The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon.

Writing about Wittgenstein, that most eminent philosopher of language, means writing about problems of translation. In his Miscellaneous Remarks, one can find this: “Philosophie durfte man eigentlich nur dichten” (Vermischte Bemerkungen 483). One good attempt to translate that statement was made by Martin Puchner, who gives it as “Philosophy should only be done as poetry” (295), with an additional explanation that the word dichten means to write poetry but also to condense. David Schalkwyk amends Peter Winch’s translation “philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetic composition” (56) by the term to poetize. Yet dichten not only refers to the writing of poetry, but to fictional production in general, even if it is not in written form, and it also evokes the semantic field of being sealed off, tight, consolidated, and also that of proximity. Wittgenstein’s comment on the literary nature of philosophy is already subject to the play of meaning which places it itself closer to literature than philosophy.

https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/article/2472/galley/2865/download/

Silences and Worlds: Wittgenstein and Pynchon

The novels of Pynchon are often discussed amongst literary experts as a prime example of so-called postmodernism. If Thomas Pynchon didn't already exist in secrecy, he would simply have to be invented, in order to verify postmodernism, just as Georg Cantor demonstrates Bacon's authorship of the works of Shakespeare. In any case, a vast cartel of quoters seem more than eager to ever increase a supposedly fresh complexity. Niklas Luhmann, when he was still smiling, occasionally joked that he knew not of any postmodernism, only of a modern post. Seeing themselves confronted with the facts and circumstances of Pynchon's novels, where the well-rehearsed tools of the humanities miserably fail, these prophets might find that the easiest way to escape their dilemma is simply to tag it as postmodern.

https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/article/2700/galley/3092/download/

Pynchon and Electro-Mysticism

In the Brandeis University Joseph Heller Collection are two items of particular interest for their connection with Pynchon. When Catch- 22 was published (1961), Candida Donadio was acting as literary agent for both Heller and Pynchon. It is not surprising therefore that she should have sent a copy of Catch-22 to Pynchon for his comments. In a note dated November 2, 1961, and addressed from Seattle, where he was then working for the Boeing Company, Pynchon expressed his enthusiasm for the novel. The main part of the note reads: "I love it. I won't tell you how much, or why, because I always sound phony whenever I start running off at the mouth like a literary critic. But it is close to the finest novel I've ever read." The note is typed on the quadrille paper Pynchon prefers for correspondence and is signed tersely just "Pynchon." Brief though it is, this note has a real historical importance in that it documents the reaction of one major contemporary novelist to another. It must also encourage critical comparisons between the two writers, particularly over their suspicion of systems and officialdom as well as their sense of the absurd.

Pynchon, Joseph Heller, and V.

Inger H. Dalsgaard's mindful "investigation of Pynchon's Spenglerian vision" (97) shows how "[i]n both The Decline of the West and Gravity's Rainbow, prospects of deliverance are radically constricted," concluding that "[o]nly the sense that Pynchon's Rocket State is constructed from the earth as resource whereas Spengler's Faustian culture is a natural outgrowth of the earth as seedbed appears to offer room for some hope" (114). This essay begins at that precise point, also combining Spengler's diagnosis with Pynchon's prose but focusing, unlike Dalsgaard, on the latter's specific geographical representations. Pynchon's landscape depictions, while they stand in obvious relation to the earth as resource/seedbed, rearticulate the crisis of modernity as they lead to ontological incertitude and epistemological dilemmas. A plenitude of historico-cultural layers lies beneath the wastelandish depictions, rendering landscape as substantially more than just contextualized scenery. Indeed, landscape in Pynchon's works figures as a sort of reflective matrix. Although much of this can well be framed with Spengler's rhetorics of decline, decay and disease, the openness and boundlessness often invoked in Pynchon's texts point at the same time to a possible loophole in the pessimistic predicament pace Spengler.

https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/article/2666/galley/3059/download/

Dale Carter

Papers

War and Power