The Poetics of Transgression: Schizophrenia, Paranoia, Narcissism, and Hyperreality in Pynchon's ...

101 Pages·2006·0.32 MB·English

by  國立中山大學 外國語文學系研究所 黃婷瑩

國立中山大學外國語文研究所
碩士論文
A Thesis Submitted to
the Graduate Institute of
Foreign Languages and Literature
National Sun Yat-sen University
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts

越界詩學:品瓊小說《喊叫 49》中的
精神分裂、偏執狂、自戀症與超真實
The Poetics of Transgression: Schizophrenia, Paranoia,
Narcissism, and Hyperreality in Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49

研究生 : 黃婷瑩
By Huang Ting Ying
指導教授 : 張錦忠 教授
Advisor: Professor Tee Kim Tong

中華民國九十五年六月
June 2006
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The Poetics of Transgression:
Schizophrenia, Paranoia, Narcissism, and Hyperreality in
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract
This thesis aims to excavate and accentuate the poetics of transgression
manifested in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in the light of psychoanalytical
theory. The psychoanalytical reading of this novel is indispensable since it provides
an illuminating comprehension of the concept of transgression. The idea of
transgression refers emphatically to the act of crossing, traversing, or violating
boundaries and, more significantly, to the subversion and undermining power latent in
the act of transgression. Chapter one offers a general introduction of the historical
and cultural context of the novel, the theoretical framework and thesis structure.
Chapter two resorts mainly to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s understanding of
the unconscious syntheses in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia to delineate
the textual structure, which refers to San Narciso. The city is simultaneously the
projection of Pierce Inverarity’s unconscious topography and the projection of
capitalist society. The psychic and social registrations are similarly founded on the
model of the unconscious syntheses, or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, the
desiring-machines, manifesting their assertion that there is no boundary between the
psychic and the social and the two are both invested by the desire. The underground
network of the Tristero otherwise projects an alternative force in contrast to the
capitalist dictatorship of Pierce. The Tristero represents the schizophrenia that is
produced yet renounced by capitalism and it also stands for the aggressive force that
pushes the capitalist machine to its limits. Chapter three analyzes the relation
between Oedipa Maas and the city San Narciso. Oedipa represents a bourgeoisie
housewife whose ego centrism is cultivated by the narcissistic enclosure of the
capitalist society in San Narciso. The permeating aura of narcissism precipitates her
paranoia, depriving her of the alternative sight to see the real Tristero. Oedipa’s
paranoiac obsession makes her see the Tristero as a simple conspiracy, ignoring its
schizophrenic nature. Opposite to such an arbitrary misconception, this thesis
attempt to recover the proper character of the Tristero as a hyperreality in the light of
Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulation.

Key words: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Anti-Oedipus, transgression,
psychoanalysis, capitalism, the unconscious, schizophrenia, paranoia, narcissism,
hyperreality
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … ...… … … … 1
Chapter Two: Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and the Unconscious Topography of
Pierce Inverarity… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … .… .........23
Chapter Three: Narcissism, Paranoia, and Hyperreality: Oedipa’s Misconception
of the Tristero… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … ..57
Chapter Four: Conclusion… … … .… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … .87
Works Cited … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … .93
Chapter One: Introduction

General introduction
First published in 1966, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is engraved
with an overwhelming atmosphere of the notorious sixties in which capitalism swayed
America. In domestic aspect, the aftermath of McCarthyism and the disastrous
outcome of intervention in Vietnam War aroused general distrust toward the
government and an unsettling emotion among the public. In cultural aspect, the
picaresque and nomadic lifestyle inherited from the Beat Generation of the fifties still
wielded its power on the hippies in the sixties.1 In the aspect of public recreation,
the invention of television proclaimed that the primary domestic entertainment had
challenged the traditional way of communication and foreseen a totally different
relationship between individual and society. Prophesying dramatic changes in
varying degrees, whether politically, economically, or culturally, the sixties marked
such a milestone in American history, that Pynchon “felt a need to stretch, to step out”
(Slow Learner 21-22). He did so in The Crying of Lot 49.
Pynchon’s work is often categorized as the postmodern gospel that characterizes
paradoxical subversion. By crying for a need to stretch and step out, Pynchon means
to make a different voice in his writing. A mocking one that subverts and makes fun
of the grand narrative— either the authorial language of the American government or
the linear narrative of traditional historians. In this respect, such a hilarious voice
can only be heard while being maneuvered under the peculiar tactics of parody. Wit

