40- ] American Literature
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas
Pynchon, (born May 8, 1937, Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, U.S.), American
novelist and short-story writer whose works combine black humour and fantasy to
depict human alienation in the chaos of modern society. He is an American
novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction
writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including
history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won
the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
After
earning a B.A. in English from Cornell University in 1958, Pynchon spent a year
in Greenwich Village writing short stories and working on a novel. In 1960 he
was hired as a technical writer for Boeing Aircraft Corporation in Seattle,
Washington. Two years later he decided to leave the company and write
full-time. In 1963 Pynchon won the Faulkner Foundation Award for his first
novel, V. (1963), a whimsical, cynically absurd tale of a middle-aged
Englishman’s search for “V.,” an elusive supernatural adventuress appearing in
various guises at critical periods in European history. In his next book, The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Pynchon described a woman’s strange quest to discover
the mysterious, conspiratorial Tristero System in a futuristic world of closed
societies. The novel serves as a condemnation of modern industrialization.
Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is a tour de force in 20th-century literature. In
exploring the dilemmas of human beings in the modern world, the story, which is
set in an area of post-World War II Germany called “the Zone,” centres on the
wanderings of an American soldier who is one of many odd characters looking for
a secret V-2 rocket that will supposedly break through Earth’s gravitational
barrier when launched. The narrative is filled with descriptions of obsessive
and paranoid fantasies, ridiculous and grotesque imagery, and esoteric
mathematical and scientific language. For his efforts, Pynchon received the
National Book Award, and many critics deemed Gravity’s Rainbow a visionary
apocalyptic masterpiece. Scenes from the novel were adapted as part of the
German film Prüfstand VII (2002).
Pynchon’s
next novel, Vineland—which begins in 1984 in California—was not published until
1990. Two vast, complex historical novels followed: in Mason & Dixon
(1997), set in the 18th century, Pynchon took the English surveyors Charles
Mason and Jeremiah Dixon as his subject, and Against the Day (2006) moves from
the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 through World War I. Inherent Vice
(2009; film 2014), Pynchon’s rambling take on the detective novel, returns to
the California counterculture milieu of Vineland. Bleeding Edge (2013)
chronicles the efforts of a fraud investigator to untangle the nefarious doings
of a New York computer-security firm in the year leading up to the September 11
attacks of 2001, all the while attempting to parent her children in the wake of
domestic difficulties.
Of
his few short stories, most notable are “Entropy” (1960), a neatly structured
tale in which Pynchon first uses extensive technical language and scientific
metaphors, and “The Secret Integration” (1964), a story in which Pynchon
explores small-town bigotry and racism. The collection Slow Learner (1984)
contains “The Secret Integration.”
Career
Early career
After
leaving Cornell, Pynchon began to work on his first novel: V. From February
1960 to September 1962, he was employed as a technical writer at Boeing in
Seattle, where he compiled safety articles for the Bomarc Service News, a
support newsletter for the BOMARC surface-to-air missile deployed by the U.S.
Air Force. Pynchon's experiences at Boeing inspired his depictions of the
"Yoyodyne" corporation in V. and The Crying of Lot 49, and both his
background in physics and the technical journalism he undertook at Boeing
provided much raw material for Gravity's Rainbow. When published in 1963, V.
won the William Faulkner Foundation Award For Notable First Novel and was a
finalist for the National Book Award.
George
Plimpton gave the book a positive review in The New York Times. He described it
as a picaresque novel, in which "The author can tell his favorite jokes,
throw in a song, indulge in a fantasy, include his own verse, display an
intimate knowledge of such disparate subjects as physics, astronomy, art, jazz,
how a nose-job is done, the wildlife in the New York sewage system. These
indeed are some of the topics which constitute a recent and remarkable example
of the genre: a brilliant and turbulent first novel published this month by a
young Cornell graduate, Thomas Pynchon. He calls the book V." Plimpton
called Pynchon "a writer of staggering promise."
After
resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent some time in New York and Mexico before
moving to California, where he was reportedly based for much of the 1960s and
early 1970s, most notably in an apartment in Manhattan Beach, as he was
composing what would become Gravity's Rainbow.
A
negative aspect that Pynchon retrospectively found in the hippie cultural and
literary movement, both in the form of the Beats of the 1950s and the
resurgence form of the 1960s, was that it "placed too much emphasis on
youth, including the eternal variety."
In
1964, his application to study mathematics as a graduate student at the
University of California, Berkeley was turned down. In 1966, Pynchon wrote a
first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts Riots in Los
Angeles, titled "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts", and published in
The New York Times Magazine.
