Matthew Cissell (University of the Basque Country)
If book reviews are generally meant for the wider public’s consumption, what can the critical reception of Against the Day tell a literary scholar? Drawing on the theory and methodology of Pierre Bourdieu, which views authors and reviewers as agents of cultural production in different sub-fields of a greater social field, this presentation examines the critical reception of Against the Day in order to locate the author’s position in the broader literary field and to better understand this massive work of fiction itself. Reading a selection of reviews drawn from compiled lists such as Metacritic and The Modern World as well as randomly gathered reviews from local and international press and other publications along with reviews of earlier novels, Pynchon’s non-fiction writing, and, most importantly, letters that he wrote in the early 60’s, I present Pynchon as an agent of cultural production both aware of his position in the literary field and actively shaping it in order to advance the cultural purposes of the novel itself.
Since book reviews necessarily lie between the positive and negative poles of evaluation (exposing the range of possible positions), one must expect diverse views. Negative reviews of Against the Day, which tended to focus on the size of the novel, its overabundant content, or formal aspects such as development of character or plot, often concluded that Pynchon had lost his touch. Positive reviews, which focused more on the humor or social concern in the novel as well as accessibility, concluded that the author still had his touch. More neutral reviews moved between these polar positions. A reviewer must take a position and stand by it, but what about the publications that print their reviews? One of the questions addressed in this critical review is, why did the New York Times publish two different reviews? This is a rather exceptional phenomenon in the practice of book reviews due to the fact that newspapers economize printing space in order to maximize profits, so what could motivate this dual expense that includes the risk of appearing to be equivocal about an aesthetic judgement?
I argue that critics sometimes did not fully appreciate certain aspects of their reading (for example, the thread of social concern that courses through Against the Day or the Weberian note sustained throughout Pynchon’s work that ends Against the Day with “grace”) because they failed to analyse their relation to the object of study. The study of the novel (objectification of the text) must be included as an object in the literary analysis. This study of Against the Day’s reviews shows that by reading carefully and objectifying our reading as a conscious practice among other social practices we can arrive at a better understanding of Against the Day’s entrance into the market of literary products and of the author’s place in the literary field that results from the interaction of his self-conscisous positioning as an author and the positioning accomplished by the authors of book reivews.
The portrait of the author that emerges is of an astute player of the game, an intellectual in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. Seen this way, Pynchon carries on the tradition of socially engaged writers from the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, such as Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, or Sinclair Lewis, who used their work to evidence the suffering of immigrants in cites, the hardships of laborers, or fascism as a real threat. Pynchon occupies a space in the literary field, not in the mold of Sartre, but rather like Nietzsche’s ‘subterranean man’ in Daybreak, tunneling through the cultural and historical detritus, at some distance from us his readers, but still concerned about unfolding events. Thus Pynchon should be viewed not as one in reclusion but in seclusion, gesturing obliquely through his writing at the world and the nightmare of history. The presentation will demonstrate that viewing Pynchon and his novel through a sociological lens reveals an engaged author and intellectual and allows for a more comprehensive reading of Against the Day.