by Joshua Cohen
Gravity’s Rainbow was written by hand on quadrille engineering paper, and on Kool cigarettes, coffee, and cheeseburgers (to name just the legal substances), in Mexico City and in a whitewashed bungalow on 33rd Street in Manhattan Beach, California. The 1974 Pulitzer Prize committee refused to honor the novel, despite the jurors’ unanimous recommendation (the committee called it “turgid” and “overwritten,” “obscene” and “unreadable”). But it went on to win the National Book Award in 1974, for which ceremony Pynchon dispatched a comedian, “Professor” Irwin Corey, to deliver a nonsensical speech: “[I] accept this financial stipulation, ah, stipend on behalf of, uh, Richard Python for the great contribution and to quote from some of the missiles which he has contributed […]” In the ’80s, Pynchon left his agent, Candida Donadio, to be represented by Melanie Jackson, great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and granddaughter of Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice and Nuremberg prosecutor. The two married in the ’90s and had a son, Jackson, who was such a fan of The Simpsons that Pynchon made a cameo (his animation was drawn with a paper bag instead of a head). Only ten images of Pynchon are publicly available, including a video captured by CNN in 1997 that occasioned this rebuke from his agent/wife by fax: “ ‘Recluse’ is a code word generated by journalists…meaning ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’ ” Then there’s the photo published by the Times of London in 1997, which provoked legal threats from Henry Holt, Pynchon’s publisher at the time.
What else? Pynchon was raised Catholic and attended mass. He was the best friend of Richard Fariña (author of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me) and the best man at Fariña’s wedding to Mimi Baez (Joan’s sister). He was reportedly so ashamed of his Bugs Bunny teeth that he underwent extensive cosmetic dental surgery….
All this information came to me via the web, which has established Pynchon as its literary divinity. Not Philip K. Dick, not William Gibson—it’s Pynchon who commands the largest and loudest community online. It’s a congregation of fanboys, academics, techno-anarchists, wannabe fictioneers, parents’ basement–dwellers, and burnouts—some using real names, some using fake names, many anonymous—who analyze and squabble over every scrap of the Shroud and splinter of the Cross, in search of the Message.
In the early days of home-use internet, back when the first major e-marketer appeared under the sobriquet Yoyodyne (sold to Yahoo in 1998 for $30 million in stock), users of Yahoo and AOL messageboards and chatrooms asserted that Pynchon was J. D. Salinger or the Unabomber, a Branch Davidian or “Wanda Tinasky,” who in witty mock-Pynchonian letters to the editors of the Anderson Valley Advertiser identified “herself” as a bag lady living under a bridge in northern California. With the gradual uploading of scholarship in the form of journal PDFs and dissertation .docs, the digital Pynchonverse got its act together, and by the mid-’90s had become a halfway-disciplined research collective of amateurs and professionals, though one that took a break every toke or two to speculate wildly. Hey, get a load of this—Pynchon’s working on a novel about Lewis & Clark (rather, Mason & Dixon); Michael Naumann, past publisher of Henry Holt and former German minister of culture, helped Pynchon gather materials concerning the David Hilbert circle in Göttingen, and went on the record as saying the author’s next book would trace the amours of the Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (material appearing in Against the Day). Pynchon himself never participated in any of this, of course, though there were at least a dozen contributors I can remember who claimed to be him, or were suspected of being him. My favorite posted under the alias Martin Scribler, and if you’re bored already: waste.org.
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Serious literary discussion on the internet began with Pynchon fans—which is just the type of generalization to spark a flame war with the science-fiction freaks, who’d claim that the Pynchonites showed up late to the party. I certainly did. It was 1994, and I was thirteen or fourteen when I found the Playboys in the basement and the Pynchon novels on a shelf in my father’s office. On the floor between was the new computer, the family’s first, a Gateway. Porn was difficult to find and slow to load, but the Pynchon guides, being text-based, were instantly gratifying. I read the threads—the rumor and gossip arbitrage, conspiracy swaps and paranoia—as if they were stray strands of Pynchon’s own narratology. I had a 28.8k dial-up modem and, despite all Pynchon’s warnings about technocracy’s incursions, no notion of what surveillance and social control lay ahead.
It was the web that educated me about contemporary literature, not through any primary or even secondary texts that were published there, but through its use. To go online was to experience in life what Pynchon—and his heirs closer to my own generation, like William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace—were working toward in fiction: a plot that proceeded not by the relationships developed by the characters (“people”) but by the relationships to be discerned among institutions (businesses, governments), objects (missiles, erections), and concepts (hippie-dippie Free Love and the German Liebestod). I read about Modernism—big “M”—and postmodernism—small “p”—thanks to links sent to me by strange anagrammatic screen names, and if I couldn’t get through Fredric Jameson yet, I could get through a GeoCities site that summarized his work. Modernism was something made by and intended for a limited but discerning audience; postmodernism, by contrast, had popular or populist aspirations—it wanted to be famous, and complex! It wanted money, and respect! The two movements connected in the “systems novel,” a phrase minted by the critic Tom LeClair to describe the complicative methods of John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Ursula Le Guin, Joseph McElroy—and Pynchon.
