Reading McHale reading Pynchon, or, Is Pynchon still a postmodernist?

Readings of Thomas Pynchon's novels are central to Brian McHale's theorization of the difference between modernist and postmodernist writing. McHale's argument that the difference resides in a shift from an 'epistemological dominant' to an 'ontological dominant' is, conversely, the foundation of his understanding of Pynchon. However, his reading of Against the Day, which suggests that the novel's use of multiple 'genre mirrors' aims to represent historical 'truth', sits uneasily within this literary-historical narrative. This essay argues that since for McHale postmodernism's ontological plurality ultimately refers back to discursive plurality, there is in fact no contradiction here. It further argues that Pynchon's project of pluralizing what McHale calls 'novelistic ontology' is no longer synonymous with 'de-conditioning' modernist readers: Pynchon's readers have either long since surrendered modernist modes of reading, or are postmodern natives who never practised them in the first place. Reading McHale reading Pynchon, or, Is Pynchon still a postmodernist?

in McHale's 1992 book Constructing Postmodernism. 4 In the 1970s and 80s theories of postmodernism such as McHale's presented themselves very much as -to borrow a phrase from the subtitle of Steven Connor's 1989 book Postmodernist Culture -'Theories of the Contemporary'; but what was contemporary in the 70s and 80s is now past history.
The identification of Pynchon with postmodernism is increasingly problematic when we turn our attention to his twenty-first-century output. Sascha Pöhlmann begins and ends his introduction to the 2010 critical collection Against the Grain with the admonition, 'We may have to stop calling Thomas Pynchon a postmodern writer'. 5 The bases of this contention are twofold: first, that Pynchon's 'postnational imagination', as displayed in Against the Day, 'exceeds the conceptual framework of postmodernism'; 6 second, that Against the Day 'positions itself far from the postmodern excesses of too easily conflating the real, the imaginary and the fictional'. 7 If we insist that the Pynchon of Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge is still a postmodernist, are we relegating him to the position of a sort of literary Keith Richards -still churning out riffs that were exciting and dangerous in the 70s, but are now just nostalgia? More importantly, are we wilfully ignoring new themes and formal innovations in Pynchon's later work in order to bolster an identification with postmodernism that is convenient for our critical and pedagogical narratives? At any rate, we will lack, as Chetwynd puts it, 'a sense of how Pynchon's relevance might endure once the identification between the contemporary and the canonically postmodern finally becomes untenable'.  McHale identifies two effects of the type of postmodernist writing which Pynchon 'exemplifie[s]', or rather, two ways of describing its effect. One is that of 'disrupting the conditioned responses of the modernist reader (and we are all, still, modernist readers), of de-conditioning the reader'. (Take note, please, of that claim made in 1979 that 'we are all, still, modernist readers', because I shall return to it toward the conclusion of this essay.) The other way in which McHale describes this refusal of modernist reading is to say that its 'ultimate effect is radically to destabilize novelistic ontology'. 16 In Postmodernist Fiction this point about 'ontology' becomes integrated into a broader argument about the difference between modernism and postmodernism, namely that there is a 'shift of dominant from problems of knowing to problems of modes of beingfrom an epistemological dominant to an ontological one'. 17 In other words, modernist fiction foregrounds the question of how we know the world, often by employing multiple subjective viewpoints which the modernist reader reconciles into a single stable ontology. This is an orthodox interpretation of modernist writing, recalling, for example, Eric Auerbach's reading of To the Lighthouse: Woolf's 'multipersonal method', Auerbach argues, has 'synthesis as its aim'. 18 Pynchon's early novels, says McHale, preserve this 'epistemological dominant'. However, postmodernist fiction presents us with a plurality of incommensurable worlds which the reader cannot reduce to a stable ontology. By the time we get to Gravity's Rainbow Pynchon has moved 'from a modernist poetics of epistemology to a postmodernist poetics of ontology, from Oedipa's anguished cry, "Shall I project a world?", to the unconstrained projection of worlds in the plural'. 19 McHale's reading of Vineland in Constructing Postmodernism also focuses on 'ontological plurality': it is the role of television in that novel, he argues, to 'complicate, diversify, and destabilize the ontological structure of the fictional world'. It 'functions at two levels, at one and the same time contributing to ontological plurality and modelling that plurality en abyme'. 20

