Deviant History
Because Pynchon writes neither counterfactual history nor historical fiction, perhaps the term should be deviated, like a septum—or, as his advance statement warned, “what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two” (if there are alternative universes, there are alternative Pynchons in them). Counterfactual history begins with a striking premise—Caesar surviving the knives on the Ides of March, Lincoln dying of pneumonia after his first inaugural, the Nazis winning World War II. Historical fiction, on the other hand, devotes itself to recreating the small details of dress and dinner, reproducing the archaeological to speculate upon the biographical (historical fiction often aspires to be history plus dialogue). Though he introduces elements of fantasy, like airships far in advance of their day, Pynchon bends his narratives around historical events (the Exposition, the collapse of the Campanile in Venice, the Galveston hurricane), which provide the backdrop for his comic-book characters, esoteric conspiracies, and zany inventions. These absurdist romps, ensnaring common men in the machinations of government and shadow government, show a fidelity to the past even historians might admire. In his almost seamless integration of history into the fictional world (which, to the reader, gives the illusion of the reverse), the story gets pried this way and that to accommodate whatever lumps of fact the past requires; but the leverage is so obvious it contributes to the maniac comedy. The verisimilitude that licenses Pynchon’s flights of fancy may corrupt (may even intend to corrupt) a reader’s faith in any chronicle, whether of antiquity or the day before yesterday.
Pynchon is fanatical about trivia; and you’d be wise not to engage him in a bar bet on Edwardian insurance trends, Russian crew nomenclature, the use of pneumatic tubes in London, or the international language of Idiom Neutral. The novel is a drunk man’s walk through the Americana of scorcher caps, Nernst lamps, Saratoga chips, Floradora girls, Little Nemo, and Arbuckle’s coffee. (Anyone who revels in the pastness of the past will find pleasure on every page.) The pains taken over insignificant matters, however, don’t mean Pynchon can be trusted with significant ones. (He wrote in Slow Learner, with slightly tipsy syntax, that “it may not be wrong absolutely to make up, as I still do, what I don’t know or am too lazy to find out.”) Indeed, his watchmaker’s care may lull the reader into a trust undeserved—in Against the Day, crossword puzzles appear a dozen years before their introduction in 1914, and Joe Hill was hardly urging American workers to organize before he had arrived in the country, much less joined the Wobblies.
Questions to Which a Reader Would Like an Answer
What is the evidence for the motorcycle act called the Wall of Death prior to the twenties? Was there a twelve-shot Confederate Colt, or has Pynchon confused it with the ten-shot LeMat? How can a character recite “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” years before Robert Service wrote it? Did Yale have a drama department in 1905? Were novelty X-Ray Spex available before the forties?
Language as a Yoohoo
The verbal texture of his novels derives partly from Pynchon’s delight in slang and cant, meticulously corrected to the period. The appearance of the words below, however, predates their first use in the OED or the existing volumes of the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
gumshoe (1899)
jake [adj.] (1914)
jass [jazz] (1916)
dazzle painting (1917)
highhat [vb.] (1922)
gunny [gunman] (1926)
paradiddle (1927)
wingding (1927)
nooky (1928)
snoot [to snub socially] (1928)
sports page (1930)
keester (1931)
boilermaker [whiskey with a beer chaser] (1934)
rat [to inform] (1934)
cupcake [attractive young woman] (1939)
hootenanny [social event] (1940)
double-dome (1943)
yoohooing (1948)
chip shop (1953)
cannonball [vb.] (not in OED or RH)
pre-owned (not in OED)
twofer (usage not in OED)
Slang is not always trapped in print until years or decades after its first use. The locker loop on the back of a man’s shirt, for instance, though called a “fag tag” in Long Island high schools as early as 1967 (and often torn off to comic and destructive effect), does not receive its first citation in Random House until 1980.
