by Joshua Cohen
If one of the barest necessities of fiction is keeping two characters apart for enough time for a misunderstanding to ensue—a misunderstanding that can be resolved only by the protagonists individually moving toward each other, and toward the book’s conclusion—cellphones, now “smartphones,” have become the chief antagonists of fiction. Today, we’re rarely denied the opportunity of contact, and all contacts—phone numbers and email addresses—can be digitally exhumed. Pynchon, by setting his novel on the cusp of the attacks, makes desperate comedy out of this last chance at inaccessibility, this final dark and silent millennial moment. He does so by exaggerating all the improbabilities and coincidence tricks of a previous information revolution—that of the Victorian novel, whose outlandishness was later called realism.
In the Victorian novel, chance is a mechanism of resolution: Two characters, separated for a bit, “suddenly” meet in a street, or at the theater. In Pynchon’s books, chance is a religious or spiritual mechanism. Meetings must have “meanings,” mysteries. In V., graffiti in a toilet stall spurs an electricity seminar when the image turns out to be a diagram for a band-pass filter. In Lot 49, the recurring doodle of a muted postal horn leads to the exposure of an underground mail network that has been passing correspondence via trashcans since the French Revolution. Bleeding Edge has a cruder approach, familiar from Pynchon’s other historical novels (Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day), in which happenstance provides the pretext for information exchange: Maxine is lazing by her office window when she notices Igor’s limousine (its Cyrillic bumper sticker translates as MY OTHER LIMO IS A MAYBACH); she gets in, only to find March Kelleher, a renegade lefty blogger who just happens to be Ice’s mother-in-law. March has to courier Igor’s Madoff money (thanks to Maxine’s tip, Igor cashed out just in time) to Sid, March’s ex-husband and a drug runner, up at “a dance club near Vermilyea.” Why not, Maxine goes along; once the deal is done, Sid offers to return them to the 79th Street Boat Basin in his antique motorboat, but the DEA gives chase and the trio flee down the Hudson, losing their pursuers by the Island of Meadows, a wetlands preserve just off the coast of Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill. This boat ride is merely an excuse for March and Sid to discuss their daughter, Tallis, and their son-in-law, Ice, which itself is merely an excuse to dump tons of data on Maxine and the reader both. But the indulgences are justified by Pynchon’s beautiful way with the trash:
This little island reminds [Maxine] of something, and it takes her a minute to see what. As if you could reach into the looming and prophetic landfill, that perfect negative of the city in its seething foul incoherence, and find a set of invisible links to click on and be crossfaded at last to unexpected refuge, a piece of the ancient estuary exempt from what happened, what has gone on happening, to the rest of it. Like the Island of Meadows, DeepArcher also has developers after it. Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends.
All the events described above occur in Pynchon’s shortest sentences and shortest paragraphs to date, in fewer than a dozen pages. The result is a breathless major bandwidth rush and a dizzily profound book about the internet that accomplishes something of which the internet has rarely been capable. It doesn’t quite make the reader believe that American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 were brought down by Stinger missiles launched from a rooftop in Hell’s Kitchen, but it does make the reader believe why and how someone else might believe this—why and how March Kelleher might believe this—and that, fellow citizens, is sympathy, or empathy, or literature.
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HERE’S ANOTHER INTRIGUE FROM online, though this one is verifiable: William Pynchon’s magistrate son, John, was a friend of the colony’s road surveyor, Miles Morgan, “the hero of Springfield,” who in 1675 defended the town against the Wampanoag tribe and was the forefather of J. P. Morgan (Pynchon was the presiding official at Miles Morgan’s wedding). The Pynchon and Morgan families would go on to maintain business ties for the next three hundred years, until the stock market crashed the country into Depression. By that time, Pynchon & Co. had become one of America’s most prominent brokerages (and the publisher of pamphlets surveying investment prospects, including “Electric Light and Power: A Survey of World Development”). According to Charles Hollander, writing in the journal Pynchon Notes, Pynchon & Co. was destroyed by its brief liaison with Chase Bank—the Rockefeller bank—in what might’ve been a speculation trap aimed at damaging this close associate of the Morgans. The Pynchon family had to auction off their property and furniture and, in debt from a reclamatory lawsuit, senior partner George M. Pynchon, Jr., committed suicide. In Hollander’s reading, much of Pynchon’s fiction plays out as revenge against the Rockefellers and their dismantling of the Morgan economy of steel, coal, and railroads in favor of an economy of plastics, oil, and weaponry.
Bleeding Edge, appearing after 2008’s Depression Redux, deals with the next economy—the virtual—in which the Rockefellers aren’t the born elite but the products of meritocracy. Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Bezos, Jobs, Gates: six sons of American sprawl, three of whom are Jews, one of whom is also a Soviet émigré; one born to a teenage mother and adopted by a Cuban immigrant stepfather; another given up for adoption at birth by his Syrian father and American mother. They are us and we are them, not just biographically but in that we help create what they sell us and improve their services—along with their fortunes—all just by our use.
