The Elegant Variation

REMAINS OF AGAINST THE DAY

We're pleased to have Jim Ruland return to offer his parting Pynchon perspective.  And if you want to express your thanks to Jim directly, you can stop by Sunday night's Vermin on the Mount (of which more anon).  We're also pleased to announce that Stephen Elliott will be stopping by here on Thursday to take the reins as we head off to NYC, and he's got a very interesting announcement to make.  Stay tuned.

GUEST ESSAY BY JIM RULAND

Against the Day is a book of terrorists.

Bomb huckers, outlaws and anarchists lurk everywhere and—surprise, surprise—nearly all of them are likable. Against the Day is like a Louis L’Amour novel in reverse but instead of the saga of the Sackett family moving westward, endlessly crossing the frontier, Pynchon’s Traverse’s travel from West to East, hurling themselves against the tide of history and humanity and into the teeth of American enterprise during the time when her fortunes were being made.

These are not basement anarchists building bombs with English dynamite but mavericks employing the very tools used to extract wealth from countless mines with little or no thought to the human cost. Yet in recent reviews by Kirsch and Kakutani, we’re led to believe that the Traverse family’s relationship to violence makes them morally inferior, as if the gears of Capitalism weren’t leaving a trail of corpses in its wake, as if violence was an instrument to be used only as a last resort, as if bombs don’t make sense, as if life wasn’t cheap and getting cheaper by the minute.

This is why some people hate Pynchon: because his history of the world reads like an English explorer’s lifeboat story—A terrible end is a foregone conclusion so let’s get on with the atrocities shall we?—but he’ll make you labor over the most groaningly awful puns and then break into song, usually featuring a ukulele or a kazoo.

After reading Kirsch’s asinine assessment and Kakutani’s predictable dismissal, I have reached the conclusion that neither is equipped to consider the counterfactual reality at work in Against the Day. One thing is clear from Kirsch’s review is that they don’t know how to read Pynchon. So many of Kirsch’s proclamations about Against the Day could easily apply to any of Pynchon’s novels, which makes one wonder what Kirsch is doing reviewing this book in the first place.

For example, he has no appreciation of Pynchon’s scope. When we open a novel we expect to be presented with a narrative. Even if the subject matter is long or short, familiar or foreign, compact or unruly, the expectation is that the writer will manage the material in a way that allows a story to be expressed. Pynchon does not follow these rules. If most novels are like nature narratives on the Discovery channel, Pynchon’s are like long shots of ants scurrying about in an ant farm; at first their antics seem utterly random, but the more one watches, the deeper the suspicion that the participants in the drama are communicating with one another in meaningful ways. To put it another way, the organizing principle of the modern novel is the family; Pynchon is interested in systems.

Pynchon challenges the reader to think about the novel is different ways. That should be a given. It was, at least for a while, but not anymore. This is puzzling because hasn’t it always been the hallmark of great writers to change the form? One could even say their greatness is measured by the extent to which they succeed. Melville was a washed up travel writer before he shattered the boundaries of classification with Moby Dick. Joyce seemed doomed to repeat the story of his adolescence until Leopold Bloom emerged in the fourth chapter of Ulysses. Their struggle/progress is immaterial because they not only wrote great novels, but they changed the way we think about and respond to them.

Strangely, Kirsch and Kakutani don’t cut Pynchon any slack even though Pynchon has always written like Pynchon. His novels have been dizzyingly dazzling from the get-go. His first novel V. has all the earmarks of his mature work. His early stories, his self-proclaimed juvenilia, were celebrated for his astonishing maturity to the same degree that his most recent work is being castigated for its outrageous silliness. Embedded in Kirsch’s and Kakutani’s criticisms are their disappointment at Pynchon’s refusal to come around to the fluorescent side of the moon and commit to hyper-realism; Pynchon cultivates such extreme fandom because his readers understand that they have to come him.