Before these writers, books deployed closed systems of symbols that, if untangled, provided a substrate of meaning separate from, but communicating with, the action and dialogue (think of Fitzgerald’s ad for Dr. T. J. Eckleburg or Hemingway’s bullfighting). But these new writers favored books that operated on open systems, that treated the entire world symbolically, and that were inextricably enmeshed with the literary whole (think of the contrast between twentieth-century sensibility and eighteenth-century language in Mason & Dixon, or the palimpsest of genres—scientific, spy thriller, teen adventure, western—in Against the Day). Perhaps the paragon of the systems novel’s associative processes is the “Byron the Bulb” episode of Gravity’s Rainbow. An ostensibly immortal lightbulb named Byron illuminates, among other places, “an all-girl opium den” and “the home of a glass-blower who is afraid of the night” in Weimar Berlin, the brothel of a Hamburg prostitute whose “customer tonight is a cost-accountant who likes to have bulbs screwed into his asshole,” and the bunk of a Nazi scientist in a subterranean rocket factory in Nordhausen. It’s a section whose fifteen-year timeframe also accommodates examinations of “ ‘Phoebus,’ the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland”; the mutual business interests of General Electric and Krupp; the production of filaments; and the synthesis of tungsten carbide.
Fiction has long been described in the terms of a coeval technology, at least since the fade of the vacuum tube, but it was the genius of the systems novelists to produce fiction expressly along the same schematics. In the ’70s their novels could be said to function like transistors, while in the ’80s they could be said to function like integrated circuits. By the ’90s, however, systems technique had been usurped online: the internet replicated its protocols, while the web replicated its surface-shifting—the rapidly changing scenes, the characters introduced, developed, then dropped.
Back when I frequented Amazon—before my favorite independent bookstores began closing and I quit the site, cold turkey, in 2007—I was fascinated by how much it resembled the novels I was buying on it: I’d click on a book by Pynchon, and then lower down or on a sidebar of the page I’d find other titles to add to my cart, suggestions generated by the site’s algorithms, but also supplied by other users. People who b
ought Mason & Dixon also bought Vineland; if I clicked, I found that people who bought Vineland also bought books about the history of the FBI, the CIA, and the War on Drugs, and from there I’d be just a click or two away from the people who also bought fallout-shelter survival kits, pallets of canned meat, bottled water, and tinfoil. Wikipedia’s debut reinforced this organizational lesson. As of the date of this writing, the voluminous Thomas Pynchon wiki—which if printed out would surely eclipse the output of its subject—links to a list of American tax resisters (Pynchon refused to pay any war-designated tax increase in 1968); the American tax resisters’ wiki links to the Redemption Movement (a group maintaining that when America abandoned the gold standard, in 1933, it continued to back its debts by pledging its citizens’ lives to foreign governments as collateral); which in turn links to the wiki for The Matrix (1999); linking to Laurence Fishburne; linking, no doubt, to Kevin Bacon.
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WHEN NEWS OF THE publication of Bleeding Edge went around Twitter in spring 2013, it set off a surge of chatter on the usual sites, but not for the usual reasons. This wasn’t just another Pynchon book; this wasn’t even just another Pynchon book with the internet in the margins (ARPANET, which was developed in the ’60s and ’70s by an arm of the American military, had a cameo in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice). Rather, this would be a book dramatizing it all front and center, “a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet,” according to the PR copy. I was excited, but also wary. As a reader I was hoping for Pynchon’s ultimate reckoning with the surveillance state he’d been railing against since the reign of J. Edgar Hoover—a culminant tilt at an institution of spying and mass mind-manipulation more powerful, and more voluntarily submitted to, than anything ever dreamed up by Reagan, Nixon, the KGB, the Stasi, or the Nazi SS. But as a novelist I also worried about how Pynchon would write about the very technology that has plagiarized his methods and that has made the sporadic lapses of fact in his meticulous research—indeed, that has made his face—a matter of public record.* Ahem, ahem: The novel was also about 9/11.
“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting edge”—so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron, lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or that was actually hyped to have existed—a real estate figment like NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (originally the Village and the Lower East Side).
Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of generic deracinated White People who’d gone out West like the prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Bay’s Zen gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for real urban grit—or at least for the really yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying—or not yet postidentity—strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color: the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the “authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.
Meanwhile, “on the Yupper West Side”—Pynchon’s own neighborhood—Maxine Tarnow is just trying to get her life back together. She’s a gun-toting fraud investigator who’s recently had her certification revoked for unwittingly abetting an embezzlement, and the doting mother of two precocious young boys, Ziggy and Otis, whose stock-trader father, Horst Loeffler, keeps offices in the World Trade Center and casual mistresses throughout the boroughs. Filmmaker Reg Despard, hired by a computer-security firm called hashslingrz to make an in-house documentary, retains Maxine to background-check his employer’s finances once his access is curtailed by CEO Gabriel Ice, “One of the boy billionaires who walked away in one piece when the dotcom fever broke.” This would be the same Ice who’s after the source code for a clandestine second-life website called DeepArcher (pronounced “departure”), developed by Maxine’s acquaintances Lucas and Justin, two Valley vets out to raise a ruckus, and capital, in the Alley.
