“Down on the Barroom Floor of History”: Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

“[The] distinction between ‘repression’ and . . . ‘suppression’ . . . will be enough to disrupt the tranquil landscape of all historical knowledge, of all historiography.”
 
—Derrida, Archive Fever (28)

To paraphrase Wilfred Owen, Thomas Pynchon’s subject is America and the pity of America, a nation doomed perennially to struggle with its own Manichaean personality. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pynchon understands the American schizophrenia: radical idealism and rampant materialism at war within one psychic geography. In his 2013 novel Bleeding Edge, Pynchon observes and perpends the 9/11 climacteric, which he links to certain salient features of an American bi-millennial moment that continues to unfold. In his representation of this recent history, he critiques the Internet and the economic order it serves, but he also engages in a shadow polemic on the responsibilities of the artist to capture truth, whether in historiography or the individual heart. Pynchon embraces the role of Socratic gadfly, fostering self-knowledge that goes beyond the personal and individual. Like others who think rigorously about the past and its shaping of the present and future, he views history as the collective version of that examined life the old philosophers urged on their followers. Although Pynchon often satirizes psychoanalysis (the examined life in its clinical guise), he is not altogether hostile to its amplification as historical or cultural metric: in his work, as in Freud’s, a tragic calculus of repression and neurosis configures “civilization and its discontents.” Nor does he neglect the workings of the unconscious, whose “ancient fetid shafts and tunnels,” briefly evoked in The Crying of Lot 49 (129), lead to the psychic oubliette laid open and plundered in the memorable sodium pentothal episode in Gravity’s Rainbow. In Bleeding Edge, he presents the Deep Web as a virtual unconscious, a “dark archive” beneath the surface Web (58). In his probing of this digital arkhē, Pynchon escorts the reader into an abyss previously explored by Nietzsche, Freud, and Derrida. Like them, he finds repression, death wish, “archive fever,” and the oblivion from which life emerges and to which it returns.
 
The first half of Bleeding Edge unfolds on the brink of an abyss known to the reader but not to the characters. Following the daily lives of a handful of New Yorkers over twelve months in 2001-2002, Pynchon weaves what appear to be portents of cataclysm into an elaborate web, which he then allows to unravel, as if to chasten his own proclivity to paranoid metanarrative. Reg Despard, a videographer commissioned to make a documentary on hashslingrz, an internet company run by the unsavory Gabriel Ice, uncovers irregularities that he brings to the attention of his friend Maxine Tarnow, a certified fraud examiner who has recently lost her license. Not only has Reg blundered into what seems to be an Arab conclave in a secret lab, he has filmed furtive individuals setting up what looks like a Stinger shoulder-fired missile on a New York roof. Maxine, following up, uncovers hashslingrz’s channeling of money to the Middle East, ostensibly on behalf of the national security apparatus. She finds, too, that one of Ice’s people, Lester Traipse, has diverted some of the funds—either to himself or to less appropriate parties in the Muslim world (possibly the northern Caucasus, i.e., Chechnya). When Traipse is murdered, the trail leads to an intelligence agent, Nicholas Windust, who seems to be acting for Ice and the nameless, faceless, more powerful parties he serves. Presently Windust, too, is murdered.
 
But as the poet nothing affirmeth, Pynchon advances no conspiracy theory. Any relation of the novel’s various dark doings to the airliners hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center remains obscure. Which means that readers share with Lot 49’s Oedipa Maas the experience of watching, as it were, a film “just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix” (20). The author, one discovers, tracks something bigger than the paranoia he famously identifies as postmodernity’s signature pathology. Rather, he undertakes to dramatize epistemic evolution, the subtle ways in which the conditions of knowing complicate what is ostensibly known. Significantly, Pynchon writes “postmodern history” in more than one sense: he writes history in the postmodern era, and he postmodernizes historiography itself. A decade before Hayden White’s paradigm-shifting Metahistory, Pynchon had demonstrated, in V. (1963), an understanding of the perspectival relativity of historical narrative. Half a century later, he continues to interrogate historiography with something like an inquisitor’s severity. “Pynchon’s project,” according to Michael Harris, “is to re-vision and problematize our understanding of the past, to call attention to history as a construct. Thus he “presents history as a narrative with multiple strands” (102). Amy J. Elias similarly calls attention to the “polyvocal” character of Pynchon’s historiography, his writing of “a mystical counter-history to the rationalistic, monovocal Anglo-European history of technocratic capitalism” (133). Pynchon indites the one as he indicts the other.
 
