The present collection grew from the International Pynchon Week conference in 1998, and only one of the essays has been published elsewhere. The editor, Niran Abbas, decided to group them in two clusters of six essays each: one centers on bodies in political issues. The first group is strongest where it demonstrates changed in Pynchon’s values, visible when you read Robert Holton’s discussion of the early stories against Julie Christine Sears’s analysis of Pynchon’s changing views of “perverse” sexualities. The second cluster seems most impressive as a prolegomenon to something that needs to be done, namely to map Pynchon’s political views and social values and contextualize them in the sources of their time. The chief accomplishment in this second cluster is to make us realize that Pynchon is not just a quirky bearer of 1960s banners; rather his political vision is complex and is emerging as a serious core value in his work, however much the literary and aesthetic fireworks have obscured that fact.

Let me pull together all the essays from both clusters that concern The Crying of Lot 49. Studies of this novel have a way of sounding similar, and we can expect discussion of waste and W.A.S.T.E., the breakdown of systems that give meaning to life, issues of communication, narcissism, Oedipal myths, and indeterminacy. While those do appear in these essays, we get an unusual appeal to the Puritan concept of a good death in Diana York Blaine’s study, interesting since Puritan values more usually appear in studies of Gravity’s Rainbow. Dana Medoro discusses both menstruation and melancholy. Critics get excited by references to this ordinary biological event, and I remain dubious as to whether Pynchon has immersed himself in the early Mediterranean mythologies that link menstruation in some cultures with the full and in others with the new moon, but admit that with characters named Koteks and Fallopian, one cannot rule out a special interest in the issue. Medoro works the associations of menstrual blood with waste or (W.A.S.T.E.) into a feminizing of the Oedipus meanings by way of Oedipus quest. Thomas Schuab sets up The Crying of Lot 49 as an answer to The Great Gatsby in its analysis of the American Dream, and teases out further Oedipal meanings by way of Oedipa’s symbolic incest with a “father,” Pierce Inverarity, and her subsequent complicity in the resultant American landscape. Carolyn Brown’s essay on waste, death, and destiny in CL49 seems uncomfortable close to those of Blaine and Medoro; fantasized pregnancy replaces menstruation, and is surrounded by concern with the multiplicity of possible “messages.”

One essay in each cluster is devoted to Vineland. Madeline Ostrander analyzes eco-feminist resistance, as embodied in Sasha, Frenesi, and Prairie, whom she sees as a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of the practical and the ideal attitudes towards the world. David Thoreen argues the Vineland has a serious political gravamen, namely the near-destruction of the Fourth Amendment under Reagan. Pynchon invokes NSDD#52 and Rex-84 in passing; Thoreen explains what they were and what powers Reagan claimed for the presidency in any crisis, and argues that these would, if invoked, abrogate many important civil liberties. Thoreen berates other critics for dismissing the politics in Vineland as mere Pynchonian paranoia or as shallow, and makes his own argument persuasively.

I wish someone would do more to contextualize Pynchon’s neo-luddite dislike of machines and his symbolic realizations of men becoming machines. Kathleen Fitzpatrick emphasizes Pynchon’s distaste for V.’s becoming increasingly electronic, and discusses SHOCK and SHROUD as humanity becomes more mechanical, but she might have started by contrasting Pynchon’s stance on immachination to Donna Haraway’s in her “Cyborg Manifest,” if only to remind us that such hostility to the machinic is not just natural and inevitable. Critics have tended to accept Pynchon’s view unquestioningly, which is why some sense of where this strain of thought comes from might help us understand him better.

Robert Holton’s piece on the early stories and Julie Christine Sears’s on sexual deviancy illuminate each other. Pynchon started life with very conventional views of white masculinity, of what threatened it, of what it wished to flee, and those early stories belong to the widespread American pattern made famous by Leslie Fiedler of seeing the frontier to escape the erotic within what was perceived as a threatening feminized culture. The concommittant assumptions about male homosexuality manifest themselves in Gravity’s Rainbow, where various “perverse” sexualities are projected onto Nazi characters. Sears notes that Mason & Dixon charts a change; the homosocial relationship of the eponymous characters is accepted without the revulsion it would have provoked in earlier fiction, and a heterosexual marriage is shown to be as death=besotted as anything among the Nazi figures of Gravity’s Rainbow. The changes thus charted demolish the common, unexamined assumption that Pynchon’s values are monolithic, and these essays suggest the desirability of looking more closely at other threads in his thought for shifts or development.

Gary Thompson’s essay differs from the rest in being oriented toward style. He analyzes Pynchon’s narrative pastiche as a technique in Mason & Dixon. Given the surging popularity of novels recovering aspects of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, this hermeneutic of pastiche should prove useful for numerous critics.

Finally, let me link the essays by Kyle Smith and Michael Harris, for they are mutually illuminating. Smith’s discussion of Pynchon’s early interest in British pre-Col War spy fiction showed me literary affiliations I had not known, and serves as a perfect foil to Harris’s analysis of Pynchon’s postcoloniality. Evidently Pynchon loved the spy fiction with its colonial ethos, but revolted against its ideology, for Harris shows more clearly than any one else I have read just how concerned with European colonialism Pynchon has been in all of his novels. Harris draws together Pynchon’s liking for tribal peoples (on whom he does significant research before writing them into his worlds as early as “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna”), his concern with slavery in various forms, his repeated episodes involving drawing of boundaries or breaking them down, his instinctive preference for open zones and anarchy, his awareness of the psycho-sexual side of colonization, whether German or British or he westward movement in America. Harris’s essay was the one that seemed to me the prime demonstration that Pynchon does prove adaptable in more than strained and mechanical ways to later modes of criticism.

When we look at the two clusters to see what they suggest, we find that the first, relating to the body, does shed some light on the enabling and destructive beliefs that shape male and female bodied experience as it relates to capitalism, the machine, and the natural world-male and female bodies relating to everything but each other. With the exception of Sears’s analysis of perverse sexualities, we find more on women’s relationship to patriarchal systems than to men or men’s desire to escape a feminized society rather than women. Or when two humans deal with each other, much is made of the quasi-allegorical values attaching to one of them (Brock, Vond, Blicero, V.), which suggests a blank on significant interpersonal relations in Pynchon’s complex worlds. We need to understand why that marks his values and what the limits of this blank spot might be. This second cluster devoted to his politics usefully foregrounds some ideas worth pursuing-in particular our need to contextualize and systematize our understanding of Pynchon’s politics-but the cluster naturally remains a set of disjunct pieces, a useful hint at what might be written. Together, the clusters point to a book that someone should write on Pynchon’s values, their context and developments. The collection is useful in itself, then, but might prove the startling point for a good new study of Pynchon-a useful outcome, I would say, for any collection.