Take this line from Kirsch’s review: “The gaudy names Mr. Pynchon gives his characters are like pink slips, announcing their dismissal from the realm of human sympathy and concern.” This is the equivalent of saying One Hundred Years of Solitude is trite and banal because so many of the characters have the same name. Still, one can’t help but wonder where Mr. Kirsch has been all these years. This has been Pynchon’s shtick since before 1962 when he opened his O. Henry prize-winning story “Entropy” with the appearance of one Meatball Mulligan. When a certain stoker by the name of “O.I.C. Bodine” appeared five hundred and seventeen pages into Against the Day, I all but stood up and cheered. (O.I.C. stands for Officer in Charge, interpolate the “n” and O.I.C. becomes “oink.”)

Kirsch is also at a loss for how to make sense of Pynchon’s now-you-see-‘em, now-you-don’t cast of thousands, which tells me the man has never waded through the Slothrop-less sections of Gravity’s Rainbow or the Zoyd Wheelerless patches of Vineland. It’s a penchant of Pynchon’s that makes experienced readers wary of latching onto characters because their time in the novel is bound to be short-lived. I think this is something Pynchon picked up from his travels in the U.S. Navy. Most war movies would have you believe that when you enlist in the armed services you bond with your buddies in boot camp, you serve together, fight together and die in each other’s arms as the credits roll. In reality, the average soldier/sailor/airman/marine comes into contact with more people in their first three months of duty then in the sum of all of their previous experience on the planet. People are constantly coming and going, signing on, shipping out, moving along on orders to the next duty station—to say nothing of disappearing, deserting, going AWOL or getting killed. It’s a cyclone of human activity that is so puzzling that there are people in the Pentagon whose jobs are to predict how many people they need to enlist today to meet the needs of the armed services tomorrow. In other words, an impossible system to base a narrative around; but that’s precisely how Pynchon operates.

Veterans of the military enjoy Pynchon on an entirely other level than ordinary civilians. There’s an entire plateau of understanding that veterans, particularly naval veterans, intuitively inhabit. For example, when I first picked up V. and encountered the barmaid with the propeller’s tattooed on her buttocks I felt like someone was speaking directly to me through the novel, someone who’d walked in my boondockers, for embedded in this mundane reference is an even more profane pun: the propeller, as any sailor will tell you is also known as the ship’s screw. This knowledge is not essential to understanding Pynchon’s work any more than one needs to be Irish Catholic to read Joyce, but it’s the place where Pynchon revels in revealing himself. Perhaps gleefully so.

Nowhere in all of Pynchon’s work is this more true than in the Chums of Chance sequences that open Against the Day and stitch many of the disparate episodes together. The Chums of Chance are simultaneously characters within the novel and characters in a series of boy’s adventure books called The Chums of Chance (the first of literally dozens of doubles at work in the novel). Both appear to be modeled after the Frank Merriwell series—an early precursor to the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys narratives that were used for intellectual entertainment and moral instruction.

The Chums fly around onboard airships filled with an assortment of impossible gadgetry. Each of the five Chums is defined by their role on the ship and Pynchon seems to delight in applying every idiomatic expression of his two-year stint in the Navy. From singling up all lines to the brightwork that always needs polishing, the Chums are proof that not even Pynchon can refrain from romanticizing his time at sea. Like a modern-day Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Pynchon abandoned his studies at college for “two years before the mast.”

But as the years wear on and the Chums become salty old vets in their own right they come to question where their orders are coming from, and why they should carry them out the way they’ve always carried them out when their work seems not to make a bit of difference on the ball of confusion below. Like the Flying Dutchman, they become the stuff of storybook fantasy while the world erupts in total war.

Perhaps in some way Kirsch and Kakutani see their own situation here: assigned a tiresome chore, they carry it out without relish or zeal because the results fail to register an impact on the landscape.

Critics: abandon ship; Pynchon fans: full speed ahead.

