Pastiche, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction. According to the ever-dubious Wikipedia, these terms often appear in relation to the writings of Thomas Pynchon, as techniques of literary postmodernism. Pynchon is heralded as a forefather of American postmodernist literature, which raises certain problems in interpreting his texts, namely that postmodernism is itself a “weasel word;” as a cultural theory or perspective it seems to have no clear or unified definition. Searching through numerous books and articles on the subject left me even more uncertain as to what postmodernism might actually mean, so I took recourse in the general opinions of my cultural milieu and cobbled together a hazy understanding from the apocryphal heart of the internet: en.wikipedia.org. Postmodernism then “tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness, or interreferentiality,” and is often characterized by a lack of belief in absolute truth along with the corollary notion that reality is therefore constructed from our perspectives and use of language . At least that’s how I took what I read.
It may seem irrelevant, or just bad scholarship, to refer to Wikipedia, postmodernism, or my own process of grappling with this material, but, I would argue as a writer attempting to learn from contemporary literature, that these are all performances of what Pynchon does in Slow Learner (as well as in the rest of his oeuvre, though we unfortunately won’t get to that) by use of the techniques mentioned in the first line of this paper. Through the engagement of his early stories’ characters, readers, and the author himself with a hodgepodge of texts, cultural references, and modes of storytelling, Pynchon creates what might best be called apocryphal or alternate realities, which in turn trouble the conventional notion that reality is absolute in favor of contemporary models of reality production.
As a literary technique, pastiche is the combining of diverse elements in a text, from styles and genres to cultural levels (such as the blending of high and low culture). We can see this pastiche of cultural levels in Pynchon’s short story The Small Rain, where the staff sergeant Rizzo “would lie in his bunk and read things like Being and Nothingness and Form and Value in Modern Poetry, scorning the westerns, sex novels, and whodunnits that his companions kept trying to lend him” (36). This placing together of various cultural references does not only serve to represent the intellectual climate of the army, but also signifies the protagonist “Lardass” Levine’s conflict in the story. Even though Levine is a “college graduate, [with the] highest IQ in the damn battalion” (33), he still finds himself attracted to artifacts and situation of low culture, as in the sex novel Swamp Wench. Pynchon illustrates this cultural conflict further by displacing the action onto a college campus, and then having Levine encounter a girl in the exact swamp-shack situation described in the pulp he’s reading, whom Levine treats with the “same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels or for the burned out but impotent good guy ranchers in a western” (50). While this attitude might come off as poor characterization, it also shows that it is the characters themselves who are pastiched together in The Small Rain, as representations of the cultural attitudes they espouse.
We see a similar use of pastiche on the walls of Dennis Flange’s room in Low-lands, “walls covered with photographs clipped out of every publication, it seemed, put out since the Depression” (67). This juxtaposition of high and low culture historical figures into a “rogues’ gallery of faded sensation fragile as tabloid paper, blurred as the common humanity of a nine-day wonder” (68), effectively flattens out modern culture into the very newspaper on which it is printed as an example of the non-hierarchical interconnectedness of the postmodernist style. In other words we are shown that reality is something that is constructed through being represented.
While Entropy continues this use of pastiche through its almost constant barrage of classical and contemporary musical allusions, this story extends the technique beyond the mention of references into the intertextual use of borrowed texts from various scientific and historical discourses. Callisto, for example, discusses the Second Law of Thermodynamics (in a third person, autodiegetic, stream of conscious monologue): “He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100% efficiency; and about the theorem of Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases” (87). By displaying this scientific discourse alongside other discourses of socio-political power (such as those of Henry Adams and Machiavelli), the character is able to find in the concept of entropy a “metaphor to apply to certain phenomena of his own world” (88), a concept made only more real when we see it played out in the party scene on the floor below. This intertextuality of “real world” dialogues in a fictional world allows the characters to engage in what we generally consider to be the world outside the text. At the same time however, these integrated texts require the reader to engage both with the real texts themselves as well as with their presentation in the story, forcing us to collude with the characters in treating the world in the story as a real world.
Pynchon seems highly aware of this interactional nature of storytelling, so much so that he has his character Dennis Flange in Low-lands muse on the very subject in relation to the telling of personal sea stories as a function of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:
“It is all right to listen but not to tell stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the truth’s extent but the minute you become active you are somehow, if not violating the convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of things” (69).
This metafictional foregrounding of the art of fiction within the story itself troubles whatever illusions we might have left that reality is not something created through our uncertain observations and utterances. As Flange finds in the story, his strongly recalled memories of himself as a rogue sea-dog actively screw up his perspective as existing in a normalized suburban reality and plunge him instead into an equally real subterranean adventure. So to might we find that our engagements with and observations of our own lives and historical realities are what create the worlds we live in. Any historian is ultimately a storyteller writing from his or her own perspective.
In Under the Rose, Pynchon continues this metafictional technique by having the spy Porpentine mention that another character could have gotten his information on the state of affairs of Egypt “from any Baedeker” (115). Pynchon himself admits in the introduction to Slow Learner that Baedeker’s “guide to Egypt for 1899 was the major ‘source’ for the story” (17). This fictionalization of historical events or settings, called historigraphic metafiction , serves several purposes in the story. By presenting a wealth of historical detail, Pynchon manages to suggest an actual historical reality in the text, which is troubled by the anachronistic inclusion of the android Bongo-Shaftsbury, who, with similarly realistic description, has a “miniature electric switch, single-pole, double-throw, sewn into the skin [of his arm]” (121). This writing of a seemingly accurate historical reality from a point in the future also allows Pynchon’s characters to comment, somewhat prophetically, about the future of their own historical period. Porpentine, for instance, muses: “history was being made no longer through the virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines” (107).
This last comment of Pynchon’s on the act of writing, that history is becoming written by “man in the mass,” does indeed seem to be our current cultural reality. Anyone can edit the articles of Wikipedia, anyone can posit a definition of cultural theories like postmodernism, and anyone can tell a story. Pynchon’s apocryphal style of writing, which re-presents reality as something that we construct, suggests that this new, democratic model of writing historical or theoretical documents is perhaps more “truthful” to the way our reality is actually produced: through our engagement with texts, cultures, and our experiences of these things, new realities can be created beyond what we imagined was only possible on the pages of storybooks.
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Postmodernism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Postmodernism (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pastiche,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Pastiche (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Metafiction,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopdia, s.v. “Historigraphic Metafiction,” http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiographic_metafiction (accessed April 14, 2009)
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