Huei-ju Wang (National Chi Nan University)
The arrival in August 2009 of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice, makes clear the centrality of the figure of the private eye in his long-standing and persistent interest in uncovering and agitating repressed, forgotten or contending social history and labor history across the Atlantic in his work. The recent literary event recalls the publication of Mason & Dixon in 1997 that firmly established Pynchon’s literary reputation as a chronicler of transatlantic history. The new novel featuring a California private investigator also underscores the significance of the private eye in Pynchon after 9/11; he deploys the figure to investigate the troubled labor history in the turn of the twentieth century America in Against the Day and to emplot the social history of California in the 1960s in Inherent Vice. The appearance of Inherent Vice thus solidifies the strong link between the genre of detective fiction and historical fiction, or the mix of the two genres, in Pynchon starting in The Crying of Lot 49.
The paper seeks to examine the significance of the private eye in Pynchon’s two California fictions of the sixties, investigating how the figure enables Pynchon the novelist to plot, resurrect and agitate “dark history” in The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice. It also interrogates Pynchon’s politics of space and gender in those novels by way of the private eye: his critique of monopolization of space/land in Lot 49 and Inherent Vice and his subversion of domestic space in Lot 49. I argue that through the figure of the private eye Pynchon examines the bygone and contemporary history of the city, including San Narcisco, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the private investigator is based or visiting, including its social, spatial and postal history. The private eye, evocative of another figure of the city, the flâneur, thus is given a symbolic significance in the historical fiction as an informant of the social, the historical and the ideological, the economic, the religious, etc. But the private eye as an informant is ideologically conditioned by her gender, class and race. In doing so, Pynchon is practicing what literary critic Jane Tompkins calls “cultural work.” In her pioneer study on the “other” or non-canonic literature of the 19th-century Antebellum fiction, Sensational Designs (1985), Tompkins suggests that 19th century popular women writers such as Susan Warren, though enjoying little critical attention in academe compared with their more esteemed contemporaries such as Hawthorne and Melville, deserve just as much attention because their works were designed to do “cultural work” no less than the frequently studied works. Tompkins explains that texts are doing cultural work when they seek to understand the culture in which they are embedded by engaging the political, social, ideological, or economic problems or discourse of their own times.
My paper, appropriating Tompkins’ insight, focuses on the allegorical aspect of the cultural work in Pynchon by examining the dialectical connection between the history his novels open up and the novels’ outside, namely, the novelist’s contemporary society. This parallel investigation allows me to show how Pynchon engages past history whether it is imagined or has a base in history while contemplating the current history as it happens through the path of past history.
The paper, analyzing the role of the private eye in Pynchon’s ’60s California fiction, argues that in the process of investigating the mysterious underground mail system Trystero (Lot 49) and the Golden Fang mystery (Inherent Vice), Pynchon’s private eyes – Oedipa Maas and Larry Sportello – embark on a journey into the repressed, contending or forgotten history while simultaneously reflecting on the society they live in. In doing so, those private investigators also prompt the reader to reflect on the history existing outside the novels: the sixties California (standing in for America), and the post-9/11 America: first shocked by the terror attacks and then expecting the coming of Obama administration during the 2008 presidential election. The paper also maps Pynchon’s appropriation and reconfiguration of the figure of the private eye in Raymond Chandler’s classic hard-boiled detective fiction.