HOT FOR PYNCHON

We're shutting down for the holiday weekend so don't expect much in this space until Monday when we return with a special edition of 3MI featuring Jonathan Lethem on the subject of rediscovered '30s great Daniel Fuchs.  Jim Ruland also promises continuing Pynchoniana (see below), and we might even have a special day of Stephen Elliott guest blogging.  A fun-filled TEV week ahead, so enjoy your holidays, be safe and come back rested and ready for action on Monday.

Who was that that said “I contain multitudes”? I think it was either Walt Whitman or Traci Lords, but I’m feeling a little lost in the multiverse that is Against the Day. It’s not that I’ve run out of things to say—on the contrary, I’ve barely scratched the surface, but this short week is already over. Maybe I’m still hungover from the Pynchon release party on Monday night. Maybe I’m still peeved about the negative reviews. Whatever the case may be, it’s obvious we’re going to have to continue this conversation next week.

So stand-by for a response to Kirsch and Kakutani. Hold fast for an ass-clown proof Pynchon primer. Prepare yourself for a look at Against the Day that doesn’t completely suck. And since my agitated state has left me all but useless for careful considerations, I turned to Duncan Murrell, a writer, editor, journalist and recovering Marine, for a more sober assessment of Pynchon’s merits. Murrell’s perspective is interesting as he collects Thomas Pynchon first editions and has a personal connection to the writer.

TEV: How long have you been collecting Pynchon first editions? How did you come to start collection Pynchon first editions?
DM: How long have you been on fire? (I kid.) I think I've been collecting his first editions since I was 19 or so, after I'd read something else he'd written, the introduction to another writer's novel. That book had been my mother's parting gift as I went off to college. I wanted to know Pynchon after that, and since this is impossible, I went and found Gravity's Rainbow in a used bookstore in Ithaca later that year. It was years after that, after buying others, that I realized I had a collection. I should say that it was also years before I actually read one of those shiny, fine, untorn and only slightly discolored books. My mother is a collector, if by "collector" you mean someone who collects things so she can understand herself. She has countless collections: christening cups, apple peelers, Sandwich glass, wind-up toys, 18th-century Maryland silver, Japanese woodblock prints, Danish landscape painters, and an edition of Salvador Dali's "Alice in Wonderland," which has never left the fucking box. It drives me crazy. But I'm my mother's son, so I began collecting books. My mother started collecting books after I began, and now she has a fantastic collection, all gems that she found for cheap. (It's not worth it to her unless it's cheap, or fairly so.) So, among other things, she's got a complete Saul Bellow collection, which she won't let me read. I have to go out and find used paperbacks of Bellow. I now collect rattlesnake rattles, and I have four handmade hot dogs that are now more than twenty years old. They live in my freezer.

TEV: What's your best "find"?
DM: The first edition of The Crying of Lot 49 that I found in the Library of Babel, next to "The Plaster Cramp." I just snatched it, kicked an Inquisitor in the mouth, and jumped into the hexagonal emptiness beyond the rail. That's how I roll. I also found my Vindication there, but it fell out of my pocket.

That would have been cool. Truly, though, I've had no great finds. I don't have my mother's patience. She makes great finds, I just find. Since Vineland, it's been easy: go out to the store, get the first edition, wrap it in plastic, put it on the shelf. I've stumbled on all of the rest but one. I went out looking for a good first of The Crying of Lot 49. (You wouldn't believe how many people apparently used that book as a trivet. Lesson: do not put your pot of stew down on your books, that's what I'm saying.) I'm happy to have it because I love that cover. The sidewalk, the horn drawn in chalk. It's pretty. That's my best find, the one that I actually wanted. The others just threw themselves at me. There are supposed to be some extraordinary editions of Gravity's Rainbow out there. Accounts of them are something like myths. I'd like one of those. Also, anything in Danish.

