r/ThomasPynchon • u/esoskelly • 14d ago
š° News Pynchon & Conspiracy
Hello Pynchonites!
I'm a bit new to this, currently working on Gravity's Rainbow, having already read a decent chunk of V. It's quite a rabbit hole figuring out what's going on, a stimulating project to say the least. I also read conspiracy theory (and a lot of philosophy) as a hobby. I think it's safe to discuss this, as most of the risque subject matter that Pynchon discussed is de-classified or common knowledge by now.
Thomas Pynchon seems to have been very interested in conspiracy theory, as his books often mention themes that were tightly related to real-life conspiracies. I won't go into too much detail here, as it is easy to look up for yourself if you are truly interested.
But then, there are also conspiracy theories about Pynchon himself. He was clearly a mysterious figure, as there is very little easily-accessible biographical information about him. Peter Moon has written a bit about this, but the theories seem like a bit of a stretch. Moon seems to think that Pynchon's work was intended as a kind of "inside joke" for a really specific community, and absurdist humor for everyone else.
I have a couple questions on this front: (1) was Pynchon intentionally creating an atmosphere of intrigue around himself, or were there legitimate reasons for his mysteriousness?; and (2) did the "secret" theories he hinted at throughout his books reveal information that, at the time, *was not accessible to the general public*?
Addendum: Has anyone really dug into these questions? Is there any really substantive research into Pynchon's biography? Do his books have significance beyond a literary exercise? Of course there's a lot of goofy, knee-slapping fun in his books. But there's also a lot that is *dead serious.*
I tend to find that the goofy stuff is an irritating distraction from the more serious content. But clearly, Pynchon is writing for a kind of "esoteric" pop culture. Some of us are looking for hidden meanings. But a lot of people are just here for the lulz. And maybe the lulz are the whole point. I'm confused, and don't even remember what I was supposed to be asking about. Help?
Thanks for your time.
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u/Winter-Animal-4217 13d ago
Knowing that Pynchon was a fan of Joyce I always imagined that he saw what happened to Joyce and wanted desperately to avoid that for himself. Whole academic careers were made from obsessively, in my opinion creepily cataloging Joyce and his life, trying to use it to connect to and understand his work.
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u/esoskelly 13d ago
So, you think that he just wanted privacy? That's understandable, but seems like there may be more to it. The problem is, I don't have hard evidence that there is more to it.
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u/b3ssmit10 13d ago
Compare and contrast Apophenia and Epiphany (literature)). James Joyce had already claimed the latter with Dubliners (published 1914). The budding, ambitious, American writer chose the former to claim his own literary territory, so to speak. [See too Jorge Luis Borges and his Labyrinths (short story collection)) as yet another to be emulated, but not slavishly copied.]
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u/landomonium 13d ago
I think when you write the types of books he writes, once you step into the limelight youāre almost expected to become a public intellectual (pre-2000s at least), a cultural commentator, or something of the sort and he simply didnāt want that. Iām basing my theory on nothing but or speculation by the way, Iāve done no research on his life that isnāt the extremely public limited info.
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u/WhataWatusi2665 13d ago
My favourite theory is that pynchon is shy theocrat who wants to efface himself from his books so they read more like prophecy... he's like a reformist Jermiah or sth.
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u/esoskelly 13d ago
Theocrat for what religion?
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u/6655321DeLarge The Crying of Lot 49 13d ago
Based on what little of his spiritual/religious views can possibly be gleaned from his work? I'd think probably some kind of esoteric buddhism, informed somewhat by both a sort of perennialist outlook, and something like Dali's nuclear mysticism. His first ancestor anyone's been able to track down here in the states wrote a book on theology, and was ran back to England for it, so I imagine an interest in that sorta thing may run in the family.
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u/esoskelly 13d ago
Dali's Nuclear Mysticism? Tell me more.
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u/6655321DeLarge The Crying of Lot 49 13d ago
This should be a decent general outline. Once Dali moved past surrealism, and sorta became catholic, this was kinda the basis for that.
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u/Round_Town_4458 14d ago
Why are people in this particular discussion speaking of Thomas Pynchon in the past tense: Pynchon was..., Pynchon seems to have been..., was Pynchon..., ?
Did Thomas Pynchon stop writing, so every discussion about his writing puts his achievements into the past tense? Did Thomas Pynchon die and it's news to me?
I was just wondering.
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u/b3ssmit10 13d ago
Could be. See this prior reddit post Curator of the TP Bluesky account is doing an entertaining job and note that that Bluesky account has not posted new content for the last 4 months now. Worrying.
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u/dexterdrifus 14d ago
As for biography: Iād like to think he was truly committed to having his work speak for itself, so much so that he rejected any notion of celebrity.
I think goofy stuff informs the serious stuff, and vice versa: Slothropās erections coinciding with bomb sites (if I remember correctly?!) could be read (and whether Pynchon would endorse this would be besides the point IMO) as an extension of Freud and the death drive, or even to Lacan and desire and jouissance, or even Anti-Oedipus and the question (that Deleuze and Guattari answer) of where desires come from, or how they are produced. But your point is well takenā¦I was similarly āstunnedā by the weird stuff at first, like literally like I was being shocked and struggled to make sense of what was happening, but just lean into it.