I propose to situate Bleeding Edge within an oeuvre notable for comedic yet tragically inflected representations of history and its strange iterations. Where Hegel, Marx, and Santayana glance briefly at the tendency of history to repeat itself, Pynchon sees in such recurrence the rationale for a postmodern historiography. Thus he dispenses with foundational thinking about the past, disdains historical metanarrative, and eschews teleology. No Geist, then, no historical inevitability—and none of the admonitory solemnity of the pedagogue quoting Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (284). If this bromide comes to mind at all (perhaps as the unstated premise of an historiographical enthymeme), it should generate skepticism: remember what past, whose past? As a character in Chuck Palahniuk’s 2001 novel Choke observes, “[t]hose who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up” (208). Pynchon, too, reframes the cautionary formula and risks a disabling fatalism: history revolves like Fortune’s wheel, nor can education or reconceptualized historiography arrest its revolutions. We are not to imagine that we can deliver ourselves from history except we recognize and accept its freefall, its freeplay. A curious corollary: historiography that is itself playful can in small measures function as mithridate, inoculating readers against despair. Play figures, too, in artistic storytelling’s engagement with “[c]ontrary-to-the-fact occurrences” that represent, according to the synopsis Pynchon supplied for Against the Day, “not the world” but “what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two.” Pynchon reminds his readers that such representation of the imagined-as-true remains, early and late, “one of the main purposes of fiction.”[1] The author has always delighted in giving grammatical terms—subjunctive, preterite—a political, philosophical or aesthetic meaning. In assorted exercises in the historical subjunctive (especially in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon’s great novel of American becoming), he scrutinizes the past and its iterative cataclysms for traces or intimations of the “better destiny” invoked in Inherent Vice (341). He does so less in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci (“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”) than of Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, who saw in Gatsby “an extraordinary gift for hope” (6).[2] But even as he invites the reader to share the hope and to join him in at least imagining some benign mutation in history’s violent self-cloning, Pynchon never strays far from historiographic tough-mindedness. To borrow a phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow, he is at pains to depict the “stone determinacy” of historical mechanism (86), which he replicates in such formal and thematic features as parallel plots, twinned characters, and, at the level of the word, paronomasic play. These elements frame the elaborate mirroring of historical events, the past punning on itself, events and personalities twinned at odd removes and in strange ways—ways undreamt of by Marx, Barbara W. Tuchman, or Giambattista Vico.
 

Paranomasic Historiography

I begin with the tendency of language, at the most basic level, to discover an economy of meaningful replication. In word play, especially the paronomasia that many mistake for puerile facetiation, Pynchon miniaturizes his hermeneutics of history. The delight in paronomasia, a prominent feature of Pynchon’s wit and style, is of a piece with the author’s predilection for doubled or geminate figures. From Dwight Eddins to Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, critics have noted the “gnostic” or “Manichaean” element in the Pynchon imaginary, but without, I would argue, adequate attention to its instantiation at the granular level. Pynchon’s fondness for pairs, twins, and dualities may stem from an instinctive recognition of their being, in effect, inchoate metaphors or puns. Conversely, the author often deploys word play to signal larger, more important analogies. Few writers since Shakespeare, in fact, have been so given to paronomasia. The puns in Bleeding Edge include the identification of Pokémon as “some West Indian proctologist” (131), the law firm of Hannover, Fisk (280), trustafarians (232), Ahrrrh-rated pirate movies (398), and the imbibing of Pinot E-Grigio (20). One winces only occasionally, as when Maxine declares, “I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers” (215). On the other hand, as will be seen, the DeepArcher pun (departure, deep archer) is one of the more serious here. At once demotic and anarchical, paronomasia abbreviates or streamlines predication. Insofar as the homophonic twinning effects conceptual or semantic comparison, a pun is an especially elliptical metaphor—one in which the distinction between tenor and vehicle is blurred. But unlike metaphor, which takes itself seriously, the pun asserts a likeness that, often disguised as absurdity (even silliness), delivers insight the more cogent for seeming accidental (as in the punning Greek adage pathemata, mathemata: sufferings are lessons). When not disclosing distinction in one or both of its elements, such verbal twinning implies their mutual deflation. In the name of a television talk show hosted by the evidently less than coruscating “Beltway intellectual Richard Uckelmann,” one notes an especially trenchant—and funny—example of the pun that disparages or deflates: “Thinking with Dick” (249).
 
Pynchon’s insistent twinning, I would suggest, is often paronomasia made visual: things, rather than words, echo each other in humorous or frightening ways. One can trace this reification of paronomasia back to “Mortality and Mercy in Vienna” (Cleanth Siegel meets, in David Lupescu, a double) and V. (Pig Bodine’s playmates Hanky and Panky, the policemen who affect the Dragnet partnership); but it becomes a stylistic signature in Gravity’s Rainbow, which features Fuder and Fass, Wobb and Whoaton, Whappo and Crutchfield, Takeshi and Ichizo, and so on—homely intimations of a parallel, unseen, spiritual plane, the realm of gnostic metaphysics. The commonplace pairs eventually give way to a more cosmic couple, Enzian and Blicero, the “Primal Twins” who define innocence and corruption in spheres political and historical, sexual and technological, tribal and statist, colonial and postcolonial (727). In Mason & Dixon, in which the Gnosticism recurs in formulations of “[a]s above, so below,” a primal pair occupies center stage, albeit as history’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (487, 624, 721). Against the Day, under the aegis of Iceland spar, seems to double its every character, its every object, its every scene.
 
