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Volume 24, Number 3 (1999) reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review INTRUDING WORLDS AND THE EPILEPTIC WORD: PYNCHON'S DIALOGUE WITH THE LAWS OF SURREALISM AND NEW PHYSICS KATHLEEN IUDICELLO* Another influence in "Under the Rose," too recent for me then to abuse to the extent I have done since, is Surrealism. I had been taking one of those elective courses in Modern Art, and it was the Surrealists who'd really caught my attention. Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of the movement, and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects.1This moment of personal revelation, fabricated or not to introduce an in- between-publications collection of previously published short stories, by an author still rumored at that time to be J.D. Salinger, provokes questions as to what extent and in what way Pynchon has used and "abused" surrealism. "Abuse" is generally acknowledged to mean "misuse," "to use wrongly," or "to impose upon." For a writer who hurls blade sharp cut-ups at blinding speed, such as the communication system WASTE and the synthetic humans SHOCK and SHROUD, Pynchon intrudes, or perhaps "detrudes," as he is reaching back to an early to mid-twentieth-century art form, upon the world(s) of surrealism. Pynchon's detrusion, moreover, causes a cataclysmic collision with readers very similar to the shattering entrance new physics makes into the safe and unassuming world of classical physics. This scientific encounter, also occurring, like surrealism, in the early twentieth century, literally destabilizes existence as Pynchon's detrusion destabilizes the text. The laws of art and science crash frequently with the Word in both The Crying of Lot 49 and V. Readers might waltz with Oedipa Maas and follow the traces of V. with greater ease, I would argue, if they entered Pynchon's dialogue with surrealism and new physics. In order that readers may understand the links among new physics, surrealism, and Pynchon's paranoid style, and so get the full sense of his work, I will begin with a review of the paradigm-shattering emergence of the uncertainty principles of new physics. Next, I intend to suggest ways in which surrealism, as an aesthetic style, reflects the shift into the uncertainty of perception. Finally, I will conclude with an account of The Crying of Lot 49 and V., which I hope will facilitate future interpretations of these texts by enabling readers to see the connections both works have with the laws of surrealism and new physics. Classic or Newtonian physics was once used interchangeably with natural philosophy as the science of discovering and formulating nature's laws. It found everything about a physical reality to be fixed, determined, and measurable. Being, therefore, at its most basic level, consisted of tiny, discrete particles--atoms--which bumped into, attracted, or repelled each other. These particles were solid and separate, each occupying its own definite place in space and time. Wave motions, as seen by classic physics, such as light waves, were vibrations in some underlying "jelly" and not fundamental things in themselves.2 Max Planck and Albert Einstein are the acknowledged founders of twentieth- century physics. In 1900 Planck introduced quantum energy, quantum being a general term for the indivisible unit of any form of physical energy, and almost twenty years later Einstein discovered that quanta are actually a flow of indiscreet particles, allowing for an account of observable photoelectric behavior. In 1927, Niels Bohr publicly formulated "The Complimentarity Principle." Bohr discovered that matter is neither solid nor separate but can manifest itself as both waves and particles, and matter is both of these manifestations. In addition, while neither state (wave or particle) is complete in itself and both are necessary to give a complete picture of reality, it turns out that both also cannot be focused on at once, making the exact location of matter indiscernible.3 Also in 1927, Werner Heisenberg formulated another fundamental element of quantum theory, "The Uncertainty Principle." This states that the exact position of an electron, manifesting itself as a particle, can be measured, or the exact momentum of an electron, expressing itself as a wave, can be measured, but both can never be measured at the exact same time. As a result, Bohr and Heisenberg argued that reality remains a matter of probabilities. But Einstein, firmly believing that God would not gamble so with human existence, thought this indeterminate state of matter was merely human error, resulting from an inability to conceptualize existence, and compared quantum theory to a "system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought."4 Such well-founded paranoia is woven strongly throughout Pynchon's texts, especially in V. and The Crying