Piece of Dirt: You May Never Get to Touch the Master, But You Can Tickle His Creatures (A Year of Pynchon)

So who exactly is this Pynchon guy?

No one really knows much about Pynchon. Despite being well regarded in the literary community, hugely influential, a pioneer in his field, and his countless awards, Pynchon is notorious for his privacy and avoiding his own celebrity, to the extent of self-parody. There are only a few facts that we know about him, and delving in too deep would be missing the point, so I'll go over the facts that are important to understanding aspects of his work.

His family's legacy started with a group of Puritans coming to America, which lead to the founding of Springfield, Massachusetts. The family continued to prosper with wealth and good fortune.

Eventually Thomas "Ruggles" Pynchon Jr. was born in 1937 in Long Island, New York. He went to high school in Oyster Bay where he started writing short stories for the school paper. He was awarded "Student of the Year". He graduated at the age of 16.

He went to college at Cornell University to study engineering physics. During his second year, he threw everyone a curve ball by quitting school to join the US Navy, where he served 2 years. He eventually returned to Cornell University to get a degree in English. There he made friends with Richard Fariña and David Shetzline.

He graduated with his BA in 1959. He got a job with Boeing in 1960 as a technical writer. He worked there for two years while he wrote his first novel V..

To continue from there is pointless. The next decade was spent writing, experimenting with drugs, flirting with aspects from the Beat Generation and the Hippie Movement, hanging out in jazz bars, crashing on couches, being a home-wrecker, moving from New York to California to Mexico repeatedly, writing blurbs and reviews after gaining recognition, avoiding the celebrity status that came with this recognition, and then vanishing off the face of the planet for over a decade. There are bits and pieces of this time in his life that have been collected, but by this point we have his writings that are fueled with his ideas, experiences, and what he was experiencing at this time.

What Makes Him Interesting?

Pynchon has always been one to eschew, and even ridicule, the idea of celebrity. He chose to go into hiding to avoid any powers that be, and to also maintain a wall between him and the public. When Pynchon started gaining notoriety, the idea of a celebrity being able to take advantage of/abuse their fame was laughable. Because of this, there are only a few photographs of him out there, he refuses public appearances, he uses aliases, and he has been known to use comedic surrogates. His intentions, however, have been turned against him. When he mentioned in the author section of V. that he was a recluse in Mexico, journalist at the time took that as a challenge. CNN decided to do an invasive report that involved secretly filming him. There have been cases of paparazzi stalking him through his daily routine just to snap a blurry photo.

Which is odd, because Pynchon seems to be one of literature's accidental secrets. Even in well-read circles, his name isn't a common one. Which is surprising, since two of his novels are on TIME's 100 Best Novels, five of his novels are in 1,001 Books To Read Before You Die, he's won quite a few awards, and he's also a common name in the nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Those in the know praise him as being one of America's best living writers, his novels consistently praised as "The Great American Novel". Not only is The Crying of Lot 49 required reading for some high school and college courses, but Thomas C. Foster has whole sections of his book How To Read Literature Like A Professor dedicated to it, and mentions it as one of his favorites. There are whole books written about the meanings and implications of Gravity's Rainbow. Harold Bloom has essays exploring his writings. And those who have heard of Pynchon know that his "must-read" books are dense, complex, and make adequate door-stoppers. They may be intimidated, not willing to put in the extra effort, or maybe they put him in the "Maybe I'll Read It One Day" pile along with other classics. And the funny thing is, if you go to your local bookstore, you can absolutely find at least one or two Pynchon novels on the shelf.

Another unsung fact is his sprawling influence. He is a pioneer of postmodernism along with DeLillo, Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis and many others. He is also popular within the high modernism movement. His dense encyclopedic writing and love of educational tangents have given his works a hypertext fiction label. His love of history, whether obscure, fictional, parodied, or referenced garnered his writing a historiographic metafiction label. Gravity's Rainbow is now considered the "Old Testament" of cyberpunk, Pynchon considered the grandfather of the genre, and William Gibson and Neil Stephenson cite him as a huge influence.