TEV: Why Pynchon?
DM There's something about Pynchon that's very sweet. Sweet like a fox. I have to admit that the bit of Pynchon I go back to more than anything else is not one of his works of fiction, but the introduction to his friend Richard Farina's book Been Down So Long Looks Like Up To Me. You might remember Farina from that Positively Fourth Street, by David Hajdu. Farina was married to Mimi Baez. Influenced Dylan, who was a little jealous of Farina. Farina also influenced Pynchon, who was not jealous of him, during their time together at Cornell. Farina-like figures pop up all over Pynchon's fictional worlds (Tyrone Slothrop, from Gravity's Rainbow, is one), and although BDSLLLUTM is obviously an apprentice work, it's fairly obvious that it had some impact on Pynchon. Considering that Farina died on Carmel Valley Road after riding a motorcycle away from a book party celebrating the publication of that first novel, Pynchon's introduction to that novel -- only available in subsequent editions -- is moving and funny and self-deprecating. I love it. Book collectors, by the way, generally consider the edition of BDSLLLUTM with Pynchon's introduction to be more valuable than the first edition.

TEV: There’s always a tendency to overstate Pynchon’s influences because we know so little about them, would you agree that some things – Pynchon’s stint in the Navy, his friendship with Farina – have been understated?
DM: In the introduction, Pynchon seems to suggest that without Farina's "dangerous presence, not wearing a jacket or tie, more hair than was fashionable, always sitting with the same group of people. Quiet, but intensely there, checking things out," he might have always been a buttoned up, repressed writer without Farina's influence and friendship. And Lord knows, there's nothing repressed about him now. Yet, you can still detect that tentative, shy, self-deprecating person in much of Pynchon's humor, and in his concerns as a writer.

TEV: You went to Pynchon’s alma mater, Cornell. Did that help foster a connection to Pynchon and Farina?
DM: Pynchon and Farina were among the first students of Cornell Prof. James McConkey ( "Court of Memory," many others) and I was one of Jim's last students. (He's still alive, but not teaching so much.) McConkey couldn't be more different than those two, but I used to enjoy hearing him talk about them, particularly Farina.

TEV: What sets Pynchon apart from other writers? That sounds like a lame question, but I guess what I’m driving at is what makes Pynchon unique?
DM: I have always loved Pynchon's bits, his set pieces, his contained moments of theatricality, his bullshitting, his musical comedy. I'm not talking about his style and attitude toward narrative, which also contains these elements. I'm talking about the dropped in moments, self-contained and ephemeral. They're unnecessary, of course, if you're the sort of person who has to always be moving from here to there at the most efficient rate possible. I think these moments are part of Pynchon's greater idea for novels, that the best become obsessions for the reader, and it's out of kindness that he gives us a break. These are the moments when you're encouraged to engage your primitive brain, take a breath, get high.

TEV: Like Byron the Bulb?
DM: Exactly. I remember best the little things, such as that excerpt in Gravity's Rainbow from a fictional philologist's work, called Tales of the Schwarzkommando, in which the spiritual leader of a group of rocket-worshipping engineers resolves a conflict between observed and divine knowledge:

"Proud man," said the Nguarorerue. "What are these data, if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket's own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value."

Pynchon at his best: wry and in love with the farcical potential of gnomics, religionists, and scientists.

TEV: I love that your favorite scene is from one of the counterfactual histories embedded in the novel!
DM: While we're at it, we should admire some of the other book titles Pynchon has invented over the years (thanks Wikipedia):

An Account of the Singular Peregrinations of Dr. Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of that Outlandish and Fantastical Race

The Courier's Tragedy, by Richard Wharfinger (a Jacobean revenge play in five acts)

How I Came to Love the People, Anonymous

The Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari

King Kong: 18 vls. by Mitchell Prettyplace (a 'definitive study')

Neil Nosepicker's Book of 50,000 Insults, The Nayland Smith Press, Cambridge, 1933

On Preterition, by William Slothrop ('among the first books to've been not only banned but ceremonially burned in Boston')

Plotting the Stealth and Intrigue of the Jacobean Revenge Plays, by Dr. Emory Bortz

Things That Can Happen in European Politics, by Ernest Pudding

The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots (with illustrations by Walt Disney) That list not only cracks me up, but I think it's a pretty good introduction to the Pynchon attitude.

