of reported statements that are incorporated into the metanarrative of a subject that guarantees their legitimacy” (Postmodern Condition, 35). Thus Stencil’s narratives attempt to explain and represent the past definitively, but fail because Stencil’s chimerical and protean conception of V is at odds with his pseudo-scientific methodology. In Benny’s chapters, on the other hand, the narrative point of view is transparently empirical, for it directly observes Benny’s inherent passivity, his rootlessness and lack of purpose, without exploring the human dimensions of Benny’s plight.² In both cases, Pynchon makes us aware of narrative systems that treat, or attempt to treat, human experience mechanistically. The metanarratives to which they adhere—what is happening now, what happened then—are not legitimate because they can only be completed by fusing their seemingly disparate approaches. In other words, Stencil’s V. chapters lack the objectivity of direct observation, whereas Benny’s chapters lack Stencil’s imperfect yet human perspective. Individually, however, these systems of seeing and knowing run the risk of erasing the humanity of the their subjects.

In this sense, dehumanization, perhaps the most important theme in V., is a symptom of our faith in closed systems, of which narration and the production of knowledge are prime examples. It is the closed historiographic system, as I hope to show in this chapter, which above all influences the textual opposition in V. between subjective and objective modes of narration. I make this assertion primarily because this conflict has been central to the development of history as an academic discipline beginning in the early nineteenth century. The systematization of history, in fact, was itself a reaction to the looser, less rigid work of the antiquarians and dilettantes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These enthusiastic amateurs, in the words of John H. Arnold, “[wrote] about the past because of the specific circumstances and needs of their own time,” especially “those periods [… ] experiencing particular turmoil and unrest” (33). Stencil is just this sort of enthusiastic amateur, whose historiographic narratives also deal with, and were composed during, times of turmoil and unrest. We learn, for instance, that Stencil’s obsession with V. began with his “studying his father’s journals only by way of learning how to please the blood conscious ‘contacts’ of his legacy” and blossomed in 1939, “when the sentences on V. [in the journal] suddenly acquired a light of their own” (54). Stencil’s project, in other words, begins with a subjective accounting of his own needs and circumstances and gradually projects them onto a world teetering on the brink of disaster. Thus Stencil’s way of “seeing” history is also a way of shaping or defining reality: Stencil imagines a point wherein it “would be he and V. all alone, in a world that somehow had lost sight of them both” (55).

By situating Stencil in the text as a interpretive point of view around which several seemingly incompatible interpretations of V. adhere, Pynchon also leaps ahead from pre-systemic historiographic narration to the beginnings of the interpretative point of view we now call historical relativism. Stencil realizes that many different possibilities as to who or what V. is exist: “Truthfully, he didn’t know what sex V. might be, nor even what genus and species [ … ] If she was a historical fact then she continued to be active today and at the moment [ … ] though V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation” (226). That such disparate interpretations of a single pattern of “facts” are possible is consistent with, in Hayden White’s words, the way in which “the consistent elaboration of a number of equally comprehensive and plausible, yet apparently mutually exclusive, conceptions of the same sets of events” was enough “to undermine [mid-to-late nineteenth century historians’] confidence in history’s claim to ‘objectivity,’ ‘scientificity,’ and ‘realism’” (Metahistory, 41). Ironically, this loss of confidence in scientific historiography occurred largely because of new breakthroughs in physics, biology, and chemistry. In particular, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which posits the gradual dispersal of energy in the components of a closed system, was especially revelatory to some philosophers of history. Applying the concept of “heat death,” or entropy, to the study of history, it became possible to envision the historical field as a “closed system” that was not orderly or stable. Wilhelm Ostwald, for instance, wrote in 1912, “The entire world of ends and values rises from the law of the dissipation (of energy) as its deepest source” (qtd. in Thompson and Holm, 458). Like the unpredictable movement of molecules as they expend their energy, the “energy” expended by events as they follow the trajectory of history also destabilizes the “container” in which they are enclosed. In such a conception of the historical field, it is understood implicitly that the “laws” which explain or govern history are plural rather than singular, for historical “energy” dissipates in random and unpredictable ways.

