Birger Vanwesenbeeck (SUNY, Fredonia)
The question of mourning has long constituted a central but, until recently, relatively little studied aspect of Pynchon’s fiction.1 From the “great death” that haunts the character Nathan “Lardass” Levine in Pynchon’s first published story “The Small Rain” (Slow Learner 50) to the “Hyperthrenia” or “Excess of Mourning” (25) of the widowed land surveyor Mason in Mason & Dixon and, more recently, the grief of paternal loss traversed—in psychological as well as geographical sense—by the four sibling protagonists of Against the Day, Pynchon has continued to create characters who find themselves confronted with what Freud—in “Trauer und Melancholie”—calls “the bonus (Prämie) of staying alive”. Left with the intolerable gift of survival, these characters find themselves, much like Hamlet, at once intimidated and urged on by the ghostly demands of the work of mourning.
The Crying of Lot 49 remains the Pynchon text where this thematic of mourning is formulated most explicitly and extensively, and through a direct engagement with Freud’s “economic” model of mourning. For not only does Pynchon’s mourning protagonist, Oedipa, explicitly define her coping in terms of work—as in her well-known rhetorical query “Sorting isn’t work?”—but the novel also closely mirrors Freud’s approach to mourning in representing grief as an energy conundrum of sorts. Indeed, it is Freud’s puzzlement over the “wasteful spending” of mourning—i.e. why does it take such extraordinary amounts of “psychic energy” in order to come to terms with loss?—that finds its Pynchonian equivalent in the ergonomic aberration of Maxwell’s Demon. The latter, a hypothetical device that would overturn the universe’s tendency towards death features in the novel as a figure for Oedipa’s own incapacity to process (or “proceed toward”) death, much as Freud’s bonus analogy signals such a logic of supplementation within the work of mourning.
In this fashion, Pynchon’s fiction—and The Crying of Lot 49 in particular—can be said to render apparent an aspect of Freud’s understanding of mourning that remains mostly implicit in the latter’s own writings on loss: namely that mourning is not simply a work or, more controversially, a state of mind analogous to melancholy, but that its operations are perhaps most usefully addressed from an ecological point of view, one that hinges on questions of sustainability and resources, psychic ones as well as material ones, including the very environmental possibility for confronting loss in the heavily urbanized and de-natured societies of the (post)modern world. It is the latter question that most forcibly haunts The Cyring of Lot 49 whose Southern California setting, with its “total absence of trees,” might justifiably be called a “post-humous” landscape in so far as any remaining presence of the soil (or “humus” in Latin) is here rapidly giving way to the land developer’s ruthless “need to possess, to alter the land, to bring new skylines.” Mourning, which requires a burial site after all, thus becomes increasingly difficult, a point that the novel raises quite explicitly when Oedipa first learns of a cemetery that was taken out for the East San Narciso Freeway. Yet Pynchon’s ecological approach to mourning is not solely a comment on the environmental ills of the modern world. For the novel at the same time harks back to the polis of the ancient Greeks where, as I intend to show, a similar ecology of mourning can already be discerned in Sophocles’ Antigone. Indeed, it is Antigone—an “Oedipa” in a filial sense—whose desire to bury (and mourn) the corpse of her slain brother Polyneices finds itself thwarted by the unforgiving edicts of the modern polis. Yet aided by the wind—which moves sand over the corpse at night—Antigone insists on burying Polyneices much like Oedipa, in direct opposition to the land developers, expresses her attachment to “a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones could still rest in peace.”