1 The term “Beat Generation” was introduced by Jack Kerouac to describe his social circle which
included a small group of struggling writers, students, and drug addicts. “Beat” implies a sense of
“tired out” and “down and out,” but Kerouac adds a paradoxical meaning of “beatific.” Kerouac’s On
the Road was published in1957. As one of the significant beat writers, Kerouac’s picaresque writing
style and life style have particular influence on Pynchon. Pynchon says after finished V., “‘I was on
the road at last, getting to visit the places Kerouac had written about’” (Gordon 176).
2
and irony pose as two important features in Pynchon’s parodic writing style, and
together with the comic nature and pseudo-names of his characters and places, these
elements lighten the mood of paranoid or sinister reading experience. The form of
parody or comedy is a necessary narrative strategy for Pynchon because it illuminates
the dark undercurrents of the novel yet it never overpowers that darkness. Parody
also serves as a convenient form for Pynchon, for it can take on diverse degrees of
seriousness, from high culture to lowly coarse puns. It is notable that Pynchon’s
sublime object of parody is the American society. There are many remarkable
realms of American life that are ironically caricatured and deflated in Crying. 2
Readers of Pynchon’s novels can sense a conspicuously subversive and skeptical
attitude of the author toward racial problems, oppressive economic practices— namely
capitalism— genocidal brutality, the intrigues in the superior, and the police-state
repression, which are the recurring themes in the text. These facts prove that the
author is more a careful inspector and sympathizer, than a playful postmodern
parodist of the turbulent sixties. Though for many Americans the fifties was
suffused with a widespread fear of international communist plot, it was until the
sixties that they discovered a richer vein of domestic conspiracy that underwent right
under their noses. As one of the postmodern writers who plays with words, Pynchon
also has his finger dipped into this grandeur inquisition, only in a more circuitous and
comical way.

Literature Review
As David Cowart has observed, literature which emerged after World War II tend
to express an element of reflexivity and writers of this period are increasingly

2 In this thesis references of The Crying of Lot 49 are to the 1965 HarperPerennail edition, which is
hereafter cited in the text as Crying.
3
committed to the interrogation of their time and milieu (1). Unsurprisingly, Pynchon
explores in Crying as in V. the atmosphere of distrust and paranoia toward American
government. In Crying, Pierce Inverarity symbolizes the incarnation of the insidious
American Big Brother and the capitalist regime. In recognizing the general appetite
for a renounced historical coherence, Pynchon creates certain alternative historical
genealogy known as the Tristero along Oedipa Maas’s journey of will performance.
Cowart sees Oedipa’s will performance as an internal quest for the self and such
quest runs parallel with the nation’s painful recognition in the sixties of its suffering
from a national neurasthenia (4-7). Such neurasthenia concerns the issue of racial
injustice brought to a full scale before American minds, an acute awareness that no
matter how many B-52s it had delivered, a certain country in Southeast Asia would
still insist on going its own way, and a self-doubt aroused among the citizens in this
country who started to realize that the version of America projected in films, on TV, in
advertisements, and in its very neighborhoods, was “woefully unrepresentative”
(Cowart 6). While Cowart discusses the impact of America of the sixties on
Pynchon and metaphorically relates Oedipa’s quest to America’s agonizing
self-awareness in this period, Charles Holldander provides some other evidential links
between the novel and the historical sixties.
Focusing on the possible references for names in Crying, Hollander’s paper
abounds in political, religious, financial, mythological and historical interpretation for
the sources of Pynchon’s naming tactics. Hollander finally introduces a recent
American history of the military-industrial complex and draws further yet daring
analogies between America of the sixties and Nazi Germany as well as between
United States and some totalitarian regimes. The term “military-industrial complex”
was first enunciated by Eisenhower while, leaving office, he could freely express his
4
anger over CIA’s over control of the U-2 affair.3 The America of the sixties was still
shrouded with McCarthyism and the nation was well equipped with armaments, on
guard against any possible martial movements of the Soviet. Hollander parallels
America of the military sixties with the police-state of Nazi Germany and considers
the Yoyodyne company, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors in the novel, as
the insidious and ridiculous headquarter of armed forces with its owner Pierce
Inverarity as the general commander. Here he indicates one more instance of
Pynchon’s serious concern modified in a parodic caricature. The first name of the
Yoyodyne stockholder Clayton Chiclitz gives rise to one’s suspicion of its likely
source of the U. S. Congressman Henry De Lamar Clayton, a name that reminds us of
the famous Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914.4
Another reference which suggests America’s similarity to a certain totalitarian
regime lies in Oedipa’s visiting Mr. Thoth in a nursing house. At Vesperhaven House,
Mr. Thoth (whose name is an allusion to Toth, the ancient Egyptian god of
communication and writing) tells Oedipa a sinister episode about the Federal
oppression of challengers and deviants to its postal monopoly. An episode with
connotations of plausible deniability assimilates the ostensibly democratic America to
the dictatorial regime of Nazi Germany. The phrase “plausible deniability,”
according to Mike Fallopian (one of the Yoyodyne’s rebellious workers and a member

