Table Of ContentWRITING PYNCHON
Also by Alec McHoul
TELLING HOW TEXTS TALK: Essays on Reading and
Ethnomethodology
WITTGENSTEIN ON CERTAINTY AND THE PROBLEM OF
RULE IN SOCIAL SCIENCE
Also by David Wills
SELF DE(CON)STRUCT: Writing and the Surrealist Text
SCREEN/PLAY: Derrida and Film Theory (with Peter Brunette)
Writing Pynchon
Strategies in Fictional Analysis
ALEC McHOUL
Senior Lecturer, Communication Studies,
Murdoch University, Western Australia
and
DAVID WILLS
Associate Professor, French and Italian,
Louisiana State University
M
MACMILLAN
©Alec McHoul and David Wills 1990
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First published 1990
Published by
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Companies and representatives
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Typeset by Footnote Graphics,
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
McHoul, A. W.
Writing Pynchon: strategies in fictional
analysis
1. Fiction in English. American writers.
Pynchon, Thomas - Critical studies
I. Title. II. Wills, David
813'.54
ISBN 978-0-333-51509-9 ISBN 978-1-349-20674-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2
For Michele and Roberta
Contents
Preface
Vlll
Introduction 1
Bookmatching, the end(s) of the book
1 Gravity's Rainbow and the post-rhetorical 23
2 PLS RECORD BOOK BID LOT 49 STOP J DERRIDA 67
3 Anti-Oedipa 86
4 Telegrammatology 108
5 Almost but not quite me ... 131
6 v 163
7 AV 186
8 Fall out 211
Bibliography 225
Index 233
vii
Preface
This work began in 1981 when we found ourselves and each other
in new jobs in separate departments at James Cook University in
Townsville, North Queensland. Neither of us, it must be said,
were happy there all of the time and before long we were working
with the slogan 'A new life in a new town'. That did eventuate
some years later. In the meantime, we began to put some of our
shared interests in Pynchon and literary theory into writing.
Before leaving James Cook, in 1985 and 1986, we had published
versions of two of the chapters of this book. Special Research
Grants from the University were generously provided for this
purpose. The two chapters in question were a paper on V. -now
revised as Chapter 6- and an early version of 'Gravity's Rainbow
and the post-rhetorical', Chapter 1. These appeared in the Adel
aide journal Southern Review in 1983 and 1986 respectively. We
thank Ken Ruthven and Noel King as well as the present editors of
the Review for their suggestions and ideas and for their permission
to use material from those versions. The idea for Chapter 2 was
suggested by Mark Deitch, to whom we are grateful, as well as to
Anne Freadman for her comments on the text. We also owe a debt
of gratitude to Lisha Kayrooz at the James Cook Computer Centre
for his invaluable help during the process of transferring our
wordprocessing files between systems and institutions.
The rest of the work has been completed by not-so-cute corres
pondence, a sort of telegrammatology in its own right. The
difficulties involved have been partly overcome by research fund
ing and other assistance from our present institutions, Louisiana
State University (Baton Rouge) and Murdoch University (Perth). In
particular, we are in the debt of Grant Stone at the Murdoch
Library for his search and destroy missions in the Pynchon Zone. It
would be a measure of our success if we could, on the basis of this
book, persuade him to write his threatened paper on Pynchon' s
reception by SF fans.
Some earlier workings-out of the ethical-moral questions raised
in our Chapter 3, 'Anti-Oedipa', have appeared in Pynchon Notes
and Philosophy Today. While those versions have undergone major
surgery and revision, we are extremely grateful to the editors of
those journals for their support and encouragement then and now.
viii
Preface ix
In particular John Krafft and Khachig Toloyan at Pynchon Notes
have shared their unique expertise and insights into Pynchon' s
writing and into the industry which has grown up around it. John
Krafft lent particular assistance in tracking down copies of TRP' s
correspondence, his little-known preface to Richard Farina's Been
Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me, and his journalism.
We thank these and other colleagues, both local and distant, for
their comments and suggestions along the way, especially Tony
Tanner, Frank Kermode, Lesley Stern and John Frow.
Extracts used in the text are taken with permission from the
following sources:
V. by Thomas Pynchon, copyright © 1961, 1963 by Thomas
Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson
Agency, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and A.M. Heath & Co.
Ltd.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, copyright© 1965, 1966 by
Thomas Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie
Jackson Agency, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and A. M.
Heath & Co. Ltd.
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, copyright© 1973 by Thomas
Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson Agency,
A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd., Jonathan Cape Ltd., and Viking Penguin
Ltd.
Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon, copyright© 1984 by Thomas
Pynchon. Reprinted by permission of the Melanie Jackson Agency,
Little, Brown and Company, Publishers, and Jonathan Cape Ltd.
Introduction
Bookmatching, the end(s) of the book
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.
What is over for us is the idea that we could write a unified, step
wise, single-argument book on the texts of Thomas Pynchon. In
fact, to come closer to our primary concerns, the numerous
attempts by literary critics to do just that are, we think, hopelessly
inadequate. Our very real dissatisfaction with the Pynchon in
dustry has been its inability to come to grips with Pynchon as, and
in terms of, what we shall call a 'writing practice'. Almost any
passage from any book by Pynchon ranged against almost any
passage from any book or paper by his critics, sympathetic or
otherwise, shows a simple lack of matching. At best, or at most,
what Pynchon writings have given rise to is a certain informality,
something of a modulation in the tone of academic address. Yet
even when tone amounts to anti-academicism 1 it remains under
scored by some of the most conservatively academic critical appar
atuses. While Pynchon delights in the play of writing, the joke, the
scholarly rip-off, the spurious derivation and the rest, his critics
continue to expend great energy exercising what can only be called
their 'exegetical drive'. 2 Into the play, the marked disunity of the
perfectly fictional and imaginary Pynchon comes, time after time,
the critical policeman, rulemaker and, above all, explainer of the
'actual', 'underlying', rationale for Pynchon' s writing.
There is a further irony to this almost polarised but practically
unnoticed opposition between Pynchon and the industry named
after him. It goes like this. Those literary critics who have written
on Pynchon tend to have ignored what may loosely be called
1
