The audacity and scope of the inventor's dreams had always sent Heino Vanderjuice staggering back to his office in Sloane Lab feeling not so much a failure as someone who has taken a wrong turn in the labyrinth of Time and now cannot find his way back to the moment he made it.
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Content Warning: I don't know what I'm talking about.
I suppose one can't help but think of Thomas Pynchon as a postmodern writer. But literary genres are sort of fucked up. I suppose all labels placed on art, in an effort to understand that art, invariably lead to art that is made in an attempt to actively engage that label. So you begin to ascertain levels based on how a piece of art coexists with the genre it's perceived as being part of. The first tier is art that is a true reaction to a previous generation's art. Maybe not entirely conscious of the rebellion inherent in it, simply a visceral, explosive sigh in artistic form. Eventually you get a second tier where people have noticed a number of similar reactions to recent art and create art in the same vein but with a conscious understanding of the new style or delivery of the art. Then there is a third tier in which the artist, having been influenced mostly by the new and current trend against the old, but having little understanding of the old, chooses to make art similar to the new style without any knowledge that it's a response to the constant conversation of generational artists. And lastly, I think, there's the tier that simply copies the style because it's the current style, not thinking one way or the other, in any depth, on what the style means or why it came into vogue. They're simply parroting what seems to be popular. The boundaries on these tiers definitely aren't steep, vertical walls but slowly ascending ramps, perhaps their steady rise sometimes barely noticeable.
These tiers perhaps make sense, as a way of thinking of artful dialogue, in many cases with new art styles supplanting old styles as the popular form of their time. But I'm not sure if I can reconcile them in postmodern literature. Postmodernism feels too much like a manufactured and purposeful response to modernist literature, never really existing in a space that was simple, visceral reaction. It's often too methodical. It's the first genre which maybe exists after a true loss of innocence (the loss happening during the modernist era). Postmodernism is simply modernism devirginized. It's generally the same reaction about the same things but with a hyperbolic (and maybe (certainly often) ironic) understanding of that reaction. It's no wonder that people tend to think of World War II as the end of modernism and the birth of postmodernism. World War I saw a stark and depressing change in the world's capability of truly understanding and acknowledging (and feeling culpable for) the horrors perpetrated by mankind. World War II witnessed how far those horrors could go, to a seemingly unimaginable end. World War I asked, "How much can human beings stand, and how far will they go?" World War II answered, "This far, assholes."
All of this is to say, I suppose one can't help but think of Thomas Pynchon as a postmodern writer. He's as conscious as any author has ever been about what he's writing and how he's writing it. He's trying to communicate big ideas about great moments in mankind's history and their effects on simple, everyday individuals. But he often feels like a modernist writer. Which is part of his postmodern game, of course! He's not just writing a story that begins in 1893 in a way that modern audiences can easily digest it. He's writing a story that begins in 1893 that would be easily digestible by people of 1893 but told in a way that winks and smirks at modern audiences. "This is a book about 1893 that isn't about 1893 at all. Did you read my book about World War II that was very much about the Nixon era and Vietnam because it was written in the late 60s/early 70s? Well this one was written at the end of the 20th century/beginning of the 21st century so it's about that time period as well. It won't mention any of that but just be aware, dumb-dumb." You can tell that was a quote I made up by Thomas Pynchon talking to me because it ends with Pynchon saying "dumb-dumb."
What got me thinking about all of this was Pynchon's sentence "taken a wrong turn in the labyrinth of Time and now cannot find his way back to the moment he made it." How postmodern is it to mention a labyrinth?! And for that labyrinth to be composed of time! I'd categorize modernism as being lost in the labyrinth of the mind and postmodernism as being lost in the labyrinth of time (and the mind and nostalgia and memory and childhood and sexual impotency and advertising and a list of things a labyrinth could be composed of). But not just lost inside a metaphorically geographic space but being lost in trying to return to a specific moment in your life.
"audacity and scope of the inventor's dreams"
This is another great bit. Pynchon doesn't say Vanderjuice is sickened by Tesla's inventions or his accomplishments; he's simply devastated by Tesla's imagination! In a way, this is probably what makes most writer's envious of other writers in the final summation. Maybe Vonnegut's Mother Night has some serious flaws in its construction and its facts, and perhaps it wasn't the most interesting of his books in, say, 1975 or 1993. But it was written in 1961 as an observation of historical events from the previous generation and was prescient in the conversation of Fox News and its terrible hosts in the 21st century. When I first read Mother Night, I wasn't envious that Vonnegut had written that book. I hardly had any life experience to make me see anything monumental about it at all. But in 2021, as a nearly fifty year old man, I am staggered by his imagination, by the audacity and scope of his perception. In other words, his genius makes me nauseated.
Pynchon, obviously, is of the same scope (if not greater. That's a subjective call that I'm not willing to debate (mostly because I don't know whose side I would be on)). But Pynchon was probably thinking of writers he's envious of when writing this moment; of people within his field who he can only dream of being compared to. I don't know much about Pynchon personally but he must have literary heroes whom he feels dwarf even his greatest works. Maybe Joyce? Melville? Heller, perhaps? Steinbeck?!