Even at their most seemingly inconsequential, Pynchon’s pairs contribute to larger meanings, as one discovers by reflecting on the recurrent conceit of actors supposedly appearing in biopics as the famous people (often fellow denizens of Hollywood) they happen to resemble. This joke originates in Vineland, with its references to Pat Sajak in The Frank Gorshin Story, Pia Zadora in The Clara Bow Story, Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story, and Woody Allen in Young Kissinger. In his introduction to a posthumous collection of work by Donald Barthelme, Pynchon genially prognosticates “a made-for-Cable-TV miniseries” on the life of the recently deceased writer. The Donald Barthelme Story will feature Luke Perry in the title role, with Paul Newman in “a cameo as Norman Mailer” (xxi). In Bleeding Edge, Pynchon imagines Keanu Reeves as Derek Jeter (367), Ben Stiller as Fred MacMurray (433), and Anthony Hopkins as Mikhail Baryshnikov (374). Maxine’s husband Horst, a connoisseur of the genre, gravitates to the “BPX cable channel, which airs film biographies exclusively,” notably endless “golfer biopics” in the run-up to the U.S. Open: “Owen Wilson as Jack Nicklaus, Hugh Grant in The Phil Mickelson Story,” and “here’s Christopher Walken, starring in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story,” with “Gene Hackman in a cameo as Arnold Palmer” (93-94).
 
The inventor of this running joke, seeing such paired faces as the duplicable parts of fame’s machinery, effects a slowing down, if not a general seizing up, of popular culture’s assembly line. Conflating the cog that propels the machine and the wrench that breaks it, the author transforms pop paronomasia into ludic Luddism. The many facial puns may also be understood as ironic complement to Pynchon’s refusal of his own image: the public’s attempts to twin the author with J. D. Salinger or William Gaddis or Theodore Kaczynski or Wanda Tinasky having miscarried; the author’s celebrated reclusiveness may complicate the casting of any future Thomas Pynchon Story.
 
These jeux d’esprit—the puns, the faux biopics, the various doublings—reveal themselves as the constituent parts, the molecules and cells, of the larger, more clearly consequential binaries of history and story, his story and her story, history and historiography. “Hegel remarks somewhere,” writes Marx, “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce” (15). In the historiographical economy of Thomas Pynchon, however, the past falls rather short of the Aristotelian standard. Pity and fear remain unpurged; anagnorisis proves elusive. Nor, the propensity for levity notwithstanding, does Pynchon really play the farceur with history’s second acts. The comedic element, tinged with bitterness, figures in Pynchon’s antic historiography, not in the history itself. Birger Vanwesenbeeck notes the paradoxical function of humor in the author’s representations of enormity: “Rather than offering his readers comic relief after long, sustained sequences of dramatic tension—as Shakespeare does in the porter scene following Duncan’s murder in Macbeth, for instance—Pynchon’s picaresque narratives proceed in the opposite direction.” History’s iteration, duplication, or recapitulation involves only an amplification of the original suffering that becomes the more horrific for its comedic (or “farcical”) presentation, often as the parody or pastiche that enlarges the small-bore dualities of paronomasia.
 
Famous for his dualities, his images twinned in Iceland spar, his often Manichaean pairs, Pynchon expects that readers will see in nearly every historical set piece in his fiction its later recurrence or earlier template. Whether chronicling the experiences of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in eighteenth-century America or those of South-West Africans and their brutal colonizers early in the twentieth century, he reverses Tuchman’s figure of the “distant mirror.” That is, he situates the glass in his own time, not in the past, and so invites recognition of the many ways in which one historical moment conjures itself in the mirror of the reader’s present or near future (prospect converts history into prophesy). Threatening to reify—or, rather, re-reify—itself, the specular simulacrum resists precession. Pynchon casts doubt, then, on a famous thesis regarding the image’s displacement of the real. He sees in historical reality, pace Baudrillard, a repressed that can return, an abreaction at trigger’s edge.
 
Thus in V. the suffering of indigenes at the hands of General Von Trotha and his troops prefigures the more exhaustive Holocaust the Germans would perpetrate at mid-century. In Vineland, the Reagan 80s reveal themselves as the 60s turned inside out. In Inherent Vice, set in 1970, readers discern the seeding of later greed, hatred, racial division and Tea Party ideology. In Against the Day, the struggles among nations and amid populations in the years leading up to World War I find their fearsome parallels in the global balkanization that obtains in the author’s twenty-first-century present. In that novel, too, one recalls the havoc wreaked when the “Vormance expedition” returns to a “great northern city” with a cargo vastly more dangerous than the giant ape or cloned dinosaurs of popular film. The ensuing catastrophe leaves “charred trees still quietly smoking” and “flanged steelwork fallen or leaning perilously” (150). This historical prolepsis gives way, in Bleeding Edge, to a more direct treatment of what happens sooner or later, to “the quaint belief that . . . evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody’s towering delusions about being exempt” (424). But even as he foregrounds the 9/11 attacks, he adduces the suggestive parallel—and finds a disturbing abbreviation of the interval between an event and its iteration: the Taliban’s dynamiting of the great fourteen-hundred-year-old Buddhas at Bamiyan preceded by only six months the destruction of the World Trade Center. “Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence” (338).
 
