Michael Harris (Central College, Pella, Iowa)
In Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism (2008), David Witzling asserts that V. “has too frequently been assumed to be a kind of typological precursor to the later, and presumably greater, Gravity’s Rainbow” (24). Several recent studies of Pynchon’s first published novel, including Witzling’s, however, place that novel in a new critical spotlight. This recent critical attention given to V. has to do with Pynchon’s treatment of race, or the racialized Other, and the range of viewpoints represented in these studies is fascinating. In this essay I intend to survey this new critical interest in V. and Pynchon’s treatment of race, and through that survey to offer my own view of the vexed issue of race as it plays out in Pynchon’s early career. Although Gravity’s Rainbow is still widely recognized as Pynchon’s masterpiece, and The Crying of Lot 49 remains the text most often found on college course syllabi, this recent critical interest in and debate over V. would suggest that that text possesses plenty of life and continues to resonate with issues and concerns still relevant in the twenty-first century.
I intend to focus my discussion on three critical treatments of V., all of which have appeared in the last two years. Besides Witzling’s Everybody’s America, these include Shelly Brivic’s Tears of Rage: the Racial Interface of Modern American Fiction (2008) and W. Lawrence Hogue’s Postmodern American Literature and Its Other (2009). Whereas Everybody’s America is a book-length treatment of V. and Gravity’s Rainbow, Brivic situates V. among three other modern American novels – Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Morrison’s Beloved (1987) – that together with V. (1963) constitute “a continuous narrative dialogue between white and black voices” (4). By contrast, Hogue sees V. and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy as postmodern texts which are perhaps hindered by the writers’ race and gender from escaping a privileged, sovereign, Euro-American male perspective. After his initial chapter on Pynchon and Auster, Hogue goes on to discuss Ducornet’s The Jade Cabinet, Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and Vizenour’s Heirs of Columbus, arguing that these later novels more successfully deconstruct the “center/periphery binary that is at the core of Western logocentrism” to produce what he calls “planetary postmodernism” (xiii).
Hogue, Witzling, and Brivic all offer useful insights. Pynchon has always been concerned with representing the racial Other. By subverting the linear narrative and offering a constantly shifting multiplicity of narrative perspectives in V. and his other novels, he demonstrates the ease with which humans engage in Othering, and also that everyone is potentially an Other. Pynchon opens up and complicates identity politics by suggesting that the complex issue of race in modern America can be most clearly understood when seen through the lens of European colonial history. Meaningfully juxtaposed with scenes involving McClintic Sphere and Paola are ones set in Egypt under British colonial rule, others set in German southwest Africa during the attempted genocide of the Herero people, and still others involving the Maltese Fausto Maijstral looking back on a world transformed by World War II.
I tend to agree with Brivic and Witzling, who place V. in a more positive, perhaps hopeful light. Brivic argues that “active cultural development takes place in dialogic interplay between cultures,” and furthermore, that “such interplay takes place within an individual, who generally contains both sides” (5). Analyzing the subjectivities of Fausto and Paola Maijstral, and McClintic Sphere, Brivic conceptualizes the novel’s v-structure as pointing toward a future marked by a longing to “cross borders [to] show concern, and experience change” (143). Although V. is his primary subject, Witzling also takes a comparative approach: juxtaposing Pynchon’s novel with the work of contemporaries such as Ellison, Baldwin, Kerouac, Mailer, and Reed. Thus Witzling is able to understand V. as “an attempt to acknowledge the implicit racism in many elements of the dominant and figuratively white American culture and to grapple with the effects of that racism on both white and black Americans” (6).
Although the majority of my discussion of V. will have to do with the differing perceptions of Hogue, Witzling, and Brivic, I also plan to reference related texts, such as Cyrus Patell’s Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (2001); recent essays by Luc Herman and John Krafft on Pynchon’s revisions of V.; and Pynchon’s article in the New York Times Magazine, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” (1966).