Clearly, Stencil’s endlessly multiplying interpretations of V. initiate a kind of entropic decline in what he calls his “V-structure” (226). In the V. chapter “Under the Rose,” in fact, the narrative point of view shifts between seven different characters, until the chapter closes with an indeterminate point of view that seems to stand outside the ruins of what had begun as a stable narrative system. This formal device is mirrored by the imagery, strongly redolent of entropic “heat death,” that describes the shooting of the British secret agent Porpentine:

Another has been standing at the end of the corridor. From this vantage he appears only as a shadow; the window is behind him. The man who removed the spectacles now crouches, forcing the prostrate one’s head toward the light. The man at the end of the corridor makes a small gesture with his right hand. The crouching man looks that way and half rises. A flame appears in the area of the others right hand; another flame; another. The flames are colored a brighter orange than the sun. (94)

The devolution in this chapter from a human to an inhuman point of view demonstrates how V.’s many personae and identities generate interpretative energies which cause Stencil’s narrative systems to run down and exhaust themselves. In Donald J. Greiner’s words, “Stencil cannot decide if the reality which shapes him has an objective existence prior to his own or is the product of his own speculative imagination, but the reader knows that in this case the creation controls the creator” (“Fiction as History,” 9). Thus Stencil’s V. system also generates an energy from the opposition between Stencil’s subjective, kaleidoscopic conception of V. and the narrative objectivity he adopts to represent her/its evolution through time. “There must [ … ] be a nearly imperceptible line between an eye that reflects and an eye that receives,” the objective persona notes at the end of “Under the Rose” (94). This line is indeed almost, but not quite, invisible in Stencil’s narratives, in which the classic “scientific” methodology of nineteenth-century historiography openly competes with his twentieth century historiographic sensibility for narrative primacy.

By situating this opposition in a single character, Pynchon perhaps wishes to point out a fundamental weakness in the production of historiographic knowledge. This weakness also suggests the fallibility of systems that claim to be objective and unbiased mediators of experience. Indeed, when the German historiographer Leopold Von Ranke established a systematic method of archival research in the early nineteenth century, he did so in the belief that the direct observation of facts would eliminate bias and subjectivity from the historiographic process.³ Von Ranke essentially adopted the empirical method of scientific observation to validate his belief that historiography could discover the singular truth of the human condition. At this he succeed spectacularly. Despite the development of relativism as a legitimate historiographic philosophy, Von Ranke’s ideas still influence the study of history. As the historian Keith Jenkins points out, “The assumption is still made by historians that if you combine realism and empiricism the representation of the past as it actually, objectively was, can be achieved” (11).

As we saw in the way V and the first year of World War II acted as a historiographic catalyst upon Stencil’s fecund imagination, Stencil is acutely aware of the breakdown of History in the twentieth century, of the pressures new ways of experiencing violence and oppression have been brought to bear on the notion of civilized progress. It was the chance irruption of cataclysms like the Great War that discredited scientific historiography for many, but Stencil embraces “traditional tools and attitudes” about the production of history to avoid “the dark deep” of randomness and uncertainty (62).⁴ Stencil’s “V-system” is thus a deeply reactionary retreat into a methodology, a way of explaining these catastrophes that makes such a world manageable and hence bearable. His objectivism is both deluded and poignant, an embrace of a suspect way of quantifying reality and a retreat into the comforting arms of rationality Stencil’s historical consciousness is that of a nineteenth-century man of reason confronted with events that do not fit into any recognizable “law” of human behavior. He is “a dual man, aimed two ways at once: towards peace and simplicity on one hand, towards an exhausted intellectual searching on another” (309). This duality is what enables him to exist in both the present and a “past he didn’t remember and had no right in, save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical care” (62).

At the same time, however, it is never entirely clear whether Stencil is aware of the ways his narratives undermine his “scientific” stance or not. Thus, near the end of the novel, Stencil has a conversation with Fausto Maijstral in which he outlines his evidence for V. On one hand, he acknowledges the possibility that V. may be a “hallucination,” a “recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects”—which, we should note, is how Stencil’s narratives hope to perceive the “objective” V. (447; 445). On the other, when Profane later recognizes the name of Father Fairing, Stencil’s faith in the “ominous logic” of the V. pattern is renewed (449). Stencil, in other words, abjures his own subjectivity yet is unable to resist the pull it has on his imagination. His struggle illustrates Henry Adams’s assertion that the rapid pace of change and technological complexities of the twentieth century have reduced the historian “to his last resources. Clearly if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his own mind” (364). Adams’ thoughts are similar to those of Sidney Stencil in V.’s epilogue, thinking in 1919 of how Post-War events are “accelerating” into darkness and hence unpredictability (456–459). Such statements help us understand how historiographic empiricism is an illusion Stencil adopts in order to impose a false order on a world that is increasingly and frighteningly chaotic.⁵