And they aren't the only ones. Pynchon has had a hand in influencing a lot of the top artist of today. To name a few:

David Foster Wallace (and Pynchon's quite a fan)
Ian Rankin
Elfriede Jelinek
Alan Moore
Salman Rushdie
David Cronenberg
Paul Thomas Anderson
Daniel Handler

Why Should I Read Him?

So Pynchon is a recluse, he's really paranoid, his writing is defined as "post-something' and 'historio-whatchacallit' and other empty literary jargon, his sentences are long, his writing is dense, his ideas are bizarre, he's influential, he's won awards, he looks goofy, but besides this why does anyone read him?

Because he's funny, often hilarious. His books are some of the funniest out there. Inherent Vice, for example, is the funniest book I've ever read.

His characters have appropriate and exaggerated names: Pig Bodine is a boorish sinister asshole; Dr. Hilarius is a German psychiatrist obsessed with hallucinogens; Dewey Gland is a dopey sailor who always has his guitar and loves playing awkward songs at inappropriate times; the list goes on.

It's not just silly names, though. Pynchon loves to write songs for his books. He is said to play the guitar, and he is a music lover, his taste ranging from jazz to rock to classical. From the aforementioned Dewey Gland's sad country ballads to the Paranoids singing rock songs in a British croon, Pynchon's books are full of songs that cover different subjects, genres, and levels of absurdity.

Which is great a representation in general. Pynchon's sense of humor covers a large spectrum. He is willing to hit an absurd point, follow it up with funny dialogue, throw in a few sex jokes or drug humor, follow it up with some slapstick, and then end it with a call-back to a joke that was made twelve pages ago that would make Edgar Wright drool with envy.

His sense of humor isn't secluded to just his writing, either. He's willing to joke about being a recluse and even mocking his own privacy on television shows. He has appeared three times on The Simpsons, and even voiced himself (through a telephone call; he didn't show up to the studio to record). There was a small plot line on The John Larroquette Show that featured "Pynchon Sightings". Pynchon gladly reviewed the scripts and made a few corrections. He's written linear notes for rock albums for bands that have embellished stories about meeting him.

There's more to him than just the jokes and the mathematics and the history lessons. Behind all of his quirks, he's still a story-teller. His books are windows into the era they're placed. There's always pop culture references littered throughout, but that's not it. They capture the culture, the struggles, the issues in the world, the fears, and the effects of that time and place on the past and the future. Each of his books holds a strong sense of nostalgia while preparing for the next big change. We'll go more into this when we get there.

And then there's the heart behind it all. Some people claim that Pynchon is cold and calculating with his characters, that he throws them in situations just to see what happens. But this isn't true. The majority of his characters are eccentric, bizarre, but their struggles are your struggles, and they're his too. They're taken to an extreme level, but it's to enhance the themes while still maintaining the entertainment value. He's the one that had to live with the characters and their stories for years while writing his books. And his affection shows.

Then there's the moments where he hits the nerve just right. Here's a few quotes, some funny, some thoughtful, to show the different sides of his mind.

“Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered.” -V.

“Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”

“Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.” -Slow Learner

“The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.” -Mason & Dixon

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” -Gravity's Rainbow

"There was an ancient superstition at the beach, something like the surfer belief that burning your board will bring awesome waves, and it went like this--take a Zig-Zag paper and write on it your dearest wish, and then use it to roll a joint of the best dope you can find, and smoke it all up, and your wish would be granted. Attention and concentration were also said to be important, but most of the dopers Doc knew tended to ignore that part." -Inherent Vice

“Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.”-Gravity's Rainbow

So this is why I'm doing the Year of Pynchon. He hits all the notes just right for me. He's one of my favorite writers, though I've only read several of his novels. It's going to be a challenge, but I think the end result will be worth it.

I want to end on one more quote, one that sums up Pynchon and what he stands for, one that encompasses his bibliography, one that the world can fit in.