Words Surprisingly in Use Long Before the Novel
dittoes [clothing] (1755)
nautch girl (1809)
skylarking (1809)
lettuce opium (1816)
solenoid (1827)
on spec (1832)
discombobulated (1834)
bell-buoy (1838)
picnic (1838)
splendiferous (1843)
Vulcanized rubber (1845)
pixielated (1848)
empowerment (1849)
skeezicks (1850)
Mafia (1866)
running mate (1868)
bucket shop (1872)
fox trot (1872)
Does Pynchon use the OED? See his introduction to Slow Learner.
Naming Names
Even in the novel’s final pages, new characters come trooping in, as if the author suffered some strange compulsion to expand the cast (novelists don’t have to budget as playwrights do). Yet who would want to be deprived of the “old-school spagyrist name of Doddling,” the “star, Solange St.-Emilion,” “Octave the barman,” a “U-boat captain named Max Valentiner,” the “baby Plebecula,” a “strangely possessed algebraist named E. Percy Movay,” or half a dozen others left to the bitter end? Pynchon (a man with an odd name himself) cooks up names the way some novelists slop in adjectives—he invents characters to swell the crowd, as a bad painter uses landscape to fill the canvas to the frame. This perhaps explains why so many of Pynchon’s characters (more than seven hundred in Against the Day, almost twice as many as in Gravity’s Rainbow) are hilariously named but inanimate as rocks.
Dickens established through character the realism his naming threatened to subvert (you wonder if he feared being sued for libel, his christenings grew so outlandish). His names offer a public-spirited advertisement of moral virtue, measured by pun if not mellifluousness (there is morality to music, so musicians believe, with every sour note a sin)—Dedlock and Skimpole and Vholes, to get no bleaker than Bleak House, prove more flawed or vice ridden than Summerson or Woodcourt, who enjoy the pastoral virtue of their surnames; but even a Guppy, trivialized in the very saying of him, has his saving graces.
Pynchon, by contrast, rejects the novel’s realist longings whenever names are named, though last names like Suckling and Grace may be found in the telephone directory. However extravagant, even preposterous, his dramatis personae, they are different in bearing from Sheridan’s Lady Sneerwell or Mrs. Candour, Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind or Uriah Heep, where the character’s character precedes him by his calling. Pynchon’s names, more often than not, seem the gift of an evil fairy-godmother or a god with a malign sense of humor. They form part of the aesthetics of doubt fate introduces right at the start.
Characters disappear, dropped after some considerable space and attention, for no better reason than that the author has galloped off after some will-o’-the-wisp, or no worse than that the plot found no further place to accommodate them—though it could be argued that after prolonged effort Pynchon has not really constructed a plot at all. The ingenuity with which he ushers characters into the book and then gives them the bum’s rush secures him large reinforcements, should coincidence require a familiar face or, rather, a familiar name.
A Few Names from a Stroll through a Hundred Pages or So
Reverend Moss Gatlin
Mayva Dash
Alden Vormance
Chick Counterfly
Constance Penhallow
Templeton Blope
Hastings Throyle
Otto Ghloix
Dodge Flannelette
Burke
Ponghill
Clovis Yutts
Dr. Oyswharf
Rica Treemorn
Deuce Kindred
Sloat Fresno
Jimmy Drop
Linnet Dawes
Nicholas Nookshaft
Pynchon also has a taste for the oddball names history itself supplies: the almost forgotten actress Olga Nethersole, for example, or the mathematician Ernst Zermelo, formulator of the Axiom of Choice.
