In an earlier tradition of literary modernism, the interior monologue still presupposed an intelligible outer world. The writer stripped away surface illusions in the hope of finding the truth hidden beneath them, even if it took him on a journey into the heart of darkness. In recent fiction, the inner journey leads nowhere, neither to a fuller understanding of history as refracted through a single life nor even to a fuller understanding of the self. The more you dig the less you find, even though the activity of digging, pointless as it is, may be the only thing that keeps you alive. Pynchons ambitious but intentionally inconclusive novels, like so much recent fiction, dramatize the difficulty of holding the self together in a world without meaning or coherent patterns, in which the search for patterns and connections turns back on itself in tightening solipsistic circles. His protagonists—Stencil, Tyrone Slothrop, Oedipa Maas—each attempt to unravel the secret history of modern times, relying, in the absence of more reliable data, on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity. Surrogates—what else?—for the writer in search of a subject, these characters see plots everywhere and pursue their investigations with fanatical energy, only to see them dissolve into thin air. Each is gifted or cursed with the ability to imagine himself in a variety of situations and to adopt a variety of identities—a necessary defense against introspection, Pynchon implies, even though it leads only to pointless activity, never to any clear insights into the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name. Stencils impersonations and his habit of referring to himself in the third person serve to keep Stencil in his place: that is, in the third person. It would be simple, Pynchon says, ... to call him contemporary man in search of an identity The only trouble was that Stencil had all the identities he could cope with conveniently right at the moment: he was quite purely He Who Looks for V. [that is, for the Big One, the centurys master cabal] (and whatever impersonations that might involve). Without V., the mysterious woman whose trail promises to lead into the inner secrets of history but who becomes in the end a remarkably scattered concept, Stencil would be left with an insupportable inner vacuum. Paranoia keeps him sane, as it keeps Slothrop and Oedipa Maas in a semblance of sanity. In Gravitys Rainbow, Pynchon describes Slo-throps fear of losing his mind. If there is something com-forting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long. Paranoia serves as a substitute for religion because it provides the illusion that history obeys some inner principle of rationality, one that is hardly comforting but that is preferable, after all, to the terrors of anti-paranoia. The underlying kinship of madness and art is an old idea, but it has taken on a meaning in contemporary literature very different from the meaning it had in the nineteenth century or even in the early part of the twentieth century. For the romantic artist, it meant that the unsocialized self is the real self and that when art strips away the accumulated layers of civilized conventions and common sense, it reveals the authentic core of personality. For Pynchon, it means that art fabricates an illusion of meaning— a plot in which everything fits—without which the burden of selfhood becomes unbearable. Paranoia is the discovery that everything is connected. But Pynchons own art—like contemporary art in general—simultaneously undercuts this discovery. His plots lead nowhere. Stencil never finds V., any more than Oedipa uncovers the secret system of underground communication that connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. Nor does Slothrop uncover the mega-cartel that operates the modern war machine. Instead, his pursuit of the sinister and elusive Firm only strengthens the suspicion that we live in a world where nothing is connected, a world without agency or control or discernible direction, in which things only happen and history consists of isolated events, newly created one moment to the next. Pynchon parodies the romantic quest for meaning and selfhood. His protagonists vaguely recall earlier American seekers—Henry Adams, Isabel Archer, Captain Ahab—only to call attention to the far more desperate predicament of the contemporary seeker after truth, who has begun to understand not only that history has no inner secrets but that the search for hidden meanings, even though it keeps him from disintegrating, may grow out of the same impulse to control and dominate, the same destructive will-to-power that has given rise to the war machine itself and to its most terrifying expression, the gravity-defying guided missile. If art shares with technology the irrational compulsion to escape from the natural law of entropy, as Pynchon implies, the only feasible alternative to paranoia seems to be a resigned acceptance of irreversible decline: the gravity that pulls everything irresistibly down into nothingness. Christopher Lasch. THE MINIMALIST AESTHETIC: ART AND LITERATURE IN AN AGE OF EXTREMITY. In The Minimal Self. The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times. W W Norton & Co; Auflage: New edition (18. September 1985), New York, p. 155-157.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 09:54:28 +0000
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