Ali Chetwynd (University of Michigan)
Many of the papers delivered at International Pynchon Week 2008, including my own on the implications of locatable centres in Gravity’s Rainbow, sought to justify discussion of what might be thought of as a Pynchonian ethics. Ethics is often seen as a matter of fulfilling simultaneous obligations. Much Pynchon criticism has insisted on the author’s ethical valuation of indeterminacy; in the current paper, I attempt to locate hints of a more solid core, a centre to a more determined functional worldview, in Pynchon’s ethical thought. Principally, I seek to more fully theorise the role that this concept of obligation plays in Pynchon’s work, contending that in his three most recent novels he is increasingly preoccupied by the obligations inherent in named social relations – patron, enemy, friend, father, brother, lover, and so on. I investigate the early question raised by Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice as to what duties living and loving in Pynchon’s worlds entail “beyond the usual boilerplate people owe anybody they’re fucking steady” (IV 2).
Boilerplate and indeterminacy map onto two schools of thought in ethics: generalism, which insists that certain rules apply in all cases, and particularism, which insists that no prescription about moral behaviour is valid or applicable in every case. Most work on the moral value of fiction insists that fiction tends to endorse a particularist worldview by presenting unique and problematic cases, and this should apply doubly to a writer like Pynchon whose worlds seem so indeterminate, indeterminable. Much of what I consider the best book-length work on Pynchon, from Thomas Schaub to Molly Hite, seems invested in a view of indeterminate, decision-delaying ethics that proceeds from Paul de Man or J Hillis Miller. This paper disagrees, in insisting that Pynchon is increasingly invested in the problematic necessity of decision and its constraints. Crucial to the tone of Pynchon’s work since Mason and Dixon, I argue, is the struggle of his characters to reconcile a sense of their own freedom from constraint with the inherent ethical obligations involved in fundamental relations like family, friendship and love.
The paper begins by briefly considering Slothrop’s actions after he has crossed the rocket site in Gravity’s Rainbow; the link between agency and ethics set up here I pursue in Pynchon’s later work. I suggest that enforced obligation of which the central characters are painfully conscious takes over from hidden organisation as the structural principle and central experience of the novels.
Taking the Scarsdale Vibe / Kit Traverse patronage plot from Against the Day as its central example, the paper proposes that these conspicuous obligations are a kind of morbid, inflexible parody of the dilemmas that emerge in the course of the more exploratory central narratives they motivate. Patronage is an act of discretionary ‘kindness’ which entails an obligation so strong that the beneficiary’s agency is compromised; I suggest that similar forces operate in all of Pynchon’s novels, most conspicuously in the most recent. But this greater consciousness of being uncomfortably obliged goes along with a clearer sense of duty to the relations inherent in human encounter. The pervasiveness of debt in Inherent Vice, the enforced journeys of Mason and Dixon, are shown to generate altruism and a sense of genuine exploration, in which exposure to a world full of others leads to choices about duty whose conclusions seem less inherent than the patron-figures might insist.
The paper ends by harking back to Slothrop, and the idea that his crossing of the rocket site entails a kind of ethical turning. If patronage plots are narratives of pursuit by obligation, then the positive counter-narrative Pynchon sets up in each novel is a narrative of turning, of the choice to return. Return in these novels involves self-scrutiny, and it involves imperfectible estimates about one’s relation to the world through which one turns. As perhaps the most widely cited lines of Inherent Vice in the press reviews insist, “built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt”. In the more recent work, the sense of inherent duties that exist in named social relations both compels this sense of doubt and helps to generate more determinedly productive responses to it.
Drawing on the philosophy of ethics and of decision, in addition to close readings of the novels in question, this paper attempts to demonstrate that many of the widely remarked tonal novelties in Pynchon’s recent work proceed from his early ideas about the structural value of return. What is new is a greater openness to working with ethical generality, an acceptance of the unavoidably but productively doubt-ridden experience of reconciling the value of autonomy with the obligatory value of the other.