The Construction of Character, Lesson I: Introduction by Epithet
“Chinchito, a jumped-up circus midget”
“East Coast nerve case Thrapston Cheesely III”
“a certain Madame Aubergine”
“the provocative and voracious Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin”
“Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, a traveling insurrectionist”
“the messenger, one ‘Plug’ Loafsley”
“Mr. Gideon Candlebrow …, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the ’80s”
“Captain Q. Zane Toadflax, Commander”
“a civilian passenger, Stilton Gaspereaux”
“an American stoker named O. I. C. Bodine”
“a wealthy coffee scion named Gunther von Quassel”
“the noted Uyghur troublemaker Al Mar-Fuad”
“a telepathic waiter named Pityu”
“a fandango girl named Chiquita”
The Novel as Juggernaut
A long novel is as difficult to shift from its course as an ocean liner; and Pynchon is no novice captain of the stout tug Coincidence, the favorite of every clumsy novelist since Thomas Hardy, if not long before. (The line of coincidence starts with Oedipus Rex—Shakespeare, Defoe, Charlotte Bronte, and many another have kept it alive.) Novels are famously more conservative in their social physics than in their propriety; random acts offend the reader’s expectation of a moral fate and undermine the Whig view of history on which much modern fiction is based. Novels that embrace the Mode of Perennial Accident—sometimes generated, like the productions of OuLiPo, by chance method—often comment upon fiction in a meta-novelistic way. These are gestures of an art fatally uneasy with its means.
Pynchon does everything possible to prevent the reader from taking his novels seriously. Realism, however (like the sincerity and authenticity so beloved in contemporary poetry), is itself full of secret inauthenticities—fiction’s handling of dialogue, for instance, rarely echoes the way people actually talk. As a young writer in the fifties, Pynchon was drawn to the new diction promised by the civic poetics of Roth and Bellow (which, however rowdy once, now seem merely an updating of Edith Wharton), as well as the howls howled by the Beats, the jazzy riffs of Norman Mailer, and the lofty-headed formalism of Vladimir Nabokov, whose oracular, idiosyncratic, and apparently nearly inaudible lectures Pynchon attended at Cornell. There are seeds of Nabokov in Pynchon’s giddy use of coincidence to poke fun at novels plotted out like a housing development. (Given names in Lolita like Clare Quilty, Dolores Quine, and Humbert Humbert, Pynchon was perhaps more influenced by Nabokov than at first appears.) Half a century later, the younger author’s struggles for style seem out of date, less a Masonic high sign than a habit that has outgrown its virtue—the coincidences in V. took a shortcut to meaning, but the ones in Against the Day seem a lame excuse for failing to provide one.
Pynchon knows that the reader’s tolerance for accident is limited and therefore uses chance to begin a scene, not to end one. His coincidences are usually meetings of the “As destiny would have it, whom did she run into out on the town that very evening but …” or the “In a train depot up in Montana …, who’d they happen to run into but …” or the “whom should he run into but his father, … whom he hadn’t seen since 1892 or thereabouts” variety. Amusing alternatives are the “Who had come blowing in to town” dodge as well as the “Cyprian came unexpectedly face-to-face with …” ploy, the “Who should appear but …” maneuver, and the “Only to find out that …” gambit. Pynchon is not a Dickens who could master plot by being mastered by it. The later author’s story lines are coercive to an unusual degree—though coercion multiplied doesn’t always equal comedy, even 1984 can seem a species of farce.
Against the Day is not immune to other methods of muscling the plot, developing as it does by fits and starts, unlikely detours through the center of the Earth and visitations by trespassers from the future. Occasionally, all else failing, in the space of a sentence one character will develop a marked and unlikely crush on another, which proves that Eros can be as effective a deus ex machina as any god. Many of these divertissements prove culs-de-sac, making the reader wonder whether Pynchon’s novels are planned in any conventional sense or mere constructions of whim plus steroids. He has long depended on charm to escort him past logic.
The universe of chance, Pynchon’s novels long ago discovered, is one in which almost anything can happen, but only certain things do. Physics receives a partial exemption. Pynchon allows himself extraordinary leeway in the world he creates, introducing sentient ball-lightning, a dog that can read Henry James, and even time travel, which, apart from a horrifying premonitory vision of World War I, promises more than it delivers. Fiction is like radio—it can get away with more impossibilities than movies or television, and for just the price of a pen and a sheet of paper.
It isn’t clear whether Pynchon plots by the seat of his pants or has his own secret and impenetrable designs—the hither-thither meanderings of character, the appalling songs, the Rube Goldberg contraptions (some not yet invented, some perhaps never to be invented in our time stream) might all be constituents of some larger, rational order. Such wishful thinking it is criticism’s usual duty to propose. “Yeah, yeah,” the author might reply.