When Bleeding Edge‘s weaponized airliners come “roaring out of the sky,” they replicate the aural annunciation with which Gravity’s Rainbow opens: “A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now” (3). That second sentence seems paradoxically to affirm and to deny the historical principle I have characterized as central to Pynchon’s thought and art. The “before” nudges the reader towards a recognition of what has immediately preceded the screaming on high: the detonation of a rocket traveling faster than the sound of its approach. The narrated event is without prologue: “there is,” as yet, “nothing to compare it to.” Like the Rocket, the narrative has introduced itself with what is, as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger have shown, the first of many instances of hysteron proteron, the trope of putting the cart before horse (168).
 
Historical insight commonly requires the perspective of many years: the more remote the past, the less contaminated by perceptual bias. But as history accelerates, so must historiography, and one makes no apology for viewing Bleeding Edge, which harks back little more than a single decade, as “historical.” Indeed, as these things go, Pynchon has been remarkably deliberate, waiting for the 9/11 mini-genre to jell in the work of his contemporaries: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2005), Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). One can also shelve Pynchon’s novel with fictions that more broadly distill the atmosphere on the eve of 9/11 and on its morrow: DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011). Whether or not they attempt to treat the destruction of the twin towers directly, all of these authors ultimately aim at defining an American fin-de-millénium troubled by terrorism international and domestic and by the unmooring of economic and political order.
 
“And upside down were towers,” raves a voice in The Waste Land (Eliot 68). The various fictions focused on 9/11, which one could argue do more to promote understanding of its events than the many works of documentary journalism that have appeared over the years, treat much the same apocalyptic spectacle—the tower struck by lightning—represented in the Tarot deck from which Eliot deals his famous poem. (In an especially elegant passage in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon will create his own urban Tarot— “The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman” (439)—to capture the slow frames that appear as one subway train is overtaken by another.) These fictions feature certain thematic elements that preserve the human scale. The fate of a parent who works in the World Trade Center, for example, figures in the novels of Foer and DeLillo, as well as in Bleeding Edge. Like DeLillo and Kalfus (or, again, Eliot), Pynchon foregrounds a dysfunctional or faltering marriage, perhaps because husband and wife are themselves twin towers that marital discord threatens to bring down.
 
An interest in history’s “many cunning passages” (the phrase is from Eliot’s “Gerontion”) anchors this author’s representations of pasts both remote and proximate. But Pynchon characteristically favors indirect representation of events so immense or infamous as to have created their own mythology. In Against the Day, he refuses to make the Great War his climax; in Mason & Dixon, the Revolutionary War is elided altogether. Nor is Gravity’s Rainbow a war novel per se, its largely European setting in the period 1939-1945 notwithstanding. It features considerable attention to Germany in the prewar period and as the postwar “Zone,” but the war itself figures only as a kind of skiagraphic outline that emerges as the author shades in the dealings of oil, chemical, and weapons cartels; markets black and otherwise; and, from Ned Pointsman to Major Marvy (not to mention Blicero), the ambitions of the unscrupulous. So, too, with Bleeding Edge, in which the millennial climacteric transpires almost in parentheses. History, for Pynchon, is not the big event—it is the matrix from which it springs. In the emphasis on history as everyday experience, Pynchon finds himself in good historiographical company. From Fernand Braudel to Doris Kearns Goodwin, modern historians have represented the past of the common man or woman as much as that of the crowned head—village life as much as this or that big battle. Pynchon has always differentiated history on the demotic street from what transpires in the hothouse of political power.
 
Bleeding Edge, then, is a 9/11 novel with little emphasis on the day’s actual violence; the author does not describe the impacting airplanes, the flames, the jumpers. Amid a chronicle of the months before and after, the fateful 11^th of September comes and goes. The novel’s chronology subsumes a single complete year, from “the first day of spring 2001,” with “every Callery Pear tree on the Upper West Side” displaying “clusters of white pear blossoms” (1), to the moment, the following year, in which the “pear trees have exploded into bloom” once again (475). This vernal recurrence signals the natural corrective to human violence, and Pynchon depicts certain elements of human solidarity as equal to whatever the terrorists perpetrate—and, withal, to whatever chicanery the Bernie Madoffs, the Gabriel Ices, and the Bush-Cheney administration are up to. Maxine and Horst edge toward reconciliation. They provide for their children. Friendships survive. Humane values prove resilient.
 
At the same time that he captures and moralizes the moment of bi-millennial rupture, Pynchon does justice to—emphasizes, even—what it feels like when “dependable history shrinks to a dismal perimeter” (328). Insofar as historiography strives for “you are there” verisimilitude, Pynchon (himself a Manhattan resident) captures the groggy disorientation and the emotional discontinuity of a whole population’s finding itself “down . . . on the barroom floor of history, feeling sucker-punched” (339). History, according to the metaphor here, bears little resemblance to the “watering hole” of genteel euphemism. Like Auden, who in “September 1, 1939” reflects on the outbreak of World War II from the vantage of “one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street” (86), Pynchon contemplates a fateful September day and briefly characterizes history itself as a place of impaired reflexes and misperceived elevation of spirits, a place in which one risks a dive into the sawdust or, worse, a toppling down stairs into some noisome latrine, like Mr. Kernan in Joyce’s “Grace.” If history is any kind of watering hole, it is the kind infested by crocodiles, a place in which most of those gathered are the food animals, not the predators.
 