Stencil’s historiographic narratives are his attempt to quell his anxiety, his sense that the forces that shape history are uncontainable and inhuman, by demonstrating the hidden pattern behind these seemingly random events. As John Dugdale writes, “Stencil’s fantasies derive from a need to pass through a looking glass into a world [… ] in which the monstrous events of the twentieth century, and the wounds it has inflicted on him, have never occurred” (78). Thus his adoption of the classic “scientific” mode of historiographic narration never quite hides the subjective dread that motivates his historiographic project. Stencil’s methodology, in which historical relativism and objectivism co-exist uneasily, is an absurd and reductive response to the uncertainty of human experience. Nonetheless, Pynchon also recognizes how, in Edward T. Hall’s words, “we are driven by our own way of looking at things to synthesize almost everything” to satisfy our appetite for stability and control (qtd. in Tanner, “V. and V-2,” 39). Because both approaches inform Stencil’s historiographic methodology, it is evident that he symbolizes both the traditional conflict between art and empiricism in historiography and the possibility, which informs White’s concept of metahistory, that “science” and poetry can combine to explain history.

This conflict is apparent in Stencil’s V. chapters, whose dramatizations of V. may also be read as dramatizations of Stencil’s struggles with objectifying what he suspects to be highly personal and idiosyncratic interpretations of historical “facts.” Stencil’s willfully “objective”stance, in fact, is crucial to his characterization: when Pynchon’s implied narrator first introduces Stencil, it makes a point of describing in detail Stencil’s concept of “forcible dislocation of identity” (62). The reader is therefore aware of the absurd basis of Stencil’s objective methodology, which is clearly an attempt to erase his own identity in order to experience the world directly.

Stencil builds this willful escape from the self into the character he calls V., whose point of view often merges with Stencil’s narrative consciousness. When Stencil has V. imagine “that she fitted into a larger scheme leading eventually to her personal destruction and she might of shied off, come to establish eventually so many controls over herself that she became [ … ] a purely determined organism, an automaton, constructed, only quaintly, of human flesh,” he is also speaking of his own attempt to sublimate his identity to the demands of his V. system (411). Earlier in the text, we learn that Stencil refers to himself in the third person, “like small children at a certain stage and Henry Adams in the Education,” to establish a “repertoire of identities [that] involved, say, wearing clothes that Stencil wouldn’t be caught dead in, eating foods that would have made Stencil gag, living in unfamiliar digs, frequenting bars and cafes of a non-Stencilian character; all this for weeks on end; and why? To keep Stencil in his place: that is, the third person” (62). Stencil’s “place,” the third person, describes the same sort of willful detachment from one’s subjective emotions and impressions that Stencil will ascribe to V. in the chapter entitled “V. in Love;” this stance is one explanation for his later realization that a desire for his “own extermination” lies behind his quest for V (451). In both instances, we have subjects whose relationship to their world borders on the schizophrenic, for Stencil and his creation, V., see themselves as simultaneously having experiences and standing outside of themselves to observe these experiences unfold. Such “places,” which may be seen as analogous to a text’s narrative point of view, are “third person” because they approximate the omniscient perspective in narration. In this sense, Stencil’s ostentatious objectivity, and the way it merges with the construct he calls V., is an attempt to assert power and control in a world which denies these qualities to individuals.

In “V. in Love,” the twin motifs of tourism and love at first sight demonstrate how Stencil’s conflicted point of view operates within his narratives through V. V.’s relationship with the teenage ballerina Melanie l’Heure-maudit—whose surname translates as “accursed time”—is a metaphor for the incommensurability of direct experience, represented in this episode by the unpredictability of love and objective interpretation. Love, as an emotion, cannot be explained satisfactorily in anything other than subjective terms. These qualities are evident in the “love at first sight” motif that runs throughout the chapter. “Time—for a while—ceased” for V. the first time she saw Melanie, for she has entered into what the narrator calls the “null-time of human love” (409). V. experiences a romantic cliche: time seems to stop when she first sees...