TEV: Like breaking out in song.
DM: I love that little musical number from Gravity's Rainbow, sung by Seaman Bodine of the U.S. destroyer John E. Badass (Jim Ruland served on that ship, right?), [Ed. Yes.] who is supposed to be Saure's contact. It's a little song about drugs and genies, and discovering that your generous, hash-happy genie is "a narco man, and he busted me right whur I lay." It's funny sad. Who hasn't been betrayed by their genies?

DISPATCHES FROM THE COUNTERFACTUALLY CHALLENGED

Jim Ruland's Pynchon coverage resumes.  Thanks for bearing with us.

Adam Kirsch is a hater. Here’s a shocker: so is Michiko Kakutani. Discuss.

PYNCHON WEEK COMMENCES

Many thanks to Jim Ruland for providing the content for Pynchon Week.

It’s always exciting when a major novelist releases a new work; but when that novelist is Thomas Pynchon it is a rare and beautiful thing, a cause for celebration. Pynchon occupies a place in the literary zeitgeist that is unique in American letters. The breadth and scope of his novels surpass anything most reasonable novelists would even attempt and his intellect is outpaced only by his imagination. No one questions his Promethean talents, but we don’t quite know what to do with him either. He is, perhaps, the only literary genius this country has ever produced.

Two of the obstacles that confront the reader interested in summiting Mt. Pynchon are his reputation for writing difficult, encyclopedic books and his inaccessibility as a literary recluse. Make no mistake: he is difficult and he is a recluse, but for those who don’t fully engage his works that’s all he is. These hurdles don’t deter serious readers from delving into his books so much as distract them from considering what the books are actually about. A reader interested in offbeat approaches to early American history who might be predisposed toward a book like Mason & Dixon, for example, has to sift through a lot of noise before they encounter an appreciation of the novel and its merits.

That’s what you’ll find here this week: considerations of Pynchon’s work, not more commentary on the mythology surrounding the man and his motives. There’ll be reflections, reviews, discussions with people with unusual approaches to the books, and if we can rustle up a ukulele and a kazoo, we may even break into song. All together now…

PYNCHON HIGHLIGHTS

Like many writers with a reputation for difficulty, Pynchon’s books are often screamingly funny. I asked several of my esteemed colleagues to name their favorite scene from Pynchon’s oeuvre.  You're invited to join them and post your favorite scene from Pynchon’s previous novels in the comments section below. - Jim Ruland

Sean Carswell: My favorite Pynchon? Mason and Dixon smoking pot with George Washington while Washington's slave sits around making master jokes. Tyrone Slothrop escaping in a hot air balloon and fending of Major Marvy's Mothas with custard pies. Tyrone Slothrop dressed up as the pig-themed superhero stealing hash from Harry Truman's windowpane.

Louis Gallo: It's been quite a while since I've read V, I didn't like Vineland much at all, but two scenes stick out for me from Gravity's Rainbow: 1. The utterly gross, disgusting shit-eating scenes. 2. The sudden disappearance of Slothrop from the novel altogether, except for the sound of his harmonica in the distance. That bit was fantastic. Main character just disappears!!! Into the Preterite, I assume.

Susan Henderson: The scene that sticks out for me is easy. It's Esther's nose job in V. The doctor who does the surgery is an old war veteran who knows first-hand about the fraternity of freaks who have suffered deforming injuries in war. He's a rough man with old-fashioned techniques for plastic surgery; and there's Esther on the day of her surgery, medicated numb but not unconscious. And the whole scene is gruesome and oddly sexual. There's a line the doctor says as he's sawing and snapping bones about how frail we all are. God, it's wonderful, and you're not at all expecting what happens when she returns to his office for post-op, all wild-eyed and bandaged and turned on.