It follows that the old Pynchonite dichotomy of Us v. Them doesn’t apply anymore. In canonical Pynchon, when the military police closed in, when the federales swooped down, there was always a stained mattress to crash on in the Village, or a band of pot growers in Mendocino County who’d stash you. You’d be safe there, in whichever countercultural cult—the Whole Sick Crew (V.), or the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll (Vineland); you’d be safe, that is, until your friends got bought out, or sold themselves, and became agents too, or at least collaborating adults who read nonfiction or nothing at all. If Pynchon’s characters were left behind by America, they denied that America and terrorized only themselves. They regarded any America that would reject them as fake, and only their own inner America as real—a country not of grandly insistent progress and Horatio Alger success, but of Henry Adams regret and failure. A country of the “preterite”—a characterization Pynchon attributed to William Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow—meaning the passed-over, the neglected, the abandoned; the Melvilles, not the Hawthornes.
Bleeding Edge, however, offers an indication that Pynchon has finally given up on seeking the soul of the nation his family helped found. For Pynchon—the embattled bard of the counterculture, disabused of all allegiance—the last redoubt has become the family, and the last war to be waged is between our virtual identities and the bonds of blood; a war to keep the Virtual from corrupting the Blood, if not forever, then for time enough to let the lil’ Ziggy and Otis Tarnow-Loefflers of this world live with the merest pretense of freedom (childhood). Pynchon understands that in the future there will be no secrets, no hidden complots—everything will be aired and any second life, whether in the cloud or in the firmament, will be despoiled or denied us. Adult sanity, then, must depend not on the lives we make online, but on the lives we make off it—our kids—on how we love them, and how we raise them, and the virtues and good-taste imperatives we pass on to them from our progenitors. Smirk if you’re a smirker and claim this as the conclusion of an embourgeoised aging-hippie novelist gone soft (or of the Mafia and the Jews), but I’m not sure whether Pynchon means this emphasis on consanguinity in the spirit of salvation or of damnation. It is, regardless, sweetly sad. Sweet and lowdown sad. The online moguls have tried to persuade us that we’re not losing a nation, we’re gaining a world. Pyncho
n proposes that both are mere second lives, fakes. Only family is real.
* The day after the book’s galley was delivered to me—this was just after the NSA Prism scandal broke—I took it along to a dermatology appointment and started reading it on the subway. Immediately a man stomped across the car and without saying anything stuck out his iPhone and snapped a shot of the cover. He was white, stocky, about five foot six, and jumped out at West 4th Street—in other words, demographically representative. Later that evening I found the pic posted online. It had already received a few hundred likes. In the weeks that followed, Bleeding Edge galleys appeared on eBay, being auctioned—being purchased—for upward of $1,500.
LETTERFORM, ISLANDFORM
THE LETTER I’D LIKE TO describe did not exist, it seemed, except in the dream I dreamt for three consecutive nights, December 2009. Coleridge smoked opium and hallucinated an entire poem, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree”: whereas I, not a poet and trying to wean myself off Xanax and Vicodin and Percocet, had difficulty retrieving from my rest even a coherent letter. I went to bed early all three evenings at my parents’ in Jersey, the anti-Xanadu. Three evenings of uneasy slumber and yet upon waking this was all I could recall: an elongated Hebrew lamed (), a distended Arabic lam (ل), the rough form of a fishinghook (lengthened, stretched; though the Semitic Ur letterform is thought to derive from the shape of a shepherd’s staff or cattleprod), a finger curled to beckon, a kinked tongue, a carpet hung from the railing of a balcony and beaten of its dust until the remnant’s pattern was pure black outline (but this is embellishment now)…the dream was of this letter only, without color, just a character inked or perhaps even incised in black upon the nothingness that is not black itself, just sleep.
To describe a letter that already exists—the letter “j,” say—without writing it or saying it, is as difficult as describing a piece of music or plastic art: Rather, how to form the lines and how to pronounce the sound and name of that letter can be described without being demonstrated just as accurately, or just as inaccurately, as can the melodies, harmonies, and timbres of a symphony, or the shapes of a nonfigurative sculpture or painting. But to describe a letter that doesn’t exist is a task seemingly more difficult than describing fake music, which Thomas Mann did well in not a few of his books, or describing fake art, which Marcel Proust, who regularly went to bed early, excelled at. I know of no writer who has, even unsuccessfully, described an imaginary letter whether in sound or image. However, I emphasize that my own experience was visual only. Before proceeding I have to admit I have no idea how my dreamletter would sound if pronounced (though something tells me it would be closer to a vowel than a consonant, and certainly it lacks the “lateral approximant” “l” sound of the lamed/lam).
In thinking of my dreamletter on the mornings after, I thought not of its identity as a letter (it couldn’t have “an identity”), but about its “meaning”: the meaning of its appearance. Dreams can be interpreted as representations of fears, but dreamletters cannot represent fear or any other emotion or thing—only letters and words actually existing can function in that way as symbols. Indeed, the only content of my recurrent dream besides the shape of the letter—pineally burning, nearly gashed into my forehead, that’s how close it felt in retrospect, how deeply substantial—can be said to be the thought, the feverishly intellectual thought, that “this is a false letter, without significance, at most it’s a self-reference, at most it’s a picture of a picture,” and so my dream announced, silently, its own meaninglessness, interpreting itself as unfit for interpretation.