Pynchon evinces particular disgust at the authorities’ appropriation of terrible events to “get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless” (328). At one point, Maxine pauses to mock the “the listen-up-all-you-slackers” moralizing of the right, the sanctimonious assertion that “American neglect of family values brings Al-Qaeda in on the airplanes and takes the Trade Center down” (363). As her friend Heidi Czornak (a professor of popular culture) observes, “11 September infantilized this country” (336).
 
This pronouncement rings true (one has heard it elsewhere—and experienced it). Indeed, if history is an arrangement of specula, one imagines the new national infancy as a version of Lacan’s mirror phase—as understood by, say, Maxine’s surfer-psychotherapist, Shawn. As “airhead” (31) and “idiot-surfant” (423), Shawn resembles Jeff Spicoli, the character played by Sean Penn in Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), perhaps crossed with the spacy protagonists of the “Bill and Ted” movies. California refugee turned shrink, Shawn manages to be every bit as cryptic as—and a good deal more amusing than—the father of his clinical orientation, whose thought he sums up as might Bill and Ted after an “excellent adventure” at the École Normale Supérieure: “total bogosity of the ego” (245). Lacan in a nutshell, the phrase comically historicizes the American character. American identity, like that of the Lacanian subject, is predicated on a false or “bogus” foundation. In Lacan’s account of the mirror phase, the infant mistakes image for self, and this misperception becomes the gossamer plinth of subjectivity, the tragic absence at the heart of ego’s peeled onion. In much the same way, infant America long ago mistook an illusion—the myth of exceptionalism—for the bedrock of identity.
 
If, as Heidi Czornak asseverates, the country has been re-infantilized by late trauma, it must perforce grow up all over again, pass through the phases of maturation described in psychoanalysis, which has itself passed from Freudian infancy to professional maturity in the work of Erikson, Adler, Horney, Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Benjamin, and others. Pynchon takes a somewhat Nabokovian pleasure in depicting the dubious Shawn as part of this apostolic succession, the bleeding edge, as it were, of psychoanalytic theory.  He also describes the cis-atlantic success of Otto Kugelblitz, an imaginary psychotherapist said to have been banished (like Jung) from Freud’s inner circle. Maxine’s sons, Ziggy and Otis, attend a school named in his honor (the older boy ironically shares a cognomen with the immigrant shrink’s own terrible father: Ziggy is a diminutive of Sigmund).
 
A droll-sounding name, Kugelblitz ought to mean “casserole lightning” or “pudding blitz,” but the word is standard German for the mysterious type of atmospheric electricity called, in English, ball lightning. Unlike the familiar flashes that link sky and ground in storms, ball lightning floats or hovers in the air. Though not to be confused with St. Elmo’s Fire or the will o’ the wisp, Kugelblitz does seem to beckon from marshy hermeneutical ground. One errs, that is, to go haring off after the science that theorizes it as something like a miniature Tunguska event, a minuscule “ancient black hole” piercing the atmosphere (Muir 48). In another sense, however, the ball lightning phenomenon reigns over the novel’s meanings the way Iceland spar does in Against the Day. One discerns its significance not in meteorology but in that branch of history devoted to military innovation: late in World War II, along with ballistic missiles (the V-1 and V-2 rockets) and the first jet fighter (the ME-262), the Germans fielded a mobile anti-aircraft gun, ancestor of such shoulder-fired weapons as the Stinger that figures in Bleeding Edge. They called it the Kugelblitz.
 
Pynchon describes education at the Otto Kugelblitz School as organized around “a curriculum in which each grade level” is “regarded as a different kind of mental condition and managed accordingly. A loony bin with homework, basically” (3). The grade levels no doubt complement or look forward to Otto Kugelblitz’s theory of life stages as mental disorders: “the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life . . . all working up to death, which at last turns out to be ‘sanity’” (2). As Freud applied his system to the larger shape of society and history (in, for example, Civilization and Its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism), so presumably do Kugelblitz’s stages of life lend themselves to ideas about the phases through which civilization passes (early and late, psychoanalytic theory complements the work of social historians from Vico to Weber and from Gibbon to Spengler and Toynbee). Thus a truly American historiography would chart growth and decline proceeding from “the solipsism of infancy” through the “sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood” and from “the paranoia of middle age” to “the dementia of late life.” American “sanity” in this declension would express itself as a wish for the very consummation toward which Slothrop, according to certain “heavily paranoid voices” in Gravity’s Rainbow, makes his way. It is Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry, a Kugelblitz precursor, who “opines” in that novel that Slothrop “might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his race’s, death” (738).
 