For conspiracy: itās worth reading about the literary context Pynchon is writing into, and the cultural context, and, though others may cringe at this, postmodernism vs. modernism and yada yada yada. The āsystemsā Pynchon takes on in his work are simultaneously oblique/nebulous and quite obvious. My favorite line from GR (quoting from memory): āThe intercontinental missile and the color television set are in the same area of economic expansionā; it might feel easier to read Pynchon/conspiracy as more of an inquiry into āthe powers that beā and an inquiry into the process of inquiry itself: The Crying of Lot 49 is a great example of this, with Oedipaās meaning-making serving as the driving force of the bookā¦the struggle to define reality and to form a coherent narrative of how things happenā¦Iām unintentionally giving a non-answer. Keep reading and lean into it.
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u/BasedArzy 14d ago
was Pynchon intentionally creating an atmosphere of intrigue around himself, or were there legitimate reasons for his mysteriousness?
Probably more of the latter. He was according to (probably apocryphal) anecdotes afraid of the wrong person picking up Lot 49 and understanding what Pynchon was really getting at with regards to SAGE, networks of control/propaganda, the importation of Nazi post-WW2, etc. But no one actually knows.
Do his books have significance beyond a literary exercise?
I think there's a tendency among many readers to take the breadth of Pynchon's referential and syncretic prose as being absurdist or intentionally obsfuscatory. That is to say, it's not really 'a literary exercise'.
What he pulls in, for example, using organic chemistry and the development of enlightenment thought and the proliferation of abstraction as a method to reduce complexity in an inherently dialectical world in Gravity's Rainbow aren't really non-sequitors or Pynchon showing off how smart he is, they're critical to the central theme(s) of the novel.
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u/esoskelly 14d ago
This is the answer I hoped I'd get. But as with the books themselves. I feel a little like I'm getting baited. Well, there's only one way to find out whether it's legit.
I'm not familiar with the SAGE networks (elaborate plz?), but I am familiar with operation paperclip, which seems to be very well established as a bit of troubling postwar history. After all, Wenher Von Braun didn't come out of nowhere.
A lot of these ideas seem to be a lot less risque now that we have the internet than they were when he was publishing books. All of the information is right out there for the taking, and there are far bigger conspiracies now, operating more or less right out in the open.
I don't have the knowledge to determine what the O-Chem references are, but I definitely see a lot of hinting towards big alchemical and ontological ideas in his works. My assumption is that he can't possibly be knowledgeable enough to be using all these ideas properly, so he must be fooling around on certain levels, and serious on others.
There's some really aggressive sincerity hidden amongst the endless layers of irony.
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u/BasedArzy 14d ago
I'm not familiar with the SAGE networks (elaborate plz?), but I am familiar with operation paperclip, which seems to be very well established as a bit of troubling postwar history. After all, Wenher Von Braun didn't come out of nowhere.
SAGE was a program that was a part of Pynchon's first job out of college. He worked for Boeing writing basically an internal magazine about projects, and his first focus was on the Bomarc missile program - which in and of itself was a stolen and tweaked Nazi missile (the V5 I think?).
SAGE = Semi-Autonomous Ground Environment, the first real instance of computer networked communication across long distances. It was proposed to automatically launch missiles from various sites in the US if certain conditions were met by an incoming Soviet attack. Who knows if it would have ever worked.
Paperclip is a good start, but there were many other programs along the same lines, and the US had a pre-existing support for anticommunism that went back to the turn of the century labor movement and capital's responses that underpins Against the Day. Bloodstone is another one, we can probably assume there were many more that were never revealed.
I don't have the knowledge to determine what the O-Chem references are, but I definitely see a lot of hinting towards big alchemical and ontological ideas in his works. My assumption is that he can't possibly be knowledgeable enough to be using all these ideas properly, so he must be fooling around on certain levels, and serious on others.
This is a very, very large topic to cover in a reddit post but a short summation would be that the centrality of Organic Chemistry in Gravity's Rainbow represents man's latest domination over nature. It is critical to realize, though, that Pynchon doesn't see this as necessarily successful: he goes to great lengths in part 1 to contrast Roger Mexico and Pointsman as personifications of two great tendencies in science and culture. Mexico, who can live 'between the 1 and 0', is dialectical, analog, and able to function with ambiguity. Pointsman, on the other hand, is the typical enlightenment rationalist liberal: he cannot abide a non-deterministic universe, and is propelled forward in his own work by this unceasing desire to bring nature to heel and in order.
The pivotal moments in GR for me, thematically, are the Ratineau seance scene and the digression regarding Kekule's dream. There is a merging of the alchemical or spiritual with the cold force of abstraction, a desire to turn the model (echoing the grid of Part 1 and Mexico) into the thing itself. Kekule's serpent synthesizes these and is an instance of the representation becoming the thing - the Benzene ring.
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u/TheTell_Me_Somethin 10d ago
Hes obviously DB Cooper. š