of Lot 49. The uncertainties of new physics, coupled with technological advancements such as computers and robotics, place the postmodern consciousness in a state of radical uncertainty. Accordingly, N. Kathrine Hayles finds: The postmodern context catalyzed the formation of the new science by providing a cultural and technological milieu in which the component parts came together and mutually reinforced each other until they were no longer isolated events but an emergent awareness of the constructive roles that disorder, nonlinearity, and noise play in complex systems.5As the once definitive boundaries of reality no longer exist, writers are left to explore an existence beyond human understanding, where any mode of reality is possible. Susan Strehl aptly calls such explorers "actualists," writers who abandon the narrative conventions of literature "not to replace reality with the purified aesthetics of self-reflexivity, but rather, self-consciously and theoretically, to renew art's readiness for its perennial project: the human interpretation of a nonhuman reality."6 To help him do this, Pynchon turns to an artistic mode born amid the creation of new physics: surrealism. Anna Balakain notes the complimentarity of these two concepts: "The scientists' thrust outward toward new physical combinations is in the same spirit as the endeavors of the group of surrealist poets and artists and their forerunners who probed the depths of the human spirit seeking to create a more dynamic and dazzling concreteness."7 In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton presented the belief that surrealism creates "a key capable of opening indefinitely that box of many bottoms called man."8 Surrealists wanted to move beyond reality and into the realm of the wondrous, where they believed humankind's clearest vision of itself and its world(s) existed. Michael Vella believes Pynchon turns this key within his texts: If Pynchon had only a superficial connection with surrealism he would not engage in such candid self-criticism. What is important here, above all, is Pynchon's avowal of his interest in, his efforts at, and his enthusiasm for at least two of surrealism's techniques--the exploration of one's dreams and assemblage.9Vella uses the word "assemblage" to represent Pynchon's "simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling results."10 Breton and the surrealists were greatly influenced by Freud's scientific study of dreams, particularly his work The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as the substantive status he gave to the term "unconscious." However, as J.H. Matthews observes, Breton's "attention was taken and held by only certain features of Freud's ideas. Thus, for example, the therapeutic aims Freud set for analysts implementing his theories really had no appeal for Andre Breton."11 As a poet, Breton, accompanied by the painters in his surreal collective, was more interested in the literary applications of dreams and explorations of the subconscious as keys for opening minds to the laws of unexplainable worlds. Similarly, Pynchon echoes the surreal quest for a new consciousness in his readers by refusing to give them a rational world based upon empirical beliefs. Along with the two elements of surrealism that Vella finds in Pynchon's texts, there is, I would argue, a third: the phenomenon of objective chance. In his study of Breton, Clifford Browder refers to this aspect of surrealism: sometimes the Surreal is experienced as a startling intuition, a sudden awareness of mysterious forces in one's life, as in the case of a curious coincidence or the chance discovery of a fascinating object or work of art; this is the phenomenon of objective chance, whereby the synthesis is achieved through the irruption of wonder in the midst of the ordinary world.12Unlike epiphany, the phenomenon of objective chance leads not to understanding the essential meaning of something but to making the impossible possible, endowing nature with metaphysical properties and allowing sensuality to take on new proportions: "visions dispersed on the face of the earth, going abegging, undiscerned in their individual solitudes, are drawn to the new linguistic magnet and brought together into a new synthesis of imagery, which in turn creates a new synthesis of existence."13 Pynchon uses this element of surrealism to create a heightened sense of paranoia, such as that felt by the strangely repetitious appearances of the Trystero horn in The Crying of Lot 49 and the mysteriously decadent V in V. Together, the three concepts of surrealism (the exploration of dreams, the creation of illogical combinations, and the phenomenon of objective chance), combined with the unsettling aspects of new physics that appear in both The Crying of Lot 49 and V., have often caused readers and scholars (such as Bernard Duyfhuizen in his study Hushing