Indeed, versions of the Kugelblitz stages reveal themselves in various ways all across the Pynchon canon. Oedipa Maas glimpses solipsism as the condition from which she (and her fellow white-bread Americans) must somehow exit. Before coalescing as Todestrieb, Slothrop’s erections figure a variety of sexual hysterias as the thousand-year Reich gives way to the American Century. Paranoia, a basic Pynchon theme, seems to crest in Vineland, in the dueling anxieties of left and right in the Reagan years. According to this progression, Bleeding Edge chronicles the dementia of pre- and post-millennium America. Perhaps, too, it recapitulates the prior stages, rather as a spell of variable Washington, D. C. weather is imagined, in “Entropy,” as “a stretto passage in the year’s fugue” (83). Thus the reader samples solipsism in DeepArcher and in the paradoxical isolation created by video games, social media, and geek life generally. Thus “sexual hysterias” lead Maxine’s friend Vyrva to betray her husband with the loathsome Gabriel Ice—and Maxine herself to play fetishistic footsy with Eric Outfield and to couple with the unsavory Nicholas Windust. Meanwhile, the “paranoia of middle age” afflicts every seasoned adult in the story, from Reg Despard to March Kelleher, and 9/11 leaves a “general dementia” in its wake. The “infantilization” that Heidi deplores represents a return—Kekulé von Stradonitz’s great serpent biting its tale—to the polymorphous perverse.[3]

Is It O.K. to Be an Internet Luddite?

The reader who looks for the role of the unconscious in this psychoanalytic fantasia discovers that it has been reconceptualized, historicized, and politicized as cybernetic archive. But before descending into that well of the remembered, the forgotten and the repressed, I should like to consider just how one of its archons, Gabriel Ice, embodies future history. In looking at the strange intersections in this novel of retrospect with prospect, prolepsis, and prophesy, I mean to argue additional dimensions to the historiographical vision that enables Pynchon to depict in the mirror of the past events that have yet to transpire. The author contrives to make his temporal setting “reflect” the proximate future, whether the balance of the Bush-Cheney administration or the prospect (in the election of 2012) of someone like Gabriel Ice in the White House.
 
Pynchon’s story turns on the death of Lester Traipse, who makes the mistake of stealing from Ice, who is both ruthless and “connected.” Worse than the theft itself may be the knowledge it implies of just where Ice’s money has been going—knowledge that will also endanger Maxine and those who aid her investigation. Lester’s body turns up in The Deseret, an apartment building as “karmically-challenged” as the celebrated and infamous Dakota, site of John Lennon’s murder (27).[4] Like the Golden Fang headquarters in Inherent Vice, The Deseret dares the investigator to look beyond its façade. Its name means “honeybee” in the language of the “Jaredites,” a group that supposedly made its way to America after the Tower of Babel’s destruction. They settled in the Lake Ontario region, where Joseph Smith, some four millennia later, claimed to have unearthed, near his home in Manchester, New York, golden tablets bearing inscriptions in “reformed Egyptian” (the Book of Mormon treats these events as historical fact). Pynchon makes no further reference to Mormonism—though he may expect the reader to think of the particular Mormon who would, a decade later, focus the desires of those farthest to the right on America’s political spectrum. Thus the name of the building around which so much of the novel’s action revolves suggests the trace presence in the city—a beachhead, so to speak—of interests that would presently, with the Mitt Romney candidacies (for governor of Massachusetts, for president of the United States), take on a higher profile.
 
Mitt Romney need not live in New York to serve as one of the models for Pynchon’s villain, Gabriel Ice, who owns (or partly owns) The Deseret but does not reside there (142, 260, 371).  That the one is Mormon, the other Jewish, is inconsequential. Both worship only Mammon—and power. During the period depicted in Bleeding Edge, Romney was disentangling himself from Bain Capital, headquartered in Boston. The novel ends a few months before the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, which Romney would win.  Known for “leveraged buyouts,” Romney preyed on economic vulnerability, taking over failing companies, stripping their assets, pink-slipping employees, and, before selling out, taking out massive loans with which to pay executive bonuses and investor dividends (Taibbi). Ditto Ice: “The book on this guy is he takes a position, typically less than five percent, in each of a whole portfolio of start-ups he knows from running Altman-Z’s on them are gonna fail within a short-term horizon. Uses them as shells for funds he wants to move around inconspicuously” (63). In the aftermath of the dotcom crash of 2000, Ice snaps up surplus fiber-optic cable and other “infrastructure” at fire-sale prices (127). He presides over a kind of cybersecurity Halliburton, hashslingrz, which does a cozy business with the Department of Defense and other, more shadowy entities, notably the C.I.A. He evidently takes an interest in DeepArcher, the program written by Maxine’s friends Justin and Lukas, because it threatens to make the security protocols of hashslingrz obsolete.
 
The latest in a series of villainous Pynchon plutocrats, Gabriel Ice represents the metastasis of capitalist privilege, which, like Shakespeare’s imposthume that inward breaks, incubates a general sepsis. In Pynchon’s early work, the agents of evil tended to seem almost incidental. V. is less a person than a fantasy of historiographic paranoia, the mythic embodiment of the blood-soaked century in which she comes of age. Pierce Inverarity, having died just before Lot 49 opens, is also a phantom. In Gravity’s Rainbow, human villainy is scattered; the twisted Nazi, Blicero, is somehow less loathsome than Ned Pointsman or Major Marvy. Corporate evil also comes in a variety of packages—Shell Mex, Krupp, Imperial Chemicals, IG Farben. But more and more, as the novels follow one another, evil presents itself as focalized through Control and those who promote it in spheres psychic, economic, and political. At a hasty count, I find some 56 instances of the word in Gravity’s Rainbow. Control is the summum malorum of Brock Vond in Vineland, of Padre Zarpazo in Mason & Dixon, of Scarsdale Vibe in Against the Day, and of Crocker Fenway and Vigilant California in Inherent Vice. All devote themselves to twisted, puritanical suppression of the freedom pursued so passionately (or clumsily) in the 1750s, at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the 1960s. Gabriel Ice, his hubris obscurely imbricated with American foreign policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, merits the loathing he inspires in lesser thugs (Misha and Grisha), who call him “oligarch scum, thief, murderer” (455).
 