From
the mid-1960s Pynchon has also regularly provided blurbs and introductions for
a wide range of novels and non-fiction works. One of the first of these pieces
was a brief review of Oakley Hall's Warlock which appeared, along with comments
by seven other writers on "neglected books", as part of a feature
titled "A Gift of Books" in the December 1965 issue of Holiday.
In
1968, Pynchon was one of 447 signatories to the "Writers and Editors War
Tax Protest". Full-page advertisements in the New York Post and The New
York Review of Books listed the names of those who had pledged not to pay
"the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or any war-designated tax
increase", and stated their belief "that American involvement in
Vietnam is morally wrong". Time's review of V. concluded: "V. sails
with majesty through caverns measureless to man. What does it mean? Who,
finally, is V.? Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is
one. Who, indeed?".
The Crying of Lot 49
Stylized line drawing of a post horn with a mute
placed in the bell of the instrument
Pynchon created the "muted post horn" as a
symbol for the secret "Trystero" society in The Crying of Lot 49.
In an April 1964 letter to his agent, Candida
Donadio, Pynchon wrote that he was facing a creative crisis, with four novels
in progress, announcing: "If they come out on paper anything like they are
inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium."
In
the mid-1960s, Pynchon lived at 217 33rd St. in Manhattan Beach, California, in
a small downstairs apartment.
In
December 1965, Pynchon politely turned down an invitation from Stanley Edgar
Hyman to teach literature at Bennington College, writing that he had resolved,
two or three years earlier, to write three novels at once. Pynchon described
the decision as "a moment of temporary insanity", but noted that he
was "too stubborn to let any of them go, let alone all of them."
Pynchon's
second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, was published a few months later in 1966.
Whether it was one of the three or four novels Pynchon had in progress is not
known, but in a 1965 letter to Donadio, Pynchon had written that he was in the
middle of writing a "potboiler". When the book grew to 155 pages, he
called it, "a short story, but with gland trouble", and hoped that
Donadio could "unload it on some poor sucker."
The
Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly
after publication. Although more concise and linear in its structure than
Pynchon's other novels, its labyrinthine plot features an ancient, underground
mail service known as "The Tristero" or "Trystero", a
parody of a Jacobean revenge drama called The Courier's Tragedy, and a
corporate conspiracy involving the bones of World War II American GIs being
used as charcoal cigarette filters. It proposes a series of seemingly
incredible interconnections between these events and other similarly bizarre
revelations that confront the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Like V., the
novel contains a wealth of references to science and technology and to obscure
historical events. The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon's habits of
writing satiric song lyrics and referencing popular culture. An example of both
can be seen in allusion to the narrator of Nabokov's Lolita within the lyric of
a love lament sung by a member of "The Paranoids", an American
teenage band who deliberately sing their songs with British accents (p. 17).
Despite Pynchon's alleged dislike, Lot 49 received positive reviews. It was
included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels published since
the magazine's founding in 1923. Richard Lacayao wrote, "With its
slapstick paranoia and heartbreaking metaphysical soliloquies, Lot 49 takes
place in the tragicomic universe that is instantly recognizable as
Pynchon-land. Is it also a mystery novel? Absolutely, so long as you recognize
the mystery here is the one at the heart of everything."
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Pynchon's
most celebrated novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973. An
intricate and allusive fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the
themes of his earlier work, including preterition, paranoia, racism,
colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy, there is a wealth of
commentary and critical material, including reader's guides, books and
scholarly articles, online concordances and discussions, and art works. Its
artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce's Ulysses. Some
scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel, and it has
similarly been described as "literally an anthology of postmodernist
themes and devices".
The
major portion of Gravity's Rainbow takes place in Europe in the final months of
World War II and the weeks immediately following VE Day, and is narrated for
the most part from within the historical moment in which it is set. In this
way, Pynchon's text enacts a type of dramatic irony whereby neither the
characters nor the various narrative voices are aware of specific historical
circumstances, such as the Holocaust and, except as hints, premonitions and
mythography, the complicity between Western corporate interests and the Nazi
war machine, which figure prominently in readers' apprehensions of the novel's
historical context. For example, at war's end the narrator observes:
"There are rumors of a War Crimes Tribunal under way in Nürnberg. No one
Slothrop has listened to is clear who's trying whom for what ... " (p.
681) Such an approach generates dynamic tension and moments of acute
self-consciousness, as both reader and author seem drawn ever deeper into the
"plot", in various senses of that term:
Pynchon
presents us with a Disney-meets-Bosch panorama of European politics, American
entropy, industrial history, and libidinal panic which leaves a chaotic whirl
of fractal patterns in the reader's mind.
If
they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about
answers.
