Paolo Simonetti (Università di Roma “Sapienza”)
Bye-bye Black Dahlia, rest in peace Tom Ince, yes we’ve seen the last of those good old-time L.A. murder mysteries I’m afraid. We’ve found the gateway to hell…
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice
In his 1984 influential work Stefano Tani, defining anti-detective fiction, realized that “to choose not to choose is the widest choice the anti-detective can make, because to let the mystery exist does not restrict his freedom to a single choice and, at the same time, potentially implies all solutions without choosing any” (Tani 1984, 46). Of course he had in mind Thomas Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, the improvised detective who, in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), remains entangled in a “malignant, deliberate replication” (Pynchon, 1965, 85) of clues and signs that, instead of driving her to a solution, brings only to “an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia” (Pynchon, 1965, 126). Oedipa chooses not to choose between the “symmetrical four” alternatives she is confronted with, and so the mystery has no real solution when, in the last page, she finally “settles back,” awaiting the crying that could (but most probably couldn’t) solve the case.
What choice remains, then, to a detective in the postmodern world, when the only alternatives range between failure and inaction? How can (s)he solve the case when (s)he is not even sure there is a case? When every impulse to detect or to psychoanalyze is violently frustrated, and every clue brings not to dénoument but to “a progressive knotting into” (Pynchon 1973, 3) without any possible solution? I will argue that Inherent Vice (2009), Pynchon’s most recent novel, provides us with some (partial) clues toward a possible evolution of detective fiction, by fusing the two trends at the core of the genre – the popular, mass-produced branch that brought to hard-boiled fiction, and the intellectual current that goes back to Poe and Conan Doyle – into a new subgenre along the lines of Joel Coen’s The Big Lebowsky: psychedelic detective fiction. Moreover, I contend that Pynchon’s self-appointed task to rewrite narratives of America’s past (and present) finds in his most recent novel a sort of completion. Besides challenging the “inherent vice” of the Sixties and the nefarious union of Nixon’s government and capitalism, Pynchon makes fun as well of the “inherent vice” that doomed detective fiction in the postmodern era, showing us a possible way out of the impasse.
Against the Day (2006), Pynchon’s massive epic about the modernist period, significantly ends with one of the main characters, former police detective Lew Basnight, becoming a private eye in a 1920s Los Angeles “that made Chicago seem innocent as a playground” (Pynchon 2006, 1041). Inherent Vice starts at this very point, as a cartoonish rewriting of classic hard-boiled noirs such as Chandler’s and Hammett’s. Yet it is full of nostalgia for a time when mystery was still possible, when every murder had a motive and a culprit, and there were no computers to provide enormous and instantaneous amounts of information, leading nevertheless only to impasse. Doc Sportello, Inherent Vice’s private eye, is less reflective than paranoid Oedipa, often distracted from his main goal and quite permanently stoned with light drugs, yet in a way his psychedelic post-Manson Los Angeles makes more sense than Oedipa’s hieroglyphic San Francisco.
In his works, Pynchon made clear paranoia is at the same time a useful tool and a fatal flaw for any writer’s/detective’s quest. Yet Doc’s paranoia is less a metaphysical state or a narrative strategy than a result of smoking too much pot; when mentally confronted with different alternatives, the only thing stoned Doc manages to say aloud is “Gahhh!,” admitting he is “overthinking myself into brainfreeze” (Pynchon, 2009, 96). While investigating, he comes upon a mysterious entity known as “The Golden Fang,” but, instead of crazily following any clue to it, like Oedipa with the all elusive Trystero, he isn’t too much interested in finding out what everything is really about. During the final chase of the schooner supposed to be called Golden Fang, Doc unenthusiastically suggests to his obsessed lawyer: “Mind if I just kick back here?” (Pynchon 2009, 356). Doc has definitely reached that state of “anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything” (Pynchon 1975, 330), which jazz musician McClintic Sphere summarized, in V. (1963), with the saying: “Keep cool, but care” (Pynchon, 1963, 33). In the same mood the reader enjoys Inherent Vice, so far Pynchon’s most accessible novel, and at the end (s)he is even blessed with a (sort of) solution, upon which the detective stumbles quite randomly and unenthusiastically.
References
Thomas Pynchon, V., London, Vintage, 2000 (1963);
— The Crying of Lot 49, J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia & New York, 1965;
— Gravity’s Rainbow, New York, Viking, 1973;
— Against the Day, New York, Viking, 2006;
— Inherent Vice, New York, Viking, 2009;
William V. Spanos, Repetitions. The Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture, Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, 1987;
Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective. The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American & Italian Fiction, Carbondale and Edwardsville, Southern Illinois University Press, 1984;