The funds he supposedly channels to “anti-jihadists” (375), evidently on behalf of the C.I.A., seem actually to be going to Chechnya—perhaps, inadvertently, to those seeking to effect a Russian 9/11. As the soft-boiled Misha and Grisha explain, Lester Traipse, aided by their boss Igor, was not stealing so much as diverting funds, perhaps mistakenly, to “some not so good” Chechens (461). Such American geopolitical misprision finds its emblem here in the Stinger missile at the center of the strange little tableau filmed by Reg Despard. The never-answered questions about just what its wielders were up to invite answers that take fully into account the vagaries of the secondary and tertiary market for such American weapons (and their knockoffs). A probable leftover of American-sponsored resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the missile represents the unintended consequences of Realpolitik (272).
 
As above, so below. The author of Bleeding Edge contemplates, with prejudice, the Internet’s susceptibility to the powerful economic forces that prevail in “meatspace.” Yet Pynchon also recognizes the Internet as the historian’s indispensable resource, an archive. Pynchon’s meditation on the underbelly of the Internet (if one may be permitted an absurd figure) appeared, as it happens, at a moment of considerable journalistic handwringing over the possible downside for a generation unable to unplug (“Is the ipad Bad for Children?” “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”).[5] The novel precedes by scant weeks the depictions of Silicon Valley Eloi in Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013) and the denunciations of popular digital media with which Jonathan Franzen peppers the scholarly apparatus of The Kraus Project, his 2013 edition of Viennese culture critic Karl Kraus’s vituperative essays. But not for Pynchon, I think, the injudicious Jeremiad. Not for him the stridency a reviewer condemns in Franzen’s
 

often . . . disheveled and talky assault on everything the author sees when he opens his laptop or clicks on a television, including, but not limited to, Facebook, smartphones, ‘the high-school-cafeteria social scene of Gawker takedowns and Twitter popularity contests,’ the hipness of Apple products, reality TV, Fox News, Amazon, even the ‘recent tabloidization’ of the AOL home page. (Garner)

Unlike Franzen, who denounces the digital pithing of consciousness in propria persona, Pynchon puts such fulminations into the mouths of his characters. As they inveigh against a variety of cyber-ills, their creator seems to reserve judgment. Though Pynchon clearly deplores the violations to which the fresh green breast of cyberspace has been subjected by advertisers, merchants, and consumers, not to mention “Nigerian” scam artists, one doubts that he wishes some violent cancelation of the Internet—only the occasional frying of the bad guys’ servers (as in Misha and Grisha’s act of vircator Luddism).
 
Maxine, too, reserves judgment, even when (or especially when) subjected to paternal kvetching about digital bad faith: Ernie Tarnow deplores the Internet as
 

this magical convenience that creeps like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid. (420)

Eric Outfield, computer “badass” and foot fetishist, expresses much the same disgust from, as it were, inside Leviathan: “every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage” (432). His anger edges toward that of the true Luddite: “We’re being played . . . and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet—the real one, the dream, the promise—is destroyed” (432).
 
Justin and Lukas, co-creators of DeepArcher, attempt an escape from what so exercises Ernie and Eric, “the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy” (357). The DeepArcher software facilitates creation of a world elsewhere, a “history-free” (373) world within a world within a world (as the Deep Web itself lies within and beneath the surface Web, which in turn lies within or alongside the everyday daylight world). Once thought absurd, the old cosmology of a world supported by an elephant standing on the back of a tortoise (and so on in infinite regression) takes on new life in the nesting spheres of cyberspace.
 
A portmanteau word, DeepArcher puns on “departure” and “deep archer,” the one a dream of lighting out for the digital territory, the other something more Apollonian. Both meanings signify the dream of a redemptive spiritual removal. Departure secularizes a beloved end-of-history fantasy of fundamentalists, the Rapture; deep archer, on the other hand, evokes a famous Zen discipline: practice with a bow until, thought banished, it becomes a part of oneself, the arrow flying unerringly to its mark without conscious volition. Readers have encountered these conceits in Pynchon before: fantasies of Rapture proliferate in Vineland, and Gravity’s Rainbow includes among its minor characters the Peenemünde engineer Fahringer, the “aerodynamics man” who works on the guidance problems of the V-2 (that high-tech arrow) by retreating to the forest “with his Zen bow . . . to practice breathing, draw and loosing, over and over.” As he “becomes one with” the arrow, so will he “with Rocket, trajectory, and target” (403). Pynchon reifies this consummation in characters—Gottfried, Slothrop—who become one with the Rocket in a more literal way.
 
