Arkadiusz Misztal (Gdańsk University)
The presentation will offer a brief analytical and comparative study of two Pynchon’s novels emblematic of the American Sixties, Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice. While acknowledging the social and political dimension of the two texts, my presentation will focus on the problem of detecatbility, more specifically on various strategies of detection that Pynchon’s texts imply, violate or reject. My analysis of Pynchonesque textuality will be guided by the forensic imagination, which aims at recovering the past through the objects in the present (Kirschenbaum 251). Both Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice attempt to construct legible records of what happened on the basis of mute or distorted evidence of the past available as relics or inscriptions in the present. Both novels reveal intimacy with mundane objects and marginalized systems of storage and communication. Pynchon’s detective quests into 1960s can also be analyzed against the background of conjectural epistemological model discussed by Carlo Ginzburg in his essay “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm”. I will argue that Pynchon’s appreciation of details, discarded information and marginal data naturally lends itself to what Ginzburg calls the venatic model of deduction: the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that cannot be experienced directly (103). The conspicuous presence of marginalized objects that permit the comprehension of otherwise unattainable reality can be found already in the very early Pynchon texts: in one of the final scenes in Secret Integration the boys solve the riddle of blockbusting by reading clues in the garbage on the front lawn of Carl’s house. In later texts this presence is magnified and amplified, Pynchon’s narratives invite a close scrutiny in the manner of Morellian method, named after the Italian art historian who developed the technique of identifying the real creator of a painting by shifting the focus form the most conspicuous characteristics of a painting to the most trivial details. Oedipa and DocSportello not only morellize the opaque reality in search for the infinitesimal traces, they also rely on other conjectural instruments such as serendipity – “the making of happy and unexpected discoveries by accident or when looking for something else” (OED) – and “low intuitions” – a form of discernment based on the senses that allows one to reveal the unknown. Ginzburg defines them as “essentialy mute forms of knowledge in the sense that their percepts do not lend themselves to be either formalized or spoken” (124). However, while Pynchon’s texts hint at the existence of deeply rooted relationships that supposedly explain all the connections uncovered, they are also to a considerable degree not only narratives of detection but also of deception. The conjectural instrumentation including the mute forms of knowledge has thus a limited scope of application: the opaque reality of Pynchon’s novels does not provide privileged zones – signs or clues – that allows us to penetrate it once and for all. Furthermore, it seems to me that Pynchon suspends an answer to the question whether his fictional reality is or is not invested with transcendence, which puts a serious question mark on the efficiency, range and limits of the above modes of detectability. These are the issues that I hope to address in the final part of my presentation. I will conclude by examining the possibility of paranoia as a mode of enhanced detecatbility both for Pynchon detectives and the readers.