Worlds
But what does it mean to talk of 'ontological plurality', of different 'worlds' or 'modes of being' in this way? In his 2007 essay 'What was Postmodernism?, or, The Last of the Angels', McHale argues that angels in postmodern culture 'signify the existence, or at least the possibility, of alternative subcultures, life-styles, values-systems, enclaves of meaning, psychological realities -of alternative "worlds" in the extended sense'. 21 In Postmodernist Fiction McHale is working with a similar definition of 'world' when he says that postmodernism 'arrives at its own version of the fantastic [...] by literalizing a characteristic modernist metaphor, i.e. "world" used in the sense of "way of life, life-experience, or Weltanschauung"'. This sense of the word world is a 'metaphorical extension of the literal ontological sense of "world" to embrace an epistemological, psychological, or sociological meaning'. 22   On the other hand, if we eschew these concepts altogether we are likely to end up with something like James Wood's negative assessment of Mason & Dixon, a particularly egregious example of what Pierre Macherey calls the 'normative fallacy', in which the critic measures a text against an imagined ideal, viewing it as 'the provisional version of an unfulfilled intention'. 30  Multiply the genre mirrors, set them at different angles to each other, and one might stand some chance of approximating the historical "truth" of the era that produced them'. 34 This seems to place Against the Day closer to the epistemologically-oriented, multiply-perspectival writing that McHale finds in V., with its 'stylized imitations of characteristic modernist strategies', than to the 'unconstrained projection of worlds in the plural' that he attributes to Gravity's Rainbow. 35 Reconciling this reading of Against the Day with McHale's over-arching theory of the shift of dominant is going to require us to pay close attention to some of the nuances of both reading and theory, and may suggest some qualifications of the theory.
For a start, the fact that Pynchon turns his attention in Against the Day to a period which he had previously written about in V. highlights the way that McHale's characterization of the trajectory of Pynchon's career implicitly depends on the chronology of Pynchon's subject matter in V., Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland as much as on the chronology of their publication. It is easy to make the case that Vineland, for example, is a fully-fledged postmodernist text (or to find a consonance, as Hanjo Berressem does, between Vineland and Jean Baudrillard's analysis of postmodern culture 36 ) because the novel is set in California in the 1980s and its cultural vocabulary is indisputably postmodern. On the other hand, because the cultural and generic reference points of Stencil's narrative belong to the early twentieth century, McHale is on safe ground representing V. as a modernist text. In 'Genre as History' McHale acknowledges that Pynchon's 'genre-poaching' in Against the Day is 'synchronized with the unfolding chronology of his storyworld', that is, that action set at a particular time in history is presented in narrative modes borrowed from fiction belonging to that time. McHale further recognizes that this logic permeates Pynchon's fiction from Gravity's Rainbow onwards, but he shies away from making the same claim regarding V., despite his insistence (in the earlier criticism I have been discussing) on the modernist texture of that novel's narrative. 37 If this synchronization plays a greater part in explaining the differences between, say, V. and Vineland than McHale's literary-historical narrative (which wants to explain the difference in terms of modernist vs postmodernist writing) admits, then it might also account for the apparent recrudescence of a modernist mode of reading -with, in Auerbach's phrase, 'synthesis as its aim' -in his critical commentary on Against the Day.
Now, according to McHale, in Vineland, and in postmodernism more generally, television functions as 'the figure of ontological plurality itself'; it is 'postmodernism's preferred model of its own plurality'. 38 aIn Gravity's Rainbow narrative and representation are primarily mediated not through television but through film, but McHale is happy to elide the difference between the two visual media: 'if the culture as a whole seems to hover between reality and televised fictions, what could be more appropriate than for the texts of that culture to hover between literal reality and a cinematic or television metaphor?' 39  If we are to find in Against the Day the ontological plurality that McHale attributes to Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, do we perhaps need to assume that the culture of the period in which Against the Day is set hovered between reality and textual fiction just as postmodern culture hovers between reality and televised fiction? Was the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -like postmodern culture -an unstable agglomeration of incommensurable 'modes of being', which postmodern writing is simply more successful at representing than modernist writing was? It is worth mentioning in this context two arguments from Postmodernist Fiction.  In the 1970s and 80s Brian McHale argued that Gravity's Rainbow resists a certain mode of reading, pointedly thwarting the reader's attempts to synthesize a single consistent ontology from its narratives. The reader who comes to Pynchon's twenty-first-century novels having read Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland and Mason & Dixon will understand herself, I submit, to have been long since released from any obligation to attempt such a synthesis. This is, partly, what differentiates the postmodernist reader from the modernist reader. David Cowart points out in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion that '[i]n film, in television, in politics and public discourse, in literature high and low, and even in children's entertainments, postmodernism seems increasingly a default mode, something woven into the very fabric of the cultural moment'. 58 This being the case, many younger readers will be what we may term 'postmodern natives': raised on film, television and literature in the 'default mode' of postmodernism, they will accept Pynchon's pluralism without any need for 'de-conditioning', having never been 'modernist readers' in the first place. Any conception of the postmodernist reader must also take into account the greater diversity of people -people belonging to a broader range of genders, sexualities, ethnicities and class backgrounds -who have over the past fifty years won for themselves admission to the category of 'reader' in academic and public discourse. In the Zone that these processes of pluralization have opened up, new questions, new possibilities, arise: McHale's reading of Against the Day and Pynchon's preoccupations in Bleeding Edge alike suggest that among these is a renewed concern for 'truth'.
End notes