–Gravity's Rainbow
The
novel invokes anti-authority sentiments, often through violations of narrative
conventions and integrity. For example, as the protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop,
considers the fact that his own family "made its money killing
trees", he apostrophizes his apology and plea for advice to the coppice
within which he has momentarily taken refuge. In an overt incitement to
eco-activism, Pynchon's narrative agency then has it that "a medium-sized
pine nearby nods its top and suggests, 'Next time you come across a logging
operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and
take its oil filter with you. That's what you can do.'" (p. 553)
Encyclopedic
in scope and often self-conscious in style, the novel displays erudition in its
treatment of an array of material drawn from the fields of psychology,
chemistry, mathematics, history, religion, music, literature, human sexuality,
and film. Pynchon wrote the first draft of Gravity's Rainbow in "neat,
tiny script on engineer's quadrille paper". Pynchon worked on the novel
throughout the 1960s and early 1970s while he was living in California and
Mexico City.
Gravity's
Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award with A Crown of Feathers and Other
Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (split award). That same year, the Pulitzer
Prize fiction panel unanimously recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the award,
but the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel
as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in
parts "obscene". (No Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded that year
and finalists were not recognized before 1980.) In 1975, Pynchon declined the
William Dean Howells Medal. Along with Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow was included
on Time's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since the
magazine's founding.
Later career
Slow
Learner (1984)
A
collection of Pynchon's early short stories, Slow Learner, was published in
1984, with a lengthy autobiographical introduction. In October of the same
year, an article titled "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" was published
in The New York Times Book Review. In April 1988, Pynchon reviewed Gabriel
García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera in The New York Times,
calling it "a shining and heartbreaking book." Another article,
titled "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee", was published in June 1993 in The
New York Times Book Review, as one in a series of articles in which various
writers reflected on each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pynchon's subject was
"Sloth". In 1989, Pynchon was one of many authors who signed a letter
of solidarity with Salman Rushdie after Rushdie was sentenced to death by the
Ayatollah for his novel The Satanic Verses. Pynchon wrote: "I pray that
tolerance and respect for life prevail. I keep thinking of you."
Vineland
Pynchon's
fourth novel, Vineland, was published in 1990, but disappointed some fans and
critics. It did, however, receive a positive review from Salman Rushdie, who
called it "free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily
accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with."[50]
The novel is set in California in the 1980s and 1960s and describes the
relationship between an FBI COINTELPRO agent and a female radical filmmaker.
Its strong socio-political undercurrents detail the constant battle between
authoritarianism and communalism, and the nexus between resistance and
complicity, but with a typically Pynchonian sense of humor.
In
1988, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s at least,
he has been frequently cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Mason & Dixon
Book
cover illustration zoomed in on the ampersand between the words "Mason
& Dixon" written in ink on parchment
Stippled
illustration of two men on a hill overseeing the American wilderness
Mason
& Dixon (1997) is a fictionalized account of the lives of Charles Mason and
Jeremiah Dixon, the historical surveyors of the Mason–Dixon line.
The
meticulously researched novel is a sprawling postmodernist saga recounting the
lives and careers of the English astronomer Charles Mason and his partner, the
surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, the surveyors of the Mason–Dixon line, during the
birth of the American Republic. The dust jacket notes that it features
appearances from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson and a
talking dog. Some commentators acknowledged it as a welcome return to form; T.
C. Boyle called it "the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of
all" and "a book of heart and fire and genius." Michiko Kakutani
called Mason and Dixon Pynchon's most human characters, writing that they
"become fully fleshed-out people, their feelings, hopes and yearnings made
as palpably real as their outrageously comic high jinks." The American
critic Harold Bloom hailed the novel as Pynchon's "masterpiece to
date". Bloom named Pynchon as one of the four major American novelists of
his time, along with Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo.
Against the Day
A
variety of rumors pertaining to the subject matter of Against the Day
circulated for a number of years. Most specific of these were comments made by the
former German minister of culture Michael Naumann, who stated that he assisted
Pynchon in his research about "a Russian mathematician [who] studied for
David Hilbert in Göttingen", and that the new novel would trace the life
and loves of Sofia Kovalevskaya.
In
July 2006, a new, untitled novel by Pynchon was announced along with a
description written by Pynchon himself: "Spanning the period between the
Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel
moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to
London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at
the times of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution,
postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly
speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years
ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic
fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day
is intended or should be inferred." He promised cameos by Nikola Tesla,
Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx, as well as "stupid songs" and
"strange sexual practices". Subsequently, the title of the new book
was reported to be Against the Day and a Penguin spokesperson confirmed that
the synopsis was Pynchon's.
