THOMAS PYNCHON

American Novelist

“From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy

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By Ali Dehdarirad

I hope I can steal a minute of your time to draw your attention to the publication of my book on our favorite writer: “From Faraway California”: Thomas Pynchon’s Aesthetics of Space in the California Trilogy. The book brings together my passion for Pynchon’s work and my interest in urban and regional studies, dating back to graduate school. Ever since I came across The Crying of Lot 49, I’ve been fascinated by Pynchon’s intriguing fiction, and it is my hope that this book makes a useful contribution to Pynchon studies and the Pynchon community. It is available as an eBook (open access format) on the website of Sapienza University Press. The following is some background on how I came to write my new book. —Ali Dehdarirad

In “the City Region” with Pynchon

Let me start by sharing some bits of my “Pynchon experience.” I gave The Crying of Lot 49 as a gift to my wife eight years ago, but she hasn’t finished it yet. I think somewhere around chapter three she said something like “that’s enough.” As odd as it might sound, I myself never got to the end of the Italian translation either. On second thoughts, I’ve never read any Pynchon book in Italian because I believe no translation could ever do justice to the complexity and depth of his fiction. My first encounter with Lot 49 is abundant proof of this. I remember reading the first pages of the novel as an undergrad and wondering, What the hell is going on? But it was all exciting. Lot 49 gave me that rush of adrenaline you feel when reading a novel that offers all you need to sit down for long hours and not wanting to leave the book unless the Grim Reaper knocks on your door. Thus began my labor of love with Pynchon, as I stood with Oedipa “in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible” (CL, 1). By the time I got to the end of the book, I didn’t want it to finish, as if I had to “keep it bouncing” (CL, 112). Though the novel ended there (or perhaps it never did), it opened up a fresh horizon, enticing me to read Pynchon’s œuvre.

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Covering Planetary Pynchon – Tore Rye Andersen

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by Tore Rye Andersen

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
Illustration: Marc Getter

The Pynchon Wiki features a great little article by Linda Getter on her husband Marc Getter, the artist behind the striking dust-jacket of the first edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. According to Linda, Marc “loved the idea of a single image being responsible for communicating the essence of a book.” This is a lot to ask of a cover illustration, especially when the book it adorns is as complex as Gravity’s Rainbow, where rockets, dodoes, and pigs intermingle, and where excruciatingly beautiful landscape descriptions and vulgar sex scenes appear side by side with cartoonish tales of the future and pointed political satire. Even though it can be discussed whether Getter’s image communicates the essence of Pynchon’s masterpiece, the cover is certainly iconic. The vibrant colors (which are notoriously prone to fading) make the jacket pop, and the three-dimensional blue letters of the title and the sharp black silhouette of the London townhouses form an arresting contrast to the soft, airbrushed orange and yellow sky.[1]On the 1975 first edition of the French translation of the novel (incongruously titled Rainbow), the anonymous row of townhouses has been replaced with a more recognizable skyline that includes St. … Continue reading

I recently published the monograph Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The book is in many ways a life’s work, a summation of thirty years of deep fascination with and research on Pynchon’s work. As part of this fascination, I have written quite a few articles throughout the years on the paratexts of Pynchon’s novels, including analyses of the covers of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Inherent Vice. While the paratextual dimension is not central to my new book, my interest in book design made the task of choosing just the right cover image for my book a daunting one.

Briefly told, my book argues that Pynchon’s three largest novels — Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day — can profitably be read as a trilogy, or one large megatext, which presents a coherent world-historical account of how the emergence and global spread of European modernity and resultant phenomena such as industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism have threatened and often eradicated alternative worldviews, peoples, and other lifeforms, all with disastrous consequences for the planet. In other words, Pynchon’s global novels show how the rise of modernity led to the current age of the Anthropocene.
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Footnotes

Footnotes
↑1 On the 1975 first edition of the French translation of the novel (incongruously titled Rainbow), the anonymous row of townhouses has been replaced with a more recognizable skyline that includes St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge.

Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (Sample)

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Luc Herman and John M. Krafft

The following list of small stylistic and substantive differences between the 1961 typescript draft of Pynchon’s V. (held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin) and the published novel (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1963) was originally intended as an appendix to our Becoming Pynchon: Genetic Narratology and V. (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2023). It is only a sample of Pynchon’s many revisions, but we hope it may satisfy the curiosity of some readers and pique that of others.

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Gravity’s Rainbow and the Game of Go

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by Michael Denison

This article first appeared in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Volume VI, Issue 3, Fall 2014, pp. 53-57

There are indications that Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 book Gravity’s Rainbow is patterned after a traditional Oriental Go game. The game originated in China about 2500 years ago and is popular now all over Asia. In Japan, it is a national pastime and there are regular Go tournaments with all of the fanfare that we associate with international chess tournaments. There are also Go clubs and regular Go columns in the daily newspapers. A recent film, AlphaGo, covers the eventually successful attempts to design a computer program that could beat humans at Go.

For those not familiar with it, Go is a war game. It is fought on a wooden board marked with 19 and 19 crossing lines. These form 361 not-quite-square rectangles, although the game is played not on these spaces, but on the lines and intersections between them. Each player has 180 disc-shaped pieces, made of wood, slate, stone, or some more modern material, in their army. One player has all black stones and the other has all white. To win a game, the players must take turns and surround open areas with fortified walls that cannot be captured. In the end the player in control of the most space wins.

Chess has long been famous for its ability to teach strategy and tactics, but chess deals with small numbers and great differences in power between individual pieces. Go, on the other hand, deals with large numbers of equal pieces. To extend the military metaphor, the general in a chess game is fighting with infantry, cavalry, and light and heavy artillery. The general in a Go game is fighting on an open field with huge numbers of infantry.

Now for the comparison. Gravity’s Rainbow is a long book about rockets, but it is about rockets in the same way that Moby Dick is about whales. Just as an entire universe revolves around the white whale in Moby Dick, so an entire universe spins, (literally, in the last scene of the book) around the V2 rocket numbered 00000 in Gravity’s Rainbow.

Pynchon’s book has a huge cast of characters and a complex plot. It is a cyclical novel, beginning again where it leaves off at the end. It is a novel about small people caught up in great events and it is a novel about patterns in space and time and of the people who cannot see them. It is a book full of the sudden “shock of recognition” (“Oh, that Peenemünde!”) and of slowly-gathering awareness.

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Inherent Vice Diagrammed: the making of a new Pynchon resource

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A new Pynchon resource helps you keep track of Inherent Vice’s 130 characters, 37 entities, 6 gangs, 4 bands, and 1 dog. The website features color-coded diagrams, plot summaries and other resources so you can get the most out of reading Pynchon’s complex detective novel. Inherent Vice Diagrammed creator Paul Razzell explains the origins and development of this innovative resource.

THERE’S A TELLING IMAGE in the film adaptation of Inherent Vice where private eye Doc Sportello attempts to diagram the connections among 16 people involved in his intersecting cases. Using crayons, he writes characters’ names on his living room wall then draws lines between the names to show relationship, connection … or something. Why is this a telling image? 

For starters, it reminds you that Doc is trying to do exactly what you’re trying to do: see the relationships among so many characters and what those relationships can tell us about their motivations, loyalties, hostilities, and power dynamics. 

Second, the scene is the filmmaker’s acknowledgement to viewers that keeping track of all these characters and their relationships is hard work. Even a seasoned private eye like Doc, who’s had personal contact with most characters, needs a visual aid. (Doc’s diagram shows 16 characters only. There are over 50 in the film. His wall is nowhere near big enough to accommodate so many names at once nor, you are led to believe, is his mind.) 

Third, the image reveals a cognitive flaw in Doc’s diagrammatic approach: all of his lines are unlabeled. How is Glen related to Clancy? How is Coy related to El Drano? Doc’s highly generalized crazy wall doesn’t answer such questions. It carries no precise or informative meaning that would lead him—or us—from confusion to revelation. 

Inherent Vice Diagrammed brings you much closer to that revelation. This free resource helps you see through Doc’s marijuana haze with

Reading Inherent Vice is, after all, detective work. It’s about finding connections between many people, organizations, and entities with a view to solving crimes and, perhaps, seeing where America is headed.

