Thomas Pynchon, Literary Giant
Thomas Pynchon remains central to any serious consideration of the maximalist novel. I first discovered the truth of an adage about Gravity's Rainbow (1973) while conducting research for my PhD dissertation on encyclopedic literature: when it comes to reading Pynchon's 760 page magnum opus, there are those who endure, and those who give up. And the difference matters. Over a fiftyyear career, the author has made stamina a central part of processing his challenging and difficult art. Through intricacies of composition, grand vision, and sheer length, Pynchon's novels exhilarate as we approach their centers, yet given their narrative overabundance fry our cognitive circuits every step of the way. Metaphysical journey, historical reimagining, and hazing ritual all at once, Pynchon's fictions are marathons replete with Borgesian labyrinths. His style compels a longterm relationship between reader and author that disrupts the against the grain reading practices privileged in academia today, which empower critics to demystify the art of fiction as political artifice. Yet, if fans of Pynchon have willfully submitted to his spell over the years embracing its efforts to respond to the zeitgeist of "exhaustion" as defined by John Barthes it is because the payoff is a glimpse into the absolute that lingers behind the network of information technologies that define our age. Pynchon is not only a master of maximalist form, but he is also a humanist who believes in the power of literature to aid in a universal search for meaning. His latest, Bleeding Edge (2013) follows this path in the historical here and now of the World Wide Web. Pynchon's relationship to a tradition of big novels was first defined by Edward Mendelson in the 1976 article "Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon." Extended references to politics, science, technology, language, history and art (as well as the tropes of monstrosity and gigantism that reflect on the form itself) are among the many particulars contained by encyclopedic works. Mendelson characterizes Pynchon as an encyclopedic author who, along with Dante and other luminaries, "attempt[s] to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge." He rightly concludes, however, that Gravity's Rainbow exceeds the nation, for "[t]he distinguishing character of Pynchon's new internationalism is its introduction of an order based on information, of data, instead of the old order built on money and commercial goods." Starting with this article, and the followup piece "Gravity's Encyclopedia," Gravity's Rainbow becomes a touchstone for virtually every major analysis of encyclopedic fiction, a "textual industry comparable to the industry founded upon the Bible" that is, according to Mendelson, typical of an encyclopedic author of major importance to an entire nation. Beyond that, Pynchon holds global credentials; he has been a source of inspiration for world authors including the late Roberto Bolano who has tried his or her hand at writing the big postmodern novel. Gravity's Rainbow occupies the center of the new maximalist galaxy; others planets only retain close orbit. Ever since first struggling with Pynchon in college, I have felt that one of the most fascinating and still unexamined features of his craft involves a deliberate form of overwriting that marries content and form in ways that are so direct as to be counterintuitive. From the detailing of Wendell "Mucho" Maas's auto junkyard in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) to a passage in Gravity's Rainbow that itemizes the objects upon Tyrone Slothrop's desk, Pynchon's run on sentences suggest spillage beyond the page. Pynchon assembles garbage heaps through a garbage heap of signifiers. The effect here is one of pushing the dimensions of literature toward the visual and the tactile. By using the rubbish of contemporary life as concrete material, Pynchon's fiction approximates junk sculpture. Even beyond the conceits of concrete poetry taking visual shape on the page, Pynchon builds a fictional cosmology through an implied mixed media process of accumulation, assortment and recycling of waste capable of turning words into "objects" that serve as buffers for the reader. V. (1963) and Gravity's Rainbow are not only books full of words, but artifacts with heft, size and mountainous scales. In connection with Robert Rauschenberg's 1960s "combines" (and the assemblage works of California artists such as Bruce Connor and Wally Hendrick) Pynchon's early novels build big with/ as garbage. Pynchon suggests such an interest in "trashing" the novel particularly vis a vis death and destruction in his article "A Journey into the Mind of Watts," which concludes with a rumination on Simon Rodia's Watts Towers. In the wake of the 1965 riots, the Watts Towers are giant sculptures made of "busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste." They survive as a "fantasy of fountains, boats, tall openwork spires, and aims of literary maximalism have evolved from their high modernist and postmodern origins to encompass an even more informationally saturated era. Big fiction published in this decade, then, reflects a step away from totality toward the multiplicity and interactivity of network aesthetics "not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude" as one ambitious character in Garth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire (2015) characterizes his own writing projects. This approach links the other titles collected here to Joshua Cohen's Witz (2010) Adam Levin's The Instructions (2011) Rick Moody's The Four Fingers of Death (2011) John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun (2011) Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity (2012) Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (2013) James Ellroy's Perfidia (2014) Robert Coover's The Brunist's Day of Wrath (2014) and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life (2015) not to mention William T. Vollmann's ongoing Seven Dreams series, the most recent volume of which (The Dying Grass [2015] clocks in at 1,376 pages to some of the best reviews of the writer's career. Indeed, the novel of the season, Marlon James's 700 page Booker Award winning A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) arguably puts this critical sea change best when its narrator warns, "The problem with a book is that you never know what it's planning to do to you until you're too far into it." Along these lines, the shift to large scale fiction is also striking because it requires a certain dedication to reading at a time many critics complain that people do not read any more or at least no longer have time for long, arborescent, and demanding books. Sam Anderson's 2009 New York magazine piece "When Lit Blew into Bits" locates this shift amid the diminishing popularity of maximalism in the first decade of the twenty first century, a development he attributes to the Internet's capacity to "infinitely distract" over a period during which the web's informational plenitude stood in for (and at times, short circuited altogether) both the value and utility of lengthier fiction. On the one hand, Anderson argues, novels literally "shrink" to shorter lengths given the cognitive pressures that force attention spans to match the speed, immediacy, and ephemerality of touch click technology. On the other, those authors still inclined toward grander productions allow their work to be disseminated in ever more compartmentalized ways for a reading public delighted with immersion but daunted by the physically intimidating heft that often accompanies it. Is Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel (2010) for example, only a Mega Novel if one buys it in the chunky paperback? Or is the work's corresponding internal density better consumed in ten discrete novellas, as the episodic ebook only edition makes convenient? That is, if size really matters, does the reading experience differ significantly between the two? In a similar vein, Hallberg's eagerly awaited debut landed on the desks of British reviewers this summer in a seven part boxed set, reflecting a UK marketing scheme modeled on the popularity of the HBO miniseries format. Whether "binge reading" will emerge to compete with its cinematic and televisual counterpart is anyone's guess. What's clearer is the fact that these comparative media discourses, unimaginable without the advent of digital textuality, will continue to shape the way publishers and scholars alike think about the reading of big novels, and explain why just as importantly they so often go unread. Responding to Mark McGurl's recent call in The Program Era (2009) for a greater attention to literary scale in which he invites readers to consider "What links, if any, can be drawn between literary form and the work's presumed scale of address?" the implications of aesthetic size in creative and critical circles will likewise continue to resonate with those critics alert to contemporary American literary history's recent past with an eye to its future.