Gary Thompson (Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan)
Thomas Pynchon’s novels can serve to test the possibilties of using performance theory in literary studies. As postmodernist fiction, Pynchon’s writing places its own status in question, leading to a greater self-consciousness about the act of reading and the permeability of boundaries between fiction and reality, so in that sense these performances are atypical if not unique. However, some of what may be said about Pynchon’s fictions as performances extends to all fiction and, indeed, all texts.
Performance theory legitimates considering fictional texts such as Pynchon’s novels as themselves being performances. Performance theory, rather than being constituted as a discipline (with all the Foucauldian associations of the term), is interdisciplinary, having connections to academic areas including drama, art, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and rhetoric, to cultural interests such as engineering, business, and feminism, and to common human activities such as ritual and play. The definition of its central term, performance, is contested: Does a good performance meet expectations or transgress them? How active are audiences in making meaning? A brief overview of performance theory will allow us to recontextualize some aspects of Pynchon’s work.
Author as performer: Following Foucault, we may argue that the author is distinct from the biographical person writing the work–not simply the shadow of the words written in various texts (with interpretations shaped by the putative unity of their author, much as happened with the canonical books of the Bible), but also the creation of cultural institutions such as publishing houses, journalistic entities, university faculty and students, and religious and social groups such as book clubs and reading circles. Against this backdrop, Pynchon’s legendary reticence about giving interviews is itself worthy of examination as a performance.
Text as field of performance: By analogy with a conventional staged performance, the texts of fiction become the areas bounded in space and time in which their events are performed. Not only characters, but the implied author and readers perform roles through and above the text; the text interweaves its own events with historical and cultural factors. In the case of Pynchon’s novels, these include WWII and the development of the V-2, in the case of Gravity’s Rainbow, Colorado mining, turn-of-the-century anarchism, and experiments with light, in the case of Against the Day, and many others. What is unusual about Pynchon’s fiction is that these are mingled with clearly fantastic events (the adenoid sequence or the Floundering Four in GR, supernaturally intelligent dogs in Against the Day and Mason & Dixon, among many others).
Text as material for further performances: Not only do Pynchon’s fictions serve as performances in themselves, they also provide material for others’ performances in different genres. Literary criticism about Pynchon’s novels is an obvious case; others would include visual art, wikis and other on-line discussions, and texts arising from popular culture.
Postmodern self-consciousness: Ultimately the most significant sense in which Pynchon’s work exists as performance involves its recurrent tendency to play with its own formal constitution. Examples include emblematic names and names which hint at some non-realistic significance (Stencil and Profane, Schoenmaker, Teddy Bloat; Oedipa Maas and Pierce Inverarity, Ned Pointsman, Weissmann), names which are puns or other instances of sophomoric humor (KCUF, Emory Bortz, Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus, and Short, Rev. Cherrycoke, Doc Sportello, Ensign Morituri), along with historical names and locations which acquire new meaning through the context (Maskelyne). The intermixture of historical and invented characters resonates with Pynchon’s counter-history, offered in flat comic tone in V., but given deeper significance in the succeeding works, from Oedipa’s apparent discovery of an 800-year tradition of postal fraud, to Gravity’s Rainbow’s examination of the rocket as technological madness, to Mason and Dixon’s eponymous line-drawing, and on into labor history and anarchism in Against the Day.
Probably without exception, Pynchon’s novels involve characters who are justifiably paranoid. Some perceive plots which may or may not be there in their realistic world (Stencil, Oedipa, Slothrop); however, in a meta-sense, they are all subject to the plots imposed by their author, to some larger scheme or structure of meaning in the larger fiction. Pynchon characteristically plays with an alternation between placing readers inside habitual realistic fictional sets, created through painstaking research and attention to detail, and reminding us that these are after all imagined, fictive worlds, through the use of emblematic names and fantastic settings and events. This alternation is perhaps the most characteristic feature of Pynchon’s fiction, and that which most marks his work as performed.