Sick Transmissions': Disrupting Story in The Crying of Lot 49) a great deal of frustration as to why, for example, Loren Passerine never cries lot forty-nine or how Valletta can have no time, no history, and all history at once. As Hayles observes "[t]hat chaos has been negatively valued in the Western tradition may be partly due ... to the predominance of binary logic in the West. If order is good, chaos is bad because it is conceptualized as the opposite of order."14 This is why a dialogue, such as the one I am about to enter, between surrealism, which I will represent here through the works of painters Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali, and new physics is so important. It allows readers to leave the binary world and calmly enter and walk among Pynchon's texts built of "dream-wall[s] [...] seeming no more solid than the decorative voids--some almost like leaves or petals, some almost like bodily organs not quite human--which pierced its streaked and cobbled substance."15 Before embarking upon this discussion, I need to explain why I have chosen painters rather than novelists, given that my focus is on the genre of the novel. Balakain notes that "[t]he objective of surrealism was the infinite expansion of reality as a substitute for the previously accepted dichotomy between the real and the imaginary."16 As the object of the surrealists, this expansion as law was not restricted to a specific medium but embraced by a collective of painters and writers. As a result, novelist Rene Crevel, playwright Roger Vitrac, as well as Louis Aargon and Andre Breton, who were both novelists and poets, became the inspired introducers and theoriticians of de Chirico and Dali in such publications as Le surrealisme et la peinture (1928) and La peinture au defi (1930).17 It is the appearance of these painters in Pynchon's texts, such as in V., when Benny Profane and Pig Bodine find themselves standing in front of Dali's The Last Supper at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., as well as Pynchon's allusion to his interest in a Modern Art course's discussion of surrealism, that led me to an exploration of surrealist painting as opposed to written discourse. The exploration of dreams, with which I shall begin my reading of Pynchon, occurs intermittently in V. between the narrative present of 1956, 1957, and shocking bursts of the past. This juxtaposition of time congeals around the wanderings of Herbert Stencil and Benny Profane. Stencil searches for the mysterious Lady V throughout the world and its history while Profane simply "yo-yos," riding the subway aimlessly throughout New York. Profane's dreams echo this disconnection and isolation, and, not surprisingly, one of his dreams occurs while yo-yoing: In this dream, he was all alone, as usual. Walking on a street at night where there was nothing but his own field of vision alive. It had to be night on that street. The lights gleamed unflickering on hydrants; manhole covers which lay around in the street. There were neon signs scattered here and there, spelling out words he wouldn't remember when he woke.18In this dream, Profane is surrounded by objects made by humans, inanimate objects: neon signs, street hydrants, and manhole covers. The indeterminate glow of lights at night mirror Profane's opaque vision created by his existence in an unsteady world. The fact that Profane cannot remember the words spelled by the neon sign reveals the Word's loss of sacredness, blaring rudely and embodied in a mechanical device, and Profane's inability to get the message. For Pynchon, this is the surreal personification of the twentieth-century nightmare to which he later refers: "the street and the dreamer, only an inconsequential shadow of himself in the landscape, partaking of the soullessness of these other masses and shadows; this is 20th Century nightmare." dream perception to amplify the twentieth century's frightening uncertainty where technological advances have the world coming dangerously close to the brink of the inanimate. As Vella has observed, the surrealist street depicted in Profane's dream is reminiscent of the famous streets depicted in the works of Italian painter de Chirico, who is often categorized with the surrealists due to the inspiration this artistic movement received from him. Giorgio de Chirico's 1914 painting The Enigma of a Day and its exaggerated perspective depicts the same hauntingly empty street of Profane's dream where the inanimate looms forbiddingly over the living. At one point in V., a de Chirico painting actually becomes a textual background for Stencil: "Paola, whom he had been trying to avoid, pinned him between the black fireplace and a print of de Chirico's street."21 More complex than Profane's yo-yoing and just as obsessive as Stencil's search for V., Oedipa's journey in The Crying of Lot 49 begins when she is named executrix of Pierce Inverarity's estate. She soon finds herself stumbling: onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies [...] for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life [...]