First thing upon waking after the second night’s dream I tried drawing the letter, but never captured what I could so clearly remember envisioning (which is not the same as being able to clearly envision it, to recall it “photographically”).
My first attempt has a strange spermy loop at bottom that my hand forced me into but that was not in my dream. Also, I find it all too sinuous (I should mention that half of my failure is due to haziness; the other half is that I can’t draw).
My second attempt, after the third night, locates that loop at the top of the shape, not the bottom. Unlike the previous day’s, this sketch’s lines are too rigid, too severe: squared off.
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I’D BEEN EXPLORING TOPONYMS—specifically, how islands came to be named after their shapes in the days before dirigible, helicopter, and airplane flyovers: aerial photography. How did the premodern inhabitants of an island called Snake Island know that it was shaped like a snake without being able to fly above it, or without seeing pictures taken from altitude? Perhaps they stood on mountains, but not every island named for its shape has a mountain peak at center from which the entirety of the island can be surveyed. Is it possible that one of the skills possessed by earlier man was the ability to walk the perimeter of a landmass and, from that walk alone, to develop a mental picture of the total form of his route? If so, then this pedocartography is a talent since lost and remains unrecorded in every language. There are many Snake Islands: a curl off Boston Harbor, a straighter Snake Island of the Philippines. Other Snake Islands are named Snake Island because there are snakes there, but these two, and a few others, are said to be named for their islandform: their serpentine coasts. The Dry Tortugas of the Florida Keys were named for the many turtles sighted there by Ponce de León, but history has it that Columbus called the Caribbean island of Tortuga what he called it because it was shaped like a turtle, or tortoise—humpbacked. Yuantouzhu means Turtle Head Isle. Kelyfos Island also translates to Turtle Island. Crocodile Island, off Boracay, also of the Philippines, is shaped like a crocodile. Muuido, of South Korea, means dancer’s dress and looks like a dancer’s dress. Shark Island, offering views of the Sydney Opera House, resembles a shark (there’s at least one other Shark Island, in Thailand). Elephantine, in the Nile, looks like an elephant’s tusk. Gato Island, a cat (skeptical tourists are told, “a sitting cat”). Tongpan Island, a barrel. Udo Island is a cow lying down or, in an alternate account, the head of a cow. Tobago exports tobacco, but is also said to be shaped like the smoke from Trinidad’s pipe (though Columbus named Trinidad for the Trinity). Anguilla is a slippery eel. Dolphin’s Nose, of India, is not an island but a massive jutting rock. Naming islands strikes me as different from naming rock formations after what they resemble—e.g., the Mitten Buttes, Horseshoe Mesa—because while it seems a natural imaginative leap to imbue giant risen inanimate stone with animate qualities, it seems quite unnatural to imbue the earth underfoot, the native earth, with equivalent personality. Rather, I have the sense that indigenous peoples can never regard their own land as, for example, a llama or tree, whereas a distant hill or another tribe’s islet, precisely because it is conceivable as external, might be so understood. Conquistadors experienced not just geography but whole cultures at a similar remove and so named what they saw without attempting to understand it. Sighted from the safety of a crow’s nest or prow, the foreign was always one thing—“the foreign”—not many things; the exotic is singular for a reason: ignorance. The New World was really, in terms of enduring civilizations, older than the Old; each India has its Indians. There is no Native American word for “America” in toto.
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THE FIRST AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH was taken in 1858; the Frenchman’s name was Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, aka “Nadar.” The image was a view of the village of Petit-Bicêtre, taken from the basket of a hot-air balloon tethered to float at an altitude of eighty meters. The balloon’s basket contained a darkroom. Tournachon’s pictures haven’t survived, however, so the oldest extant aerial photographs are James Wallace Black’s of Boston from 1860, also taken from a balloon roped to earth. Images captured by automatically timed exposures from rockets, kites, and carrier pigeons—“bird’s-eye views”—were popular throughout the 1880s and ’90s, while the first widely publicized images taken from an aircraft were (silen
t) movies courtesy of Wilbur Wright, captured on an exhibition trip to Rome in 1909 (European governments were quick to grasp the military promise of flight photography and cinema). Sherman Fairchild of Oneonta, New York, invented the flash camera in 1915, and five years later pioneered the aerial imaging of Manhattan, creating the most perfect map of that borough’s imperfect grid by assembling a series of overlapping photos (Manhattan’s earliest substantive aerial imaging had been accomplished by British photojournalist James Hare, 1906). Mannahatta, in Lenape dialect, was most likely pure description: “many hills.” The island has since been described, by a Victorian travel guide, as a “sole-fish”; paintings of the Depression depicted it as an ironing board and a trowel; not a few poems have transmuted it into a sweat drop or tear. Sitting on the subway one afternoon, I looked up from my book to the system map and saw it—I saw my letter. The lower bulge of the Battery, the upper winnow of Harlems and Inwood. Manhattan, incognoscible first letter of an alphabet dreamt but as yet undiscovered.