Dan Kaplan: Here's one that strikes me. In The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, in her quest to understand the operations and verify the existence of the mail-distribution organization Trystero, wanders into Golden Gate Park, where she happens onto "a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours." Such a simple, profound piece of oddity--Oedipa happening onto others' collective dream, which is apparently her own reality--that perpetuates the blurring of what does and doesn't exist, is "real" or imagined in the novel. Amplifying the spookiness is that these are displaced, spectral children who are on the outskirts of safety, hiding in surprising places and deceiving those who love them. Disturbing. Love it.

Carolyn Kellogg:  So much of Pynchon's work is ridiculous wordplay to the extreme -- say, the shrink Dr. Hilarius in The Crying of Lot 49, paranoid and locked up while the police come to arrest him -- that it's easy to overlook how prescient he is. In that book, published in 1966, there's a bar near Yoyodyne populated with engineer-type conspiracy theorists listening to Stockhausen on the jukebox; Saturdays are live electronic music nights. Ridiculous and futuristic, maybe: but since the 1990s, I've been going to that bar. We've all been there. It's at the bar that protagonist Oedipa first sees a drawing that looks like a muted trumpet. It may symbolize a secret mail system, which might imply many other things (then again, it might not). I had the symbol tattooed on my wrist. Some people recognize it. One day I was at Trader Joe's and the checkout guy asked me about it. "It's from a book," I said vaguely, not wanting to sound too smarty-pants. He asked about the book and I told him. "Yeah, I knew it," he said, smiling. I asked what he thought of The Crying of Lot 49, but he hadn't read it; I was the third person who'd come to his register that week with the same tattoo. Either I'm a member of a vast conspiracy (so secret that I'm unaware of it), or there are legions of Pynchon fans out there, all wearing our affiliation on our skin.

John Leary: V, I read in 1994, when I was "stationed" in Vietnam. V is a book about paranoia, and I loved it, and it spoke to me deeply, it seemed. Then a few years after I left Vietnam I read in the newspaper that Lariam, the anti-malarial medication I was taking in Vietnam, had as one of its side effects paranoia. So, that didn't exactly ruin the book for me, but it maybe lost a little resonance. I no longer really want to go to Malta, for example.

Scott O’Connor: I’m a big fan of a sequence not far into V., where the two protagonists, Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, cross paths for the first time in the NYC sewer system. Profane has gotten work with a shabby band of alligator hunters, all armed with 12-gauge shotguns and unreliable flashlights, navigating the narrow refuse pipes far below Manhattan. Stencil, following his own plotline (and the title character of the book), has also journeyed down into the sewers--disguised, unfortunately, as an alligator. In the course of Profane’s pursuit of the gator, we hear the troubled bureaucratic history of the alligator patrol, the story of the patrol’s boss, brief glimpses of other guys on the squad, and the hair-raising legend of a Depression-era Catholic priest who tried (and failed gruesomely) to bring religion to the rats of the very sewer system Profane is stumbling through. All this within the 20-odd pages of Chapter Five, and told from the perspectives of (among others) Profane, Stencil, Father Fairing, even a couple of the catechized rats in question. Profane finally catches up to Stencil (in what must be one hell of a convincing gator costume). Gunshots ensue. The density of imagination in Pynchon sequences like this always remind me of Silver-Age Fantastic Four and Justice League comics: each panel is so packed with action and ideas—a fight scene, lines of overlapping dialogue, a villainous diatribe, subplots lurking in the background—that it threatens to become completely overwhelming when, at the last second, it propels you off into the next panel, and the next and the next, careening hellbent to the end of the book. More bang for your buck, really, with this kind of stuff.

Karen Palmer: Pynchon himself dismissed 1965's The Crying of Lot 49, saying, "I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I'd learned up till then." But the book -- witty, sly, and absurd -- offers the melancholy pleasure of prescience. In an early scene Pynchon's heroine, Oedipa Maas, encounters the Peter Pinguid Society, a group of right-of-the-Birchers, drip-dry-suited Yoyodyne engineers whose Civil War hero commanded the Confederate man-of-war "Disgruntled." In 1863, Pinguid (Dubya) plans an attack on San Francisco (Iraq), to open a second front for the war (on terror). Meanwhile, Russia dispatches its Far East Fleet, hoping to discourage Britain and France from aiding the Confederacy. The "Disgruntled" may have sighted one of the Russian ships (WMD); shots may have been fired (9/11); some vessel or other may have been sunk (Mission Accomplished) . . .