Against
the Day was released on November 21, 2006, and is 1,085 pages long in the first
edition hardcover. The book was given almost no promotion by Penguin and
professional book reviewers were given little time in advance to review the
book. An edited version of Pynchon's synopsis was used as the jacket-flap copy
and Kovalevskaya does appear, although as only one of over a hundred
characters.
Composed
in part of a series of interwoven pastiches of popular fiction genres from the
era in which it is set, the novel inspired mixed reactions from critics and
reviewers. One reviewer remarked, "It is brilliant, but it is exhaustingly
brilliant." Other reviewers described Against the Day as "lengthy and
rambling" and "a baggy monster of a book", while negative
appraisals condemned the novel for its "silliness" or characterized
its action as "fairly pointless" and remained unimpressed by its
"grab bag of themes".
Inherent Vice
Inherent Vice was published in August 2009.
A
synopsis and brief extract from the novel, along with the novel's title,
Inherent Vice, and dust jacket image, were printed in Penguin Press' Summer
2009 catalogue. The book was advertised by the publisher as "part-noir,
part-psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes,
occasionally, out of a cannabis haze to watch the end of an era as free love
slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog."
A
promotional video for the novel was released by Penguin Books on August 4, 2009,
with the character voiceover narrated by the author himself.
A
2014 film adaptation of the same name was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Bleeding Edge
Bleeding
Edge takes place in Manhattan's Silicon Alley during "the lull between the
collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11." The
novel was published on September 17, 2013, to positive reviews.
Style
Poet
L. E. Sissman wrote from The New Yorker: "He is almost a mathematician of
prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line,
each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and
virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks.
Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate
love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a
drugged and drunken orgy." Pynchon's style is commonly classified as
postmodernist.
Themes
Pynchon's
work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas exhaustively,
though in quirky and approachable ways. His writings demonstrate a strong
affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of low culture, including comic
books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery,
urban myths, paranoia and conspiracy theories, and folk art. This blurring of
the conventional boundary between "high" and "low" culture
has been seen as one of the defining characteristics of his writing.
In
particular, Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and non-fiction as an
aficionado of popular music. Song lyrics and mock musical numbers appear in
each of his novels, and, in his autobiographical introduction to the Slow
Learner collection of early stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and
rock and roll. The character McClintic Sphere in V. is a fictional composite of
jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. In
The Crying of Lot 49, the lead singer of The Paranoids sports "a Beatle
haircut" and sings with an English accent. In the closing pages of
Gravity's Rainbow, there is an apocryphal report that Tyrone Slothrop, the
novel's protagonist, played kazoo and harmonica as a guest musician on a record
released by The Fool in the 1960s (having magically recovered the latter instrument,
his "harp", in a German stream in 1945, after losing it down the
toilet in 1939 at the Roseland Ballroom in Roxbury, Boston, to the strains of
the jazz standard "Cherokee", upon which tune Charlie Parker was
simultaneously inventing bebop in New York, as Pynchon describes). In Vineland,
both Zoyd Wheeler and Isaiah Two Four are also musicians: Zoyd played keyboards
in a '60s surf band called The Corvairs, while Isaiah played in a punk band
called Billy Barf and the Vomitones. In Mason & Dixon, one of the
characters plays on the "Clavier" the varsity drinking song that will
later become "The Star-Spangled Banner"; while in another episode a
character remarks tangentially "Sometimes, it's hard to be a woman".
In
his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon acknowledges a debt to the anarchic
bandleader Spike Jones, and in 1994, he penned a 3000-word set of liner notes
for the album Spiked!, a collection of Jones's recordings released on the
short-lived BMG Catalyst label. Pynchon also wrote the liner notes for Nobody's
Cool, the second album of indie rock band Lotion, in which he states that
"rock and roll remains one of the last honorable callings, and a working
band is a miracle of everyday life. Which is basically what these guys
do". He is also known to be a fan of Roky Erickson.
Investigations
and digressions into the realms of human sexuality, psychology, sociology,
mathematics, science, and technology recur throughout Pynchon's works. One of
his earliest short stories, "Low-lands" (1960), features a meditation
on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a metaphor for telling stories about
one's own experiences. His next published work, "Entropy" (1960),
introduced the concept which was to become synonymous with Pynchon's name
(though Pynchon later admitted the "shallowness of [his]
understanding" of the subject, and noted that choosing an abstract concept
first and trying to construct a narrative based on it was "a lousy way to
go about writing a story"). Another early story, "Under the
Rose" (1961), includes among its cast of characters a cyborg set
anachronistically in Victorian-era Egypt (a type of writing now called
steampunk). This story, significantly reworked by Pynchon, appears as Chapter 3
of V. "The Secret Integration" (1964), Pynchon's last published short
story, is a sensitively handled coming-of-age tale in which a group of young
boys face the consequences of the American policy of racial integration. At one
point in the story, the boys attempt to understand the new policy by way of the
mathematical operation, the only sense of the word with which they are
familiar.
