Xavier Marcó del Pont (Royal Holloway, University of London)
As Samuel Cohen states, ‘Pynchon’s big novels have all had central geometric figures, which are even referred to in their titles: V. (1963) has the chevron, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) has a parabola, and Mason & Dixon (1997) has the line.’ I propose to present a paper on narrative structure and organisational devices in the recent fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Critics such as Cohen, Joseph W. Slade, Tony Tanner, and Harold Bloom have all explored the many ways in which the titles of Pynchon’s novels can be seen to suggest the shape of their narrative structures; this paper will attempt to apply an analogous logic to Against the Day (2006) and Inherent Vice (2009), investigating the motifs of electromagnetic waves, photography, and the contre-jour technique in Against the Day, and that of the mechanical vice, the annulus and broken circularity in Inherent Vice. The tenacity with which these motifs recur in the novels and the parallels between motif and narrative structure raises them to the order of mise en abyme, where the structure of the whole can –as in fractals– be distinguished within its component parts.
This paper will characterise the narrative structure of Against the Day in a two-fold manner. Firstly, as a juxtaposition of electromagnetic waves, all vibrating at different frequencies, yet coinciding with each other at certain points. Secondly, it will explore the ways in which the novel as a whole can be seen as a contre-jour image: Against the Day being read against the present day, so to speak. I will propose that the narrative structure of Inherent Vice be read in terms of circularity, the principal visual motif being a workbench vice closing in on the novel’s protagonist, Larry “Doc” Sportello. Not only is “Doc” caught in a vice between antagonistic figures, such as “Bigfoot” Bjornsen and the Golden Fang, but also facing the imminent end of his defining era: ‘The Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness…’
I believe much can be gleaned from analysing the texts in this way, after all ‘names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern’ (Gravity’s Rainbow). The act of naming is not an empty one, it delineates and structures its subject, as –I shall attempt to prove– is the case with the titles of Pynchon’s novels. The models of interpretation that connect narrative structure and the visuo-geometrical devices suggested by their titles are –I believe– symptomatic of paranoid reading. The characters in Pynchon’s novels are unavoidably involved in acts of decoding and detection, symbolising the search for meaning amongst the confusion of 20th century society. The labyrinthine quality of Pynchon’s prose causes the reader to undertake a similar process of intense decodification, leading us to question at which point analysis becomes paranoia, a theme that is crucial to the author’s oeuvre.