Maxine’s inquiries into DeepArcher and hashslingrz serve as the book’s basic binary. The former gets her caught up in an insomniac second life in which she wanders through an unregulated cyberniche, a “framed lucid dream,” that morphs in appearance and purpose according to user input—mediascapes of ghetto squalor one moment and pristine desert the next, all “in shadow-modulated 256-color daylight, no titles, no music,” untainted by advertising. The latter entangles her in the physical world, what Pynchon calls “meatspace,” investigating a host of sketchy (in every sense) personalities: Nicholas Windust, a federal agent whose first job was “spotting for the planes that bombed the presidential palace and killed Salvador Allende” on 9/11/73, and who went on to run “interrogation enhancement” and “noncompliant-subject relocation” squads in South and Central America; Avi, Maxine’s brother-in-law, a recovering Mossad agent; Rocky, a fugazi Cosa Nostra venture capitalist; Igor and his stooges Misha and Grisha, Russian gangsters who’ve invested with Bernie Madoff. All or some of these characters point to the idea that the U.S. government, or rogue elements within it, was aware of and maybe even plotted—perhaps in league with Ice—the 9/11 attacks (for which readers will have to wait until page 316).
Obviously, the opposite might also be the truth. Ice, through his partners in the Middle East and shell companies in the Emirates, might be a hero, if not of America then of the right—laundering money for the undisclosed locations of the “war on terror,” coming soon to a screen near you.
But wait, there’s more—if you enjoyed 9/11, you might also enjoy red herring, which aren’t native to the coast of Long Island, unlike the Montauk Project. This actual paranormal conspiracy theory—regarded as the successor to the Philadelphia Experiment—is, in Pynchon’s telling, “a kind of boot camp for military time travelers” that kidnaps, starves, beats, and sodomizes American preadolescents. They—“Boys, typically”—are trained to become the agents of tomorrow, or yesterday, “Assigned to secret cadres to be sent on government missions back and forth in Time, under orders to create alternative histories which will benefit higher levels of command who have sent them out.” Now, keep in mind that this explanation of the Montauk Project, which is supposedly accessible by a tunnel under Ice’s vacation property, comes to Maxine not in meatspace but in DeepArcher, from an Adderall-addled “IT samurai” named Eric Outfield, or rather from his avatar, whose “soul patch pulses incandescent green.”
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PAGE 316:
Maxine heads for work, puts her head in a local smoke shop to grab a newspaper, and finds everybody freaking out and depressed at the same time. Something bad is going on downtown. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,” according to the Indian guy behind the counter.
“What, like a private plane?”
“A commercial jet.”
Uh-oh. Maxine goes home and pops on CNN. And there it all is. Bad turns to worse. All day long. At around noon the school calls and says they’re shutting down for the day, could she please come and collect her kids.
Everybody’s on edge. Nods, headshakes, not a lot of social conversation.
“Mom, was Dad down there at his office today?”
“He was staying over at Jake’s last night, but I think he’s mostly been working from his computer. So chances are he didn’t even go in.”
“But you haven’t heard from him?”
“Everybody’s been trying to get through to everybody, lines are swamped, he’ll call, I’m not worrying, don’
t you guys, OK?”
Maxine—part JAP, part MILF—tries to buck up her guys, as does Pynchon’s flattest style in what’s inevitably the book’s roughest stretch (roughest to read and to write, I’d imagine). The novel’s zany tangents and waves of punning fall away for a spell. We’re left with a possibly husbandless woman on the couch alongside her possibly fatherless children, who’ve temporarily forgotten their game cartridges because the onscreen carnage is so compellingly uncontrollable. That excerpt’s last quoted line and its implications are key to every family’s sense of frustrated codependence. Sometimes the phones work and sometimes they don’t, leaving Dad—Horst—in limbo incommunicado, his fate in the hands of God, or Wolf Blitzer.
The attacks of 9/11 gave rise to bad invasions, bad occupations, and bad laws, but one of their least-noted but most-consequential impacts on the homefront was how they encouraged a society of total contact with a furious and mortal urgency (which Pynchon reinforces by using the present tense). Nowadays, to lose touch is to die; if you’re ever buried by rubble, the first thing you do is call and pray that the signal’s strong enough to let your last words live at least on voicemail. Before 9/11, the online world was engaged with at home, in a chair, at a desk. Having a cellphone—Pynchon prefers “mobile phone”—wasn’t a social norm, let alone a requirement akin to having a heart, or a brain, or lungs. In Bleeding Edge, cellphones ring fewer than a dozen times, and their occasional presence merely accentuates their absence.