. Or [...] [she is] hallucinating it. Or a plot has been mounted against [...] [her] [...] planting [...] post horn images all over San Francisco [...]. Or [...] [she is] fantasying some such plot.22On a twenty-four hour sleepless search for the one true choice among the symmetrical four, Oedipa endlessly follows muted post horn signs and comes upon a circle of children in Golden State Park who say they are dreaming their gathering. The dream Oedipa is witnessing leaves the children exhausted when they wake, causing them to spend their days finding places to sleep. In the children's dream world the "night was empty of all terror for them, they had inside their circle an imaginary fire, and needed nothing but their own unpenetrated sense of community."23 Free from the chains of the absolute, the rational enslavement of the logical waking world, these children can experience a security Oedipa never will. Complete security does not exist in an uncertain world. The world that these children can escape through their dreams entraps Oedipa. Her logical, rational mind will not release her to experience the freedom offered by their world, so her response to the children is a defensive one: "Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them."24 Oedipa's fruitless search for the Word, her endless grasping for signs, for meaning, for the muted post horn, is echoed in Giorgio de Chirico's 1914 painting Melancholy and Mystery of a Street. Rolling a hoop with a stick, the girl in the painting looks as if she is chasing a muted post horn down one of de Chirico's famous streets where ominous shadows lurk and depict a man, potentially offering the girl salvation or harm from an eternal distance. Such images are like words: "being the raw material of thought, it is through them primarily that one experiences the surreal and its marvelous fusion of opposites: they are the key to the reunification of opposites" in an indeterminate world.25 The union of opposites in V. is perhaps most vivid in the nightmarish marriages of flesh and metal. The Bad Priest of Malta, Signorina Veronica Maganese, for example, slowly and willingly exchanges parts of her body for metal, jewels, and mirrors. Thought to be a man by her parishioners, Veronica preaches abstinence, isolation, and, ultimately, the demise of the human race: "The girls he advised to become nuns, avoid the sensual extremes--pleasure of intercourse, pain of childbirth. The boys he told to find strength in--and be like--the rock of their island."26 The lack of humanity in this message must have been subconsciously felt by the children, who, upon finding her body trapped under a fallen beam, pick her apart like vultures feeding on dead flesh. Unabashedly, and not without drawing blood, the children pull from their priest the following grotesque treasures: a long, white wig; dull, gold slippers stuck to artificial feet; a star sapphire belly button; a set of false teeth; and, a glass eye with a clock-shaped iris. Salvador Dali consistently depicted the unnatural union of animate and inanimate. In his 1935 painting Woman at the Head of Roses, a woman is admiring the art work standing before her: a woman draped in white and green cloth, with a delicate arm and foot featuring painted red nails. Yet the exposed leg is wooden, made with iron nails and attached to the flesh of her hip, and the lovely head expected to rise above the graceful shoulder is a bouquet of flowers--there is no face but a strage beauty in this illogical union. Additionally, between the years 1951 and 1952, Dali depicted human features in jewelry, one of which is The Eye of Time. The edge of the lids exist as sleek crustaceans of diamonds outlined in silver, and a ruby is placed at the inner corner of the eye, from which a tear is falling. Most relevant, though, to Veronica is that the eyeball itself is a clock. Hands protrude from the iris, pointing to the numbers that encircle the white eye. Both Pynchon and Dali recognize, it seems, the eerie surgical ease with which human features could be replaced with unsettling beauty by inanimate objects. The Crying of Lot 49 begins with surreal imagery of the inanimate: "Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work."27 Standing still, Oedipa allows the inanimate object a brief animated existence. The TV actively stares through its eye at Oedipa, who is motionless. After this confrontation, Oedipa often finds herself caught between the shocking and illogical intrusion of worlds. Writing "Shall I project a world?" in her memobook, Oedipa not only acknowledges her ability to create a world but that more than one world exists for her to encounter.28 One major interpretation of