Of course, the author is capable of portraying conventional psychological development, particularly in Slow Learner, his early collection of stories, but this style of character development has rarely been a priority. Informed by modern physics, he has always refused to embrace linear cause and effect, in plot or in character. Pynchon brings the whole cosmos-not only as it’s known to philosophers and poets, but also to science and history-crashing down on his characters. Rather, Brooke-Rose’s “palimpsests” are unafraid of knowledge-of history, of science, of religion-and strive to “stretch our intellectual, spiritual and imaginative horizons to breaking point.” Such works exhibit neither the limited, quotidian vision of contemporary literary realism (characterized by a pernicious extension of the old dictum: “write what you know, and never try to know more”), nor the the solipsistic and cloistered self-reference that continues to plague much “experimental” writing (and which exceeds the restricted scope of realism only insofar as it games narrative conventions). Pynchon writes what novelist-critic Christine Brooke-Rose once termed “polyphonic palimpsest histories,” which she described as being halfway between sacred books and the commentaries on those books: new myths of our history sitting next to unending exegeses on and contextualizations of those very myths. Bleeding Edge uses these tactics in a bit more linear fashion, providing for the most attractive combination of complexity and accessibility that Mr. He did not plot so much as pattern his novels, setting up complementary and clashing resonances and dichotomies in such a way as to refuse any reductive analysis of the narrative. Unlike his peers, he never started from a set conception of the world, but from the detritus of pop culture, science, and art. Pynchon has always been writing about why we construct conspiracy theories, and his explorations have been borne out by the last twelve years. Contemporary events can be dangerous territory for a novelist (remember John Updike’s Terrorist ?), but Bleeding Edge, perhaps unexpectedly, is a valedictory, updating the author’s thematic preoccupations for this century while stressing their fundamental continuity.īleeding Edge succeeds not because conspiracy theories are back in vogue, but because Mr. Bleeding Edge is set in 2001 it is a novel about dotcoms and 9/11. But his new novel, Bleeding Edge, asserts a contemporary urgency that was not immediately apparent in his two prior epic-length monsterworks, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, and certainly not in his brief and puzzling noir excursion, Inherent Vice. Pynchon’s work might have seemed likely to fade into irrelevance as well. Narrative self-referentiality has, unsurprisingly, ceased to be important to all but a few outside its circle of practitioners.Īt one point, Mr. The increasingly etiolated MFA-produced fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, which adhered to a banal, impressionistic realism, now looks only like a handful of writing teachers’ idea of realism, one which most of America (to say nothing of the world) does not acknowledge. Pynchon looks more contemporary than most of his peers. Pynchon’s crude pop-culture borrowings, his phantasmagoric imagination, and his refusal to develop psychologically “complex” characters placed him out-of-step with these other authors, even though he was frequently lumped in with them. Barth), or else deployed mild-to-moderate experimentalism on top of conventionally “realistic” characters and narratives (in the case of the others, particularly Gaddis, Mr. All the others either cultivated a thick self-referentiality largely divorced from contemporary events (in the case of Nabokov and Mr. If you came of age in the 1990s, as I did, you grew up reading a certain set of large-scale, ambitious, and experimentally inclined American writers: Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, William Gaddis, William Gass, Joseph Heller, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and David Foster Wallace. This review has been drawn from the Anniversary Issue of the American Reader, available in our Shoppe.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |