Robert J. Lacey (Iona College)
This paper is an exploration of Thomas Pynchon as a theorist of totalitarianism who builds on the insights of Hannah Arendt and anticipates those offered by Vaclav Havel. In his portrayal of organized power in the modern world, Pynchon clearly draws on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of conditioning and total domination in The Origins of Totalitarianism. He is able to stretch Arendt’s conceptual framework, which she develops from the experiences of Nazism and Stalinism, and apply it to the world he sees emerging in the second half of the twentieth century: a world that, though ostensibly democratic, provides fewer and fewer opportunities for spontaneous action or political resistance to existing power arrangements. In suggesting that totalitarianism, albeit in a subtler form, has permeated western democracies since the mid-twentieth century, Pynchon also anticipates the work of Vaclav Havel (and other theorists, such as Sheldon Wolin). Havel’s discussion of “post-totalitarianism” in “The Power of the Powerless” shares commonalities with Pynchon’s work, especially the view that capitalism, in collaboration with the automatizing forces of technology, has become the new totalizing ideology with which human beings must contend.
Unlike these thinkers, Pynchon sees a life in which people are self-governing and able to shape their own destinies as an ideal that cannot be realized in a political and economic system that will either co-opt or destroy them. No one can defeat the ubiquitous matrix of power, and those who become aware of the connectedness within the power network can become deeply paranoid. But, according to Pynchon, neither fighting the system nor cowering in a perpetuate state of fear and loathing is the answer.
Alternatively, Pynchon celebrates preterition, the act of being disinherited or passed over. In a clever inversion of Calvinist theology, Pynchon suggests that preterites, the forgotten refuse of society, are the fortunate few to have received a kind of grace. Embracing the apolitical, preterites enjoy an invisibility that Pynchon believes is necessary to attain a modicum of freedom in late modernity. They find freedom by eluding the clutches of the system, by effectively disappearing. In our age, suggests Pynchon, freedom can be experienced at best in its most negative form (“freedom from”). In other words, the free person is blessedly forsaken.
The politics of withdrawal is a prominent theme throughout Pynchon’s work, particularly in Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49. In these novels, the characters who avoid both co-optation and paranoia are the freest. Able to navigate the system and use it to their advantage, and also aware that the web-like connectedness of the system does not mean there is a master conspiracy, these characters find a middle way. This middle way, suggests Pynchon, can be found by leading a preterite’s life, eschewing, as much as possible, the trappings of state capitalism: buying and selling, unbridled ambition, fetishized technology, bureaucratic routines, and the cold-blooded domination of others. No one can escape the taint of corruption completely, but a partially reclaimed humanity, the vestige of an authentic life, may be found in the virtues of simplicity, modesty, obscurity, spontaneity, and warm-heartedness.