quantum theory is "The Many Worlds Theory," which is based upon the actualized multiple choices that happen every time there is a point of decision about the way an indeterminate physical process might resolve itself. This theory suggests that there are an infinite number of worlds and possibly a version of being in each one that is different from the others because it had to pursue and develop another possible chain of events.29 Such a combination that defies all empirical thought is sensed by Oedipa in her vision of the road being a hypodermic needle and the freeway a vein into the drug-addicted persona of Los Angeles: "What the world really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain."30 As the tupperware-filled, mundane world of Oedipa Maas collides with a world of concrete and steel, people become the drugs that sustain the hallucinations of the city's inanimate world. Such worlds collide in a way that defies human logic, and they do so amidst the surreal phenomenon of objective chance. In Surrealist Situations of the Object, Breton refers to this chance as "le hasard objectif": "an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes peculiar to each individual, of harmonies struck as though on a piano, flashes of light that would make you see, really see, if only they were not so much quicker than all the rest."31 The surrealist belief in the phenomenon of objective chance, chance meetings and connections in the world, past and present, is an example of the wondrous as well as an illustration of Pynchon's portrayals of paranoia. The text V. itself is an example of the phenomenon of objective chance and of how Pynchon "parodies the compulsion of the human mind to find a pattern in events and to create a pattern where none manifests itself."32 The chance appearances of "V" in the text, and in Stencil's search, parody the cause-and-effect reasoning of the rational mind. "V" stands for victory, a bar called the V-note, half of a TV, and a symbol for the direction in which society is headed. "V" is the first letter of Valetta, the land where Stencil's father died, and a prominent letter in the name of a theater, Theatre de Vincent Castor, and a play, L'Enlevement des Vierges Chinoises. "V" is also in Vheissu, a surreal land that agent Godolphin stumbles upon: "The trees outside the head shaman's house have spider monkeys which are iridescent. They change color in the sunlight. Everything changes. The mountains, the lowlands are never the same color from one hour to the next. No sequence of colors is the same from day to day. As if you lived inside a madman's kaleidoscope."33The letter V additionally has a prominent affiliation with the surrealist movement. VVV and View were significant surrealist reviews published in New York City in the early 1940s, and it is "likely that VVV was referred to in Pynchon's art history elective at Cornell, but it is certain that both VVV and View were available on the open stacks of the New York Public Library where Pynchon researched and worked on V.." 34 In The Crying of Lot 49, the surreal phenomenon of objective chance comes not in the shape of a solitary letter but in circuitry, a dance, and a muted post horn. Upon entering the Southern California town of San Narciso, Oedipa thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the ciruit card had. [...] [A] hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate."35Recognizing this pattern, the connection makes Oedipa feel as if "a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding" that "she and the Chevy seemed parked at [...] an odd, religious instant."36 Eric Charles White notes the irony of Oedipa's paranoid impulse towards patterns and connections: "Oedipa may have become a producer rather than a passive consumer of meanings, may have overcome the drift toward 'generic' sameness, but from whatever interpretation she attributes to reality, another totalizing system can emerge."37 Nevertheless, Oedipa's "odd, religious instant" illustrates the need Pynchon's characters feel to create patterns out of chance occurrences with the hope that some sort of understandable order and meaning will materialize. The dancers that Oedipa encountered at the deaf-mute delegates' ball defy any such pattern. Swept into the dance upon entering her hotel, Oedipa watched couples tango, two-step, and bossa nova as she listened to the rustling, shuffling hush, for there was no music. Oedipa expected and feared collisions, but none came. Frantically searching for a reason, the only conclusion Oedipa could come to was an unsettling one: "The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined."38 The explanation Oedipa most desperately craved, however, is one that would reveal the meaning of her repeated encounters with the muted post horn sign. The muted post horn is a symbol for Trystero, an underground mail system which opposed