Doug Haynes (University of Sussex)
Using Hegel’s concept of the unhappy consciousness as a rubric for reading, my paper will investigate how Pynchon’s writing mediates the conflicts of class society.
The paper is part of a book-length project in which I seek to define and socialise the concept of ‘black humour’ in modernist and postmodern writing. Pynchon has frequently been regarded as a writer of such humour but, historically, this appellation seems to refer simply to his cynical or sometimes absurdist tone. Seeing black humour as a kind of ‘existentialism-lite’ belongs surely to a generation of commentary long superseded by more theorised critics. I nevertheless think that the term has potential contemporary relevance: using a set of ideas that stem from Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’ from the Phenomenology of Spirit, I present black humour as a form of self-attack that destabilises the position of the writing subject. Containing elements of both master and slave, the voice of black humour is, as Beckett once suggested, the risus purus: the laugh that laughs at the laugh; the laugh that, in other words, refuses to confirm either a stable human subject or lifeworld. Black humour expresses an unresolved conflict that in Hegel relates to the subject’s struggle to transcend a sceptical and empty egoism, but its analogues are diverse and everywhere. In, for example, Baudelaire’s comments on laughter, modernity itself is essentially risible. Humanity, he says, is torn between thoughts of itself as, on the one hand, divine and, on the other, merely contingent. The philosopher who can put the two together, he suggests, catches modern life exactly.
Against ontological readings, such splitting can be located most securely, I will argue, within class structure: unhappy consciousness is precisely the diremptive condition of consciousness in a society whose members are simultaneously both masters and slaves, exploited producers and appropriative consumers – a society wherein a consciousness we might best call ‘petty bourgeois’ has become generalised.
If black humour can be revived as a concept, some of the well-known motifs in Pynchon can be productively revisited in its light. It is the paradoxes of unhappy consciousness that, I will suggest, Pynchon picks up in his recurrent tropes of paranoia and the location of his texts in information society. Eschewing representations of class in ‘classical’ terms, from V. to Vice, information exchange for Pynchon becomes the medium and mechanism of social hierarchy. Demonstrating something of Walter Benjamin’s derogation of information as etiolated, redacted and ideologised experience, Pynchon uses characters and plots as the loci of exchanges that stand for mystified and agonistic social relations. Power and knowledge here are intimately related. Social critic Nicos Poulantzas suggests that,
[t]he various petty-bourgeois agents each possess, in relation to those subordinate to them, a fragment of the fantastic secret of knowledge that legitimises the delegated authority that they exercise. This is the very meaning of the ‘hierarchy’. Each bureaucratised instance both subordinates and is subordinated; everyone is at the same time both ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to someone else. [my emphasis]
Although writing with the stable model of the factory in mind, Poulantzas allows us to connect the complexities of information society with a capitalism that has not evaporated in postmodernity. Pynchon’s preoccupation with bureaucratisation and the lure of ‘fantastic secrets of knowledge’ is strikingly echoed here. The chimera of some absolute but deferred meaning becomes a cultural and social logic. The sense of paranoia as an anxiety about the meaning and authority of the ‘other’ is also signalled. Most importantly, Pynchon’s narratives, which so self-consciously play with the deployment and retention of information, express the Janus-faced nature of information as both powerful and enslaving, for readers as well as characters. What Poulantzas misses is the way the very form of information itself resembles and yet ideologically suppresses the struggle between abstract knowledge and concrete experience, between mastery and slavehood, or between different social classes. And it is this, I will argue, that Pynchon covertly plays with in his economy of information.
My paper will hence take appropriate examples from a number of Pynchon’s novels, including Inherent Vice, to describe the textual strategies he employs to draw attention to this conflict: notably his thematic presentation of paranoia and the slippage between narrative voices he uses to undermine readerly security. I will end with a short consideration of the way Pynchon suggests other kinds of laughter – the ‘low’ pleasures of puns and chases, for example –actually reinforce the higher, ‘blacker’ forms.