Does Thomas Pynchon Exist?
Thomas Pynchon was the first writer of my adult life. It would be more accurate, I guess, to say young adult: when I was sixteen, and an unbearable high school music journalist, always wearing band tees and blazers, my friend Alex Henderson, whom I knew from an online indie rock message board (itself a sub-forum of a larger video game-related message board), and who is a talented fiction writer, told me he was reading Gravity’s Rainbow.
I suppose at first I was attracted to the book’s, and the writer’s, famous difficulty. I was no good in school but also desperate to prove myself intelligent and, beyond that, uniquely suited to one or another competency; professionally, I was a bag boy at Publix, and everyone I knew (except Alex Henderson) found my indie music journalism obnoxious, and so I guess the thought was that it would be good for the business of being me to be good at something, in this case reading.
Now it is almost twenty years later and I have had occasion to reflect, over the past year or so, about the effect of this writer on me. Of course, this piece of writing, the one you are hopefully reading right now, is not about me. This Substack is called “Living Writing,” and I want it to be about the relationship between living, the often shameful and humiliating act of getting by in time, and writing, in which shame can be forgiven, if not understood, and time can be slowed down. But of course I am the one writing this, and I am the one living and writing.
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Thomas Pynchon in some sense presents us with the ultimate example of the problem of authorship. He is so famously reclusive – or famous and reclusive – that to call him famously reclusive is to employ an embarrassing cliche. He lives somewhere now, is in his late eighties, was born somewhere at some point in the 1930s (in Long Island in 1937), and as the writer Joshua Cohen points out in his review of the novel Bleeding Edge, stems from a roughly millenium-old line of Norman nobles that came to England to help William the Conqueror with his Conquest.
Pynchon’s own bloodline is, then, a product of the competition between the Anglo-American and German ambitions for world dominion, one of the horrific motor forces of the twentieth century and the bass line, one might call it, that mediates between the rhythm and melody of his novels, the catastrophic paranoia and historical melancholy that suffuse them.
The author himself, though, outside of the charming and oddly sweet introduction to his story collection Slow Learner, has kept out of the public. It stands to reason that the only way out of the network of conspiracies that structures the realm of the visible in his books is to disappear. It is as if he is not only the author of his books but one of his characters, which makes sense because he is hardly their author at all as we have come to understand that term, premised as it is today on the press cycles around books and the construction of the author as a public figure, which so much of the last decade-plus’s “autofiction,” starting with Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be, both feeds into and critiques. But how else is one supposed to make money?
Pynchon’s notorious absence from the public itself became a marketing technique. Salman Rushdie complains in his review of Vineland that publishers withheld review copies, giving critics “maybe a week to deal with what took him almost two decades.” The marketing for Shadow Ticket was characterized by, for those of us who did not get one, slightly annoying social media posts about receiving numbered review copies. But invisibility is good marketing. Between multiple semi-viral tweets and a semi-adaptation of Vineland (One Battle After Another) due for award wins, Pynchon has been in the air, not least because of the authoritarian Americanism that runs through so much of his work is now our reality, and so much so that writing about how he is in the air is now also a cliche. But that’s what I get for waiting so long to start this Substack, which I hope, unlike my high school music journalism, will not be too obnoxious.
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Pynchon writes in the introduction to Slow Learner that “[s]omewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.” Of course anyone who reads New York Review of Books reissues of lost Eastern European classics, anyone who reaches for books that are obscure or underread, knows the experience of not being able to relate a work of fiction to either a living author or one accessible to online research. But Thomas Pynchon is one of the most famous living authors, with one of the most easily recognizable literary voices, jagged and sad and knowing, slightly high on his own jokes and crazy names, proceeding through plot and character by means of riff and digression. In his case, to lack a physical corollary to the self that exists in books, that writes them, does not depersonalize them but makes of them electromagnetic disturbances in our normal field of reading and writing, both full and empty of personality, as if written by machines half a century before ChatGPT, but in a way that scans as more human and idiosyncratic than many regular Anglophone novels, which come armed with identifiable creators, pictured on book jackets, but feel written by committee. What does it mean to compose books that contain personal experiences “displaced,” as Pynchon puts it in his introduction, “off into other environments” – books that are personal without a person to point to?
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What I discovered reading Gravity’s Rainbow is hard for me to describe, which no doubt will already be apparent from the above paragraph and its use of abstruse metaphors to talk about concrete artistic effects. By the end, what brought me to the page wasn’t the book’s difficulty and much-needed validation of my intellectual abilities, which anyway wouldn’t have been in the offing because nobody around me cared I was reading it, but its peculiar use of language. Pynchon, the author, the voice, seemed in this book to become strangely emotional when writing about topics, characters, and situations that should not have provoked his emotions.
Writing about rocketry and physics:
No one could really claim credit 100% for any idea, it was a corporate intelligence at work, specialization hardly mattered, class lines even less. The social spectrum ran from von Braun, the Prussian aristocrat, down to the likes of Pökler, who would eat an apple in the street–yet they were all equally at the Rocket’s mercy: not only danger from explosions or falling hardware, but also its dumbness, its dead weight, its obstinate and palpable mystery…
Writing about urophilia:
Her shadow covers his face and upper torso, her leather boots creak softly as thigh and abdominal muscles move, and then in a rush she begins to piss. He opens his mouth to catch the stream, choking, trying to keep swallowing, feeling warm urine dribble out the corners of his mouth and down his neck and shoulders, submerged in the hissing storm.
These are two small examples in a very large book, but I want to emphasize the role here of the way the prose becomes stuck. In the first example, we see three modifiers of the “Rocket”: “but also its dumbness, its dead weight, its obstinate and palpable mystery…” Then in the second example, we see the repetition of (what I understand to be) gerund phrases to describe and emphasize the sensory experience of the “hissing storm”: “choking, trying to keep swallowing, feel warm urine…”, etc. The point isn’t in the particular rhetoric used here, nor in the repetition itself, but in the way the writing seems to stop and bend around phenomena it becomes interested in, comprising a “riff” not in content but in style. Of course, this technique might become annoying if the language itself, the particular nouns and adjectives and sometimes verbs, used to carry out these riffs were not so unexpected and almost physical in the way they, (as I experienced it then) make your reading mind feel like a sensory organ: “falling hardware” followed by “its dumbness, its dead weight,” for example. This language will have different effects on different people, but the point was in the fact that novelistic language about rockets and piss was capable of moving you and exciting your mind, not with ideas but with feelings, in ways you did not and could not understand.
This discovery led me to start writing, not about music but about imaginary people, and start writing in particular like the Pynchon of this book. The results of this imitation, as you’d imagine, like most literary imitations by minors, were and are unfortunate, with the one exception being this story from 2009, my first published one, which I still kind of like. But the connection I am trying to trace here is not between Pynchon’s writing and my writing, which by now is minimal at best, though I expect to always be a devoted rereader of his books. It is a connection between the living person, me in 2007 or so, and those “displaced personal experiences” I mentioned earlier. When a reader can detect, in their displacement and dispersal, the suffering and sadness in those personal experiences, which in Pynchon’s case will probably always be unknown, the effects can be profound enough to make one start imitating them, as if to seek their causes. That I could not fold the emotions I sensed in that book back into a personal story or history made them more important and memorable, a suggestion different and harder to parse – I’m not sure what to make of it – than our typical assumption that personal writing requires revelation of the self.