the Thurn and Taxis postal system in Europe and appeared sometime before 1853 in America as a rebellious competitor of Wells Fargo and the Pony Express. The sleepless twenty-four hours Oedipa spent wandering the streets of San Francisco, for example, were imploded by muted post horns in many forms: worn on the lapel of a man in a gay bar, The Greek Way; displayed through the pattern of a jump-rope game; stamped upon a 1904 edition of the paper Regeneracion; stitched with silver thread upon the gang jackets of delinquents; scratched on the back of a bus seat; tacked to the bulletin board of a laundromat; traced upon a window by a fingernail in the steam of a girl's breath; scrawled in the balance-book of a gambler who always loses; and, posted as an advertisement on a latrine for A.C.D.C., the Almeda County Death Club. From a physically deformed welder to an aging night watchman who eats ivory soap, Oedipa found that "[d]ecorating each alienation, each species of withdrawal, as cufflink, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always the post horn."39 The random appearances of the muted post horn, as well as the letter "V," which Pynchon's paranoid characters are constantly trying to mold into a pattern, resemble the electron, one of the basic elements of matter, in new physics. Neils Bohr recognized that electrons jump from the energy state of the particle to the energy state of the wave in discontinuous quantum leaps, which vary in size according to how many quanta of energy electrons have absorbed or dispersed. As a result, when an electron makes the transition from one energy state to another within the atom, it does so in a completely random and spontaneous way: "Suddenly, with no prior warning and certainly without a 'cause,' a previously quiet atom may experience chaos in its electron energy shells. It's all just a matter of chance."40 Studying physics for his undergraduate degree, Pynchon surely would have been familiar with this scientific phenomenon of objective chance that his characters constantly confront and fruitlessly attempt to explain. The phenomenon of objective chance takes on an aesthetic form in Dali's 1936 Suburb of Paranoiac-critical Town: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History. In this painting, the bell tower of the background appears in the foreground structure's shape, and the girl whose skirts form the bell in the background tower can be seen again skipping rope through the foreground structure. The girl is reminiscent of de Chirico's girl from Melancholy and Mystery of a Street where the hoop and stick are replaced with a similarly shaped jump-rope, both seen in the shadows. Additionally, horizontally yet disjunctively architectural spaces represent simultaneously three diverse locations where Dali lived at different times in his life: Palamos, Vilabertran, and Cadaques.41 Unexplainable repetition and similar occurrences happen together here but all beyond human understanding. By the middle of the twentieth century, surrealism and new physics left their final experimental stages and became instituted and readily accessible to the general public. It is also at this time, around 1960, that some literary scholars claimed modernism had given way to postmodernism, a division that has been argued about for decades. Literary scholars defending the existence of a postmodern text often refer to the characteristics that they claim distinguish it from a modern text, namely the constant reappearance of a sense of dislocation, of humans being eclipsed by systems, of fantastic worlds created from the acceptance of an existence beyond comprehension, and of a sarcastic, strangely calm nod in the direction of cultural threats and the impossibility of any available meaning. Other critics argue that postmodernism, by its very name, is merely a deepening or an extension of modernist anxiety and search for authenticity and understanding. While this ongoing debate is beyond the scope of my paper, I hope to have opened a dialogue among V., The Crying of Lot 49, surrealism, and new physics in order to provide readers with the means of more readily accepting the possible worlds accentuated by the reappearances mentioned above and that exist in Pynchon's texts. The laws of new physics have proven that any sort of comprehensive meaning is impossible, for matter is never stable enough to measure. The various worlds portrayedin surrealist painting reflect this fantastical and indeterminate state of human existence. Pynchon reaches back to the laws of both new physics and surrealism in order to textualize the uncertainty of being that surrounds mid to late twentieth century culture, and readers who refuse to enter a dialogue with all three simultaneously will find themselves in a frustrated state of confusion because the patterns, endings, and meanings they expect are simply beyond reach. |