3At the height of the "cold war," as critics of the Eisenhower administration complained about the
growing "missile gap," the United States secretly gathered data on Soviet missile capabilities through
photographs obtained from U-2 reconnaissance plane overflights of the Soviet Union. In May 1960,
plans were finalized for a crucial Paris summit conference between western nations and leaders of the
Soviet Union with disarmament to be the main focus. Hopes for a successful summit were dashed when
on May 1, May Day, an American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over
Soviet air space. On the first day of the Paris summit, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stormed out
after delivering a condemnation of U.S. spy activities.
(http://www.eisenhower.utexas.edu/dl/U2Incident/u2documents.html)
4 According to Hollander, The Clayton Act prohibited “’exclusive sales contracts, local price cutting to
freeze out competitors, rebates, interlocking directorates in corporations capitalized at one million
dollars or more in the same field of business, and intercorporate stock holdings’” (87). However,
Pynchon’s intentional use of the name is ironic since the Clayton Chiclitz is an exploiter who ignores
employee’s patent right and a supporter of Yoyodyne’s economic hegemony in San Narciso.
5
of Tristero network), refers to a tactic usually involves a cover story “that disguises
how the objectives of the state . . . are accomplished (here by armed suppression of
competition) using means that contradict professed policies or principles of the state”
(Hollander 88). Hollander suggests that, in this episode Tristero may have been a
secret assassination company hired by the U.S. government to eliminate unwanted or
difficult people to consolidate its postal monopoly and yet to deny any official
involvement in case the matter come to light. Though Hollander provides an
interesting interpretation of Tristero’s historical and political existence, he fails to
further decipher Tristero as a potential counterforce to the state. Engaging in events
of the governmental suppressions over independent postal corporations, Tristero’s
partnership becomes a pain in the ass after the dirty work is done. Its very existence
threatens the integrity and righteous nationhood and hence symbolizes the reification
of an undermining antagonism.
Both Hollander and Cowart present a fascinating explication of Crying based
on their thorough understanding of American history and politics, which stimulate
readers to make a connection between the text and the contemporary milieu. Such a
reading brings about a sympathetic attitude to the author’s writing intention.
However, such foregrounds and implications might be arbitrary and confusing for
Pynchon’s first-time readers who are without these “basic knowledge” of American
panorama. Instead of being pinned down by single historical interpretation, Crying
presents itself as a novel with diversities of meanings and appeals to multiple
realizations. Among numerous critical readings of the text, I find discussions
centering on Pynchonian nomenclature based on possible mythological sources and
psychoanalytic interpretations particularly inviting and thought provoking.
Names have always been a significant access to the understanding of Pynchon’s
characters. Though The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon’s second and shortest novel,