The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Some postmodernisms

Double-coding. Of all the theories of postmodernism as an aesthetic practice, surely the best-known and most influential is the thesis that, in the postmodern era, the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture that the modernists had striven so hard to maintain and police has finally, definitively broken down. This thesis, articulated with considerable intellectual rigor by Andreas Huyssen, attained broad public recognition through the efforts of the architecture critic Charles Jencks, a consummate salesman of the idea of postmodernism.13 It is Jencks who is responsible for the notion of double-coding. Postmodern buildings, he argues, communicate on two different levels, to two different constituencies at once: on one level, through their modernist structural techniques and in-group ironies, they communicate with a minority constituency of architects and connoisseurs; on another level, they reach a broader public of consumers through their playful and pleasurable allusions to familiar historical styles of architecture.14 Jencks saw analogies to his notion of architectural double-coding in postmodern literary manifestoes by John Barth and Umberto Eco, and in artistic practices across a range of postmodern art forms including, for instance, Eco’s own novel The Name of the Rose (1980), which is simultaneously an exemplary historiographic metafiction (in Hutcheon’s sense) and a popular bestseller.15 Larry McCaffery, another able propagandist, coined the term “avant-pop” to label the kind of double-coded works that straddle or collapse the distinction between avant-garde experimentalism and popular culture.16

The notion of double-coding helps explain the paradox of Pynchon’s status as simultaneously the object of academic research, widely taught in university courses, and a countercultural writer with a popular “cult” following.17 Pynchon’s fiction displays avant-garde difficulty and high-cultural allusiveness, and calls upon readers to bring to bear more or less esoteric knowledge from a range of demanding specialist fields. But its high-cultural demands are counterbalanced by low-cultural entertainment value. Pynchon’s novels offer all kinds of “mindless pleasures” (the original title of the book that became Gravity’s Rainbow): silly names and tasteless puns (“there was that high magic to low puns,” Oedipa muses in The Crying of Lot 49), flagrant anachronism, cartoonish characters, abundant slapstick comedy, chase scenes, pornography (especially in Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day, but also in the “V. in Love” episode of V.), pop-song lyrics and musical comedy song-and-dance numbers, and so on.18 Especially characteristic of Pynchon is the unstable, disorienting interaction of his complex style with models derived from popular genre fiction, movies and television (see below): the very definition of avant-pop.

Irony and pastiche. The postmodern attitude, according to the fiction writer Max Apple, is “a mixture of world weariness and cleverness, an attempt to make you think that I’m half kidding, though you’re not quite sure about what”19 – an ironic attitude, in short, but involving irony of a peculiarly unfocused or unmoored kind. The postmodern period style, it is generally acknowledged, is ironic; but then, so was the modernist period style before it. How does postmodernist irony differ from the modernist kind? Alan Wilde argues that modernist irony

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