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Pynchon on Record, Vol. 4

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The British literature scholar Cedric Watts once wrote: “One test of literary merit is fecundity, the ability to generate offspring” (xix). More than many other novelists, Pynchon’s work has generated not only literary but also musical offspring: songs, bands, entire albums inspired by Pynchon’s themes and novels. In 1982, Steven Moore made a first attempt to collect such songs and inspirations in Pynchon Notes under the title “Pynchon on Record,” to which Laurence Daw added “More on Pynchon on Record” in 1983 (and later expanded the list on The Modern Word). Sixteen years later, Juan García Iborra and Oscar de Jódar Bonilla published an article that added more names to the previous lists. Since then, the search algorithms on the internet have vastly improved—and so has the amount of available information and the possibilities to upload one’s own material.

Laurie Anderson’s “Gravity’s Angel” from Mr. Heartbreak.

I wrote a dissertation on music in Pynchon’s work (which I hope to publish soon), and since I believe that no large-scale study on this topic would be complete without acknowledging his musical offspring, I spent many days researching his impact on the music scene. I ended up with a list of more than eighty songs, artists, albums, and record labels who make their nods to the novelist (by the latest update on 14 July 2020, the list has grown to about 120 entries), and I am happy to present it here, replete with links and comments.

The Crying of Lot 49 initially proved to be the most fruitful novel for musical adaptations, likely because its length made it more accessible to readers and because it has been around longer than any other Pynchon novel except for V. However, publishing this blog post and finding more references, Gravity’s Rainbow overtook The Crying of Lot 49. Gravity’s Rainbow’s opening sentence has been used for band names, album and track titles (it’s certainly easier to remember than the opening sentence of The Crying of Lot 49). V. also has a good number of entries but the more recent novels have not received the same kind of attention from musicians. The range of genres covered by these recordings spans jazz (remarkably little), experimental music of all kinds, new classical music, world music, and all sorts of pop/rock subgenres such as rock’n’roll, indie, punk, new wave, or metal. The references range from homages to quotations and from inspirations to adaptations.

Some were recorded by well-known or influential bands and musicians such as Laurie Anderson, Radiohead, Devo, Mark Knopfler, Bill Laswell, or Soft Machine, others by college bands and in bedroom studios. The fact that many of the works of music cataloged are from recent years can likely be explained by the better visibility lesser-known bands enjoy on the internet nowadays, particularly with websites such as Myspace (anyone still remember that?), Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Youtube. I doubt that it took about fifty years after a novel was released to catch on in the music world. Most artists mentioned are based in Western Europe or North America. Although this may have to do with Pynchon’s popularity in these regions, it is more sensible to assume that I simply did not find artists whose references are in languages other than English. The reason that the adaptations of songs penned by Pynchon are predominantly recorded by lesser known artists may have to do with legal considerations. If little or no money is involved and the visibility of the artist is not so great, the author or the legal departments of the publishing houses may not care to intervene.

On the occasion of some of my New York and Philadelphia talks on the subject in 2015 and 2016 (and the Pynchon birthday party I organized at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich), musician and poet Tyler Burba interpreted songs from different novels. When I presented my work on Pynchon’s saxophone and kazoo in Atlanta, local musicians Reese Burgan and Caleb Herron accompanied the talk on the respective instruments. There is no telling how many other artists have referenced Pynchon or recorded songs from his books or were simply inspired by his work, but if progeny is a mark of literary accomplishment, these albums, songs, and bands are testament to Pynchon’s wide-ranging appeal as a writer of sonic fiction.

The following list is ordered chronologically, first by novel, then by the work of music. My personal favorites are marked with a magenta heart, thus: ♥. I am certain that I overlooked a great many other examples, so please contribute in the comments section! I will periodically update this post (last update: Jan 16th, 2022).

Contents

1 Introduction (this page)
2 “Entropy” and V.
3 The Crying of Lot 49
4 Gravity’s Rainbow
5 Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and miscellaneous homages
6 Bibliography and Biography

Image credit (top of page): spread-open cover of Land of Kush’s 2009 album Against the Day.

Cook’s Tour – Richard Poirier’s 1963 Review of Thomas Pynchon’s V.

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Cook’s Tour

The New York Review of Books, June 1, 1963
by Thomas Pynchon
Lippincott, $5.95

Richard Poirier

Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon’s first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathaniel West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them. V. is full of self-mystified people consistently avoiding direct relations with one another through disguise or evasion, people living the disrupted existences either of the Cook’s Tour, in one plot or in the other, of a kind of contemporary tourism called “yo-yoing,” the pointless repetitive passage and return on any convenient ferry or subway. Neither of the two interwoven plots is presented in sequence. One involves a self-styled schlemihl named Benny Profane, his naval buddies, and a gang in New (sometimes “Nueva”) York who call themselves the Whole Sick Crew. The other is an international melodrama of spying that covers the years since 1898. It is reconstructed by Herbert Stencil – the name meaning that he is a copy of his father in the effort to keep track of the elusive V. He cannot be sure what V. is, whether she (or it) is not wholly a fantasy.

Even the title of the novel is thus cryptographic, V. comes to stand for anything to which, in the absence of love, one devotes his passion and curiosity. It can refer to a bar called V-note, where Benny and the Crew listen to a jazz player named McClintic Sphere; to Valetta on Malta; to a sewer rat, Veronica, so named by a Father Fairing who wants, in his efforts to convert the rats of New York to Roman Catholicism, to make Veronica his first saint and his mistress; to Venus, the goddess, the planet, the mons Veneris – to Venezuela and Queen Victoria, to Vesuvius and other volcanoes, to the mythical land of Vheissu with its iridescent spider monkeys. So far as Stencil is concerned, however, V. is a lady internationally renowned as spy, lover, transvestite and impersonator. She has been on the scene of various international crises since her first appearance in Cairo during the Fashoda incident in 1898. There, in her nineteenth year, and under the name Virginia Wren, she is deflowered by a British agent. The next year she is in Florence coincident with a manufactured crisis over Vheissu (and, of course, Venezuela), during which she seduces Stencil’s father at the British consulate, thereby becoming Stencil’s mother. In subsequent impersonations, she is identified in Paris in 1913 as the Lesbian fetishist lover of a dancer named Melanie l’Heuremaudit. Still later, she is placed in German Southwest Africa during a native rebellion in 1922, and in this instance is given two simultaneous identities by Stencil: as a child of sixteen with white-blond, hip-length hair and the information that “I am Hedwig Vogelsang, and my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man”; and as the older, more subtle Vera Meroving who sports a glass eye, the face of which is also a watch, and a star sapphire sewn into her navel on Malta in 1919 – she was known then as Veronica Manganese. She makes her last appearance, in Stencil’s increasingly weird dehumanization of the figure, again on Malta in 1939 when, disguised as a priest with a detachable gold foot, she is knocked unconscious in a bombing raid and disassembled by a group of children who are less mean than inquisitive.
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The Science of Vectors, Spacetime, and Light in Pynchon’s Against the Day

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NOTE: This is the first of four parts of a discussion, originally written in 2007,  of some the science the shows up in Against the Day.

Part 1: The Michelson-Morley Experiment and the Failure of Classical Physics

Introduction

Thomas Pynchon is known for his dense and often obscure references to history, pop-culture, and especially science in his novels. His novel Against the Day is set around the beginning of the 20th Century, a time when our understanding of space, time, and light, rooted in classical physics, was completely overturned and replaced by a revolutionary new perspective based on the theories of special and general relativity. Pynchon takes the science of this period and incorporates it deeply into the language and structure of Against the Day, more so perhaps than in any of his other novels. Against the Day is suffused with meditations on light, space, and time, and often plays with the tension between different perspectives in math and physics – classical physics versus relativity, or Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism described with the imaginary numbers of quaternions versus the real numbers of vector analysis. This material is not just filler – it’s critical to the core of Against the Day, a fact which has been underappreciated in early reviews of the novel. One reviewer claimed that a new generation of writers has a “grasp of the systems that fascinate Pynchon — science, capitalism, religion, politics, technology — [that] is surer, more nuanced, more adult and inevitably yields more insight into how those systems work than Pynchon offers here.” When it comes to science at least, this claim is absolutely not true – Pynchon’s achievement in Against the Day proves that he is peerless at deeply and knowledgeably working the most abstract scientific subjects into the context of our common humanity that is the ultimate concern of his novels.