Rolf Potts: My strongest impression from his writing comes from the only book of his I read, V, where he's talking about how Benny Profane rides the subway and is weak with lust because there are so many pretty girls everywhere. I was like 21 when I read that, and it seemed so true. Still does, on spring days in NY or Paris.

Danna Sides: I loved Gravity's Rainbow even though experiencing the book was very much like chasing a rabbit down wormhole after wormhole, which leads to yet another wormhole. I enjoyed thinking about the mythological and occult connections conflated with world events, and how literally everybody and everything was in there: Andrew Jackson to Hansel & Gretel; genocide to seriously twisted sex. If I had to chose, I'd say I especially like the flashback of when Slothrop loses his blues harp down the loo and the Orpheus/descent into the Underworld allusions. I also enjoyed his oblique commentary on genocide: Herero/Jews. Lots of humor and serious rage right under the surface. His brain is like Google: his associations are limitless, fluid, wild interconnections galore. I remember thinking his prose made my brain tingle like when I drink a little too much champagne.

Benjamin Weissman: The bar scene in V with the bosom nipple spigots has never left me.

Antoine Wilson: My favorite/most memorable Pynchon moment is probably the visit with Washington in Mason & Dixon, where Washington is smoking hemp, being entertained by the proto-Sammy-Davis-Jr. slave, and Martha brings in the munchies.

PYNCHON'S INVISIBILITY

Many thanks to Theresa Duncan for contributing this essay.  She is a former video game designer and current cultural critic and filmmaker. She hails from Detroit, Michigan, but currently lives in Los Angeles. Theresa has written for Feed Magazine, Artforum, and Slate.

"My silence was the silence of ten men." --David Berman

I don't really think about Pynchon's invisibility, because somewhere in the back of my mind I know that like the Cottingsley Fairies he hides from THEM but reveals himself to US. So he's always there, you know, the game of fort/da forever over, because you can't lose what you never had. Pynchon's invisibility is so much more vivid, isn't it? Than seeing some warmed-over wonder read at the 92nd Street Y and you have to go "that's his voice?" matching it with the better one that comes like wind out of the great library of the uncollected unconscious to invisibly light up every book you've ever read. And then--God--listen to the sycophants in the audience titter at even the unfunny ones in order to prove that they are closer to the great man's mind and humor and vision.

Pynchon's disappearance then, is nearly as great an act of generosity as the wonder-books he himself writes. Like the Hebrew moment of Tsim Tsum where God first withdrew from the universe in order to make room for his creation the universe, Pynchon's withdrawal means that we get that much more mental real estate. You know that feeling? You wait and wait for a book like this, buy it, and when you get around to opening it, you just start expanding...There's not even any photos of Pynchon except that silly sailor one. Invisibility. Perhaps it's a vain celebrity peccadillo, but to me it works as an act of psychoanalytic silence, where what I really pay for is to have the great man with his mighty mind listen, not talk.

And in that silence (still so vividly shaped by compassion and humor and intelligence) we suddenly have a limitless place to put the best of ourselves. Have you ever had a session that was timed a half-minute off, and had to witness another analysand waiting in the tiny dim foyer off Central Park West, next to your leaded glass windows and the your long green velvet curtain, which you thought were perhaps imaginary, or maybe props placed just so to frame your mental stage productions and yours alone? I mean, you're basically paying to be an only child aren't you, not for this shit. And so by sparing us the sight of other readers, we get a book that has room enough not for just ten men, not just a limitless amount of them, but room for just one. And now I'm afraid that's all the time we have. That's not me you see brushing past as you climb from the waiting room outside into your own personal thought-kingdom. Dear Reader, (as they used to say) it's probably just some fake fairy from a photo, you know, or a trick of the literary light.