In Tin Pan Alley
The dust jacket warns that “characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs.” Pynchon’s characters at first did this with clunky parody lyrics (sung to tunes like “Aura Lee” or Cornell’s “Alma Mater”) but, from Gravity’s Rainbow onward, with goofy humor, methedrine rhymes, and little discernible talent. The results sound like W. S. Gilbert on a very bad day or Noel Coward on LSD. An allegedly “melancholy yet catchy tango” floats out of a Montparnasse nightclub:
Vege-tariano …
No ifs ands or buts—
Eggs and dairy? ah no,
More like roots, and nuts—
Pot roast prohibido,
Tenderloin taboo,
why should my heart bleed
over the likes of you?
The songs rarely function as the comic relief the porter scene in Macbeth is said to provide, because they’re funny only in a strained and sniggering way. There’s little more embarrassing than to see a writer of genius fail at something trivial (it’s difficult to prevent the shiver of Schadenfreude that follows). Pynchon obviously delights in writing dreadful lyrics; otherwise he would stop. He’s hardly unaware of how bad they are—the jacket copy was written by Pynchon himself.
Bad Jokes
“It is comforting to imagine this as an outward and visible manifestation of something else,” chuckled one of the Austrians, puffing on a cigar stub. “But sometimes a Tatzelwurm is only a Tatzelwurm.”
“Ich bin ein Berliner!”
“Excuse me?” The patient seemed anxious to speak with Kit.
“He will not harm you,” Dr. Dingkopf assured him as attendants adroitly steered the patient away. “He has come to believe that he is a certain well-known pastry of Berlin—similar to your own American, as you would say, Jelly-doughnut.”
“There is now an entire branch of spy-craft known as Applied Idiotics—yes, including my own school, a sort of training facility run by the Secret Service, near Chipping Sodbury actually, the Modern Imperial Institute for Intensive Instruction In Idiotics—or M6.I., as it’s commonly known.”
Pynchon’s attorneys might mutter that such jokes are never “bad” in an absolute or moral sense but merely the projection in our “ti
me-stream” of a humor (call it a “variant stimulus to laughter”) in common use in the future but not yet available to us. They are therefore not prochronistic, rotting away any slim foundation of realism that remains, but always already anticlimactic.
Pynchonian Acronyms
F.I.C.O.T.T. (First International Conference on Time Travel)
I.G.L.O.O. (Inter-Group Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation)
L.I.S.P. (Lieutenants of Industry Scholarship Program)
M.6I. (Modern Imperial Institute for Intensive Instruction in Idiotics)
R.U.S.H. (Rapid Unit for Shadowing and Harassment)
T.W.I.T. (True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys)
Lists
The nightly talent included Professor Bogoslaw Borowicz, who put on what he called “Floor Shows,” which, due to his faulty grasp of the American idiom, turned out to be literal displays of floors —… as well as “trainers” of stuffed animals whose repertoire of “tricks” inclined to the rudimentary, narcoleptics who had mastered the difficult but narrowly appreciated knack of going to sleep while standing up, three minutes or less of which had audiences, even heavily opiated themselves, fighting to get out the exits, and crazy inventors with their inventions, levitating shoes, greenback duplicators, perpetual-motion machines which even the most distracted of audiences understood could never be demonstrated in any time frame short of eternity, and, strangely often, hats—notably The Phenomenal Dr. Ictibus and His Safe-Deflector Hat.
The rooms seemed to run on for blocks, stuffed with automata human and animal assembled and in pieces, disappearing-cabinets, tables that would float in midair and other trick furniture, Davenport figures with darkrimmed eyes in sinister faces, lengths of perfect black velvet and multicolored silk brocade a-riot with Oriental scenes, mirrors, crystals, pneumatic pumps and valves, electromagnets, speaking-trumpets, bottles that never ran empty and candles that lighted themselves, player pianos, Zoetropic projectors …
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