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RICHARD POIRIER
tially conservative an idea "hip" turns out to be. Barth writei not
merely in praise of such needs and virtues (and Mailer only momen–
tarily proposes them), but like a man who has decided (as the con–
temporary young are reluctant to do) that he really must search for
them through the labyrinths that have been made of life by history
and literature, by criticism and even by the very novel he is in
the
act of writing.
I am describing a literature whose structural and stylistic prop–
erties are given a status equivalent to systems of a politically and
psychically repressive kind. In Thomas Pynchon's work much
the
same repressive and dictatorial power is located in yet another ele–
ment of the literary imagination - the element of plotting - and
this, too, is a distinguishing feature of the contemporary political
imagination.
V.,
his first novel, is designed to indict its own (omic
elaborateness. The various quests of V. are interwoven fantastically;
they are made preposterously coherent.
As
in Barth, the participa–
tion of Pynchon's characters in this maze of fabrication precludes
their participation in more human plots, the search for love and
the
discovery of friendship even within their pathetic tribal huddles. The
knotty entanglements of plot in Pynchon's novels are meant to testify
to waste - a word prominently displayed on the inside cover of
his
second novel
The Crying of Lot
49 - the waste of imagination
that creates and is then enslaved by its own plottings, machines, the
products of its technology. Except for the heroine of
V.,
Rachel Owl–
glass, and the heroine of
The Crying of Lot
49, Oedipa Maas–
lovable, hapless, decent, eager girls - both novels are populated
by
self-mystified people running as
if
on command from the responsi–
bilities of love to the fascination of puzzles and the power of
things.
No plot, political, novelistic or personal, can issue from the circum–
stances of love, from the simple human needs,
say,
of Rachel or
of
Oedipa, and Pynchon implicitly mocks this situation by the Byzan–
tine complications of the plot by which his characters choose,
if
that
is the right word, to be manipulated.
Gestures of warmth are the more touching in his novels for
being terrifyingly intermittent, shy and worried. The coda of
the
first novel (which I had the astonishment of reviewing with no prior
warning as to its brilliance when it first came out in 1963) is enun–
ciated by the jazz player McClintock Sphere, and it serves
well