My goal here is twofold: First, to illustrate how Pynchon goes beyond using science as simply a backdrop, or a way to show off his amazing erudition – he weaves scientific concepts into the language and structure of his book better than any other author working today. Second, I’ll lay out a primer on the basic scientific ideas so that readers of Against the Day can make their own discoveries about the novel. I cover four main topics: (1) the Michelson-Morley experiment and the breakdown of classical physics, (2) space-time and special relativity, (3) the development of vector analysis and the eclipse of quaternions (I’ll give you my guess of the ‘Baedeker’ that Pynchon ‘looted’ for his material on quaternions and vectors), and finally, Riemann surfaces.

These four topics cover most of the scientific references in Against the Day. Pynchon, clearly being a sucker for historical trivia, is mindful of the chronological development of these subjects, so I’ll cover most of them from a historical perspective, including some famous, now-rejected explanations proposed for the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. It is also important to note the science Pynchon did not include in the novel – other important advances were being made at the time by some of the same scientists featured in the book, but Pynchon hardly mentions them – most notably those in statistical mechanics (and yes, entropy) made by J.W. Gibbs. In this book, Pynchon has chosen to focus on space, time, and light.

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Thomas Pynchon & Kirkpatrick Sale – Their Unfinished Science Fiction Musical “Minstrel Island”

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NOTE: Inside parenthetical citations: [P] = material from Pynchon’s draft; [S] = passage from Kirkpatrick Sale’s draft

“Minstrel Island” by Thomas Pynchon & Kirkpatrick Sale

“Minstrel Island” is an unpublished, unfinished musical (it’s also been referred to as a “science fiction musical” and “operetta”) written by Thomas Pynchon and his friend John Kirkpatrick Sale while they were attending Cornell University. The materials — one folder of handwritten and typed notes, outlines, and draft fragments from sometime in the spring of 1958 — are in the collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

Pynchon handwritten notes for Minstrel Island

The incomplete state of “Minstrel Island” allows us to observe something about the process that Thomas Pynchon and Kirkpatrick Sale followed as they tried to turn an idea into a piece of writing.  The following note sets out to demonstrate, as much as possible, the order in which the material was completed, something that allows us to discern at least one of the differences between Pynchon’s and Sale’s artistic sensibility.

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Thomas Pynchon, Newton’s Second Law and Entropy

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What does F = ma have to do with “Entropy”?

Among the books owned by the late UNIX pioneer Greg Chesson are two signed copies of Pynchon’s story “Entropy,” a bootleg edition and a first edition of the collection Slow Learner. In both copies, Pynchon did something unusual: along with his signature, he inscribed the equation for Newton’s second law of motion, F = ma, i.e., force (F) equals mass (m) times acceleration (a). In the bootleg edition, Pynchon went even further. Rather than cross out his printed name above his autograph, which authors sometimes do to emphasize their more personal signature (see the Low-Lands autograph below), Pynchon instead crossed out the word “Entropy” and wrote the equation beneath it.

Why would Pynchon write down Newton’s second law on a copy of a story about the second law of thermodynamics? One possibility is that this is a bit of an inside joke and a note of encouragement to a friend – hence the crossing out of the title and its replacement with F = ma in the bootleg copy. Intuitively, entropy suggests dissolution, a system that’s running down. Pynchon’s story muses on the negative consequences of the inexorable increase in entropy: disorder, death, and the ultimate end of the universe. F = ma suggests the opposite – a positive force, acceleration rather than loss of motion, an ability to act to alter the world, rather than simply let things run their course.

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About ThomasPynchon.com

ThomasPynchon.com (formerly the HyperArts Pynchon Pages) came online in 1997. With the publication of Against the Day in 2007, the alphabetical guides to Pynchon's novels were migrated to the Pynchon Wikis.

This website is affiliated with neither Mr Pynchon nor his representatives; rather, it's aligned with the community of folks who enjoy reading Pynchon's work — and digging deeper.

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Many have contributed to the content of ThomasPynchon.com and, ultimately, it's a team effort. Special thanks go to the folks at Pynchon-l at Waste.org, the long-standing list-serve dedicated to the ongoing discussion of Pynchon's works, with a shoutout to Allen "the Quail" Ruch and his seminal but, alas, departed theModernWord.com website

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