The
Crying of Lot 49 also alludes to entropy and communication theory, and contains
scenes and descriptions which parody or appropriate calculus, Zeno's paradoxes,
and the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon. At the same time, the
novel also investigates homosexuality, celibacy and both medically sanctioned
and illicit psychedelic drug use. Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of
sexual fetishism (including sado-masochism, coprophilia and a borderline case
of tentacle erotica), and features numerous episodes of drug use, most notably
cannabis but also cocaine, naturally occurring hallucinogens, and the mushroom
Amanita muscaria. Gravity's Rainbow also derives much from Pynchon's background
in mathematics: at one point, the geometry of garter belts is compared with
that of cathedral spires, both described as mathematical singularities. Mason
& Dixon explores the scientific, theological, and socio-cultural
foundations of the Age of Reason while also depicting the relationships between
actual historical figures and fictional characters in intricate detail and,
like Gravity's Rainbow, is an archetypal example of the genre of
historiographic metafiction.
Influence
Precursors
Pynchon's
novels refer overtly to writers as disparate as Henry Adams (in V., p. 62),
Jorge Luis Borges (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 264), Deleuze and Guattari (in
Vineland, p. 97),[78] Emily Dickinson (in Gravity’s Rainbow, pp. 27–8), Umberto
Eco (in Mason & Dixon, p. 559),[79] Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Vineland, p.
369), "Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, di Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros" (in V.,
p. 307), William March[citation needed], Vladimir Nabokov (in The Crying of Lot
49, p. 120), Patrick O'Brian (in Mason & Dixon, p. 54), Ishmael Reed (in
Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 558), Rainer Maria Rilke (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 97 f)
and Ludwig Wittgenstein (in V., p. 278 f), and to a heady mixture of iconic
religious and philosophical sources.
Critics
have made comparisons of Pynchon's writing with works by Rabelais, Cervantes,
Laurence Sterne, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles
Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, William S. Burroughs, Ralph Ellison,
Patrick White, and Toni Morrison.
Pynchon's
work also has similarities with writers in the modernist tradition who wrote
long novels dealing with large metaphysical or political issues, such as
Ulysses by James Joyce, A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, The Apes of God by
Wyndham Lewis, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil and the U.S.A. trilogy
by John Dos Passos. Pynchon explicitly acknowledges his debt to Beat Generation
writers, and expresses his admiration for Jack Kerouac's On the Road in
particular. He also outlines the specific influence on his own early fiction of
literary works by T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow,
Herbert Gold, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Buchan and Graham Greene, and
non-fiction works by Helen Waddell, Norbert Wiener and Isaac Asimov.
Legacy
Pynchon's
work has been cited as an influence and inspiration by many writers, including
David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, Richard Powers, Steve Erickson, David
Mitchell, Neal Stephenson, Dave Eggers, William Gibson, Salman Rushdie, Alan
Moore, and Tommaso Pincio (whose pseudonym is an Italian rendering of Pynchon's
name).
Thanks
to his influence on Gibson and Stephenson in particular, Pynchon became one of
the progenitors of cyberpunk fiction; a 1987 essay in Spin magazine by Timothy
Leary explicitly named Gravity's Rainbow as the "Old Testament" of
cyberpunk, with Gibson's Neuromancer and its sequels as the "New
Testament". Though the term "cyberpunk" did not become prevalent
until the early 1980s, since Leary's article many readers have retroactively
included Gravity's Rainbow in the genre, along with other works—e.g., Samuel R.
Delany's Dhalgren and many works of Philip K. Dick—which seem, after the fact,
to anticipate cyberpunk styles and themes. The encyclopedic nature of Pynchon's
novels also led to some attempts to link his work with the short-lived
hypertext fiction movement of the 1990s. Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector
Rebus mystery novels, called encountering Pynchon "a revelation":
"Pynchon seemed to fit the model I was learning of literature as an extended
code or grail quest. Moreover, he was like a drug: as you worked out one layer
of meaning, you quickly wanted to move to the next. He wrote action novels
about spies and soldiers which also happened to be detective stories and bawdy
romps. His books were picaresquely post-modern and his humour was Marxian
(tendance: Groucho). On page six of The Crying of Lot 49, the name Quackenbush
appears, and you know you are in safely comedic hands."
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