Initially uncorrupted by advertising and Control (or by the scary convergence of corporate and governmental purpose), the Deep Web harbors freedom that cannot long go unregulated. Maxine at one point dreams of “some American DeepArcher” (353), a version of that truly cheered land Oedipa Maas and Lew Basnight envision or imagine. Like the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll in Vineland or the great airship Inconvenience in Against the Day, DeepArcher promises escape from Control—whether political or gravitational—but ends up, as they do, merely validating the etymology of Utopia (“no place”). Presently, then, DeepArcher begins to fill up—like America—with the refuse of the old world or, as it is called here, the surface Web, which was always already “based on control,” as Ernie Tarnow observes (420). Advertising and other commercial interests begin turning up, as do those latter-day Thanatoids, the piteous ghosts of 9/11. Some Rapture.
 
Among other things, then, DeepArcher is a variation on a theme—its digitization, so to speak—that Pynchon reframes from novel to novel. In the closing pages of Lot 49, he evokes the America that persists beneath the consumerism, the perpetual sacrifice to the materialist Moloch, “the absence of surprise to life” (170). In Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop yearns in exile for a green idea of his homeland. The characters of Vineland and Inherent Vice contemplate the doomed revolution of the 60s, the beach beneath the literal and figurative paving stones. This American subjunctive is at stake, too, in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. In the one, America is the plain on which reason and the spirit engage in dubious battle; in the other, it anchors the global allegory of geopolitical catastrophe on the millennial horizon.
 
In his musings on the Web beneath the Web, Pynchon adumbrates the cybernetic sublime. The author has wryly regretted (in the Slow Learner introduction) the supposedly obtrusive presence of T. S. Eliot in his early work, but echoes persist. “Burnt Norton” provides language and images well suited to Internet catabasis:
 

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit. (179)

Pynchon’s heroine, exploring DeepArcher, hears about a deep “horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss” (357). Continuing her night-sea journey through the Deep Web, she encounters a woman (or someone with a female avatar, for the Internet makes literal the performance of gender) who speaks of “the deep unlighted . . . where the origin is. The way a powerful telescope will bring you further out in physical space, closer to the moment of the big bang, so here, going deeper, you approach the border country, the edge of the unnavigable” (358). That last word carries etymological freight, for “cybernetic” derives from the Greek cubernetes, “steersman.” This nameless interlocutor (whom Maxine momentarily thinks the Archer herself, Zen mistress of Zen masters) wants to “[f]ind out how long I can stay just at the edge of the beginning before the Word, see how long I can gaze . . . till I . . . fall in” (358). She imagines the void beyond the cybernetic.
 
Abyss and Logos. Readers encounter related figures in The Crying of Lot 49, in which Oedipa contemplates a Mexican painter’s vision of universal solipsism. The description of Remedios Varo’s “Bordando el Manto Terrestre” teases the ear with a belated yet oddly resonant independent clause: “all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world” (20-21, my emphasis). The verbal template of that last phrase appears in the first sentence of the Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God.” Later, Oedipa brings to consciousness that problematic Logos as she considers the dark velleity that manifests itself as:
 

the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity’s pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike “clues” were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. (118)

In comparing the language here with that of Bleeding Edge, one sees the extent to which Pynchon has come to privilege void over Verbum. In the later novel, one encounters nothing so sanguine, so numinous, as a redemptive Logos. Far from the Miltonic numen that confounds Chaos and old Night, the Word referred to by Maxine’s fellow wanderer in DeepArcher annunciates only the secular boundary between digital order and disorder. Momentarily imagining the dark side of this binary, the author contemplates, with Maxine, a cybernetic event horizon, the ineffable origin of origins. Pynchon in effect “digitizes” the poignant passage in which Nabokov, in Pnin, evokes exile: “the accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglenooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody” (62).
 
Pynchon also contemplates what, borrowing a term from Derrida, one might call the “archontic” function of cyberspace. Pynchon views the Internet as a great archive made in the image of the human mind. Consciousness finds its “analog” in the surface Web; the Deep Web models the unconscious, in which fearsome abreactive energies may lurk. Like Derrida, moreover, Pynchon conceptualizes the archive as troubled by the originary material it houses. An archive, according to Derrida, always represents more than a simple repository. Originating as a place distinguished (often dubiously) as the special charge of an archon, the archive is inescapably political—as is the narrative of origins to be read there. Derrida emphasizes the “politics of the archive” and argues that “[t]here is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (4n1). Politically susceptible to suppression, the archive is, insofar as it models the psyche, susceptible also to the pathologies of repression. The archive fosters the “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). Deconstructing archival desire (the custodial imperative), Derrida discovers something very much like the repetition-compulsion that prompted Freud to hypothesize a Todestrieb or death instinct, Janus-face to the Lustprinzip or pleasure principle. Derrida’s “archive fever,” by the same token, twins the desire to conserve with a paradoxical, self-canceling “destruction drive” (19).
 
Thus Ernie Tarnow says more than he realizes when he declares that the Internet “never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet” (420). Ernie’s paranoia is ironically mirrored in the very medium he despises. As Michael Chabon notes in a perspicacious review of the novel in The New York Review of Books, the “infinite interlinks” of the Internet make it “a perfect metaphor for paranoia” (68). Chabon persuasively reads Bleeding Edge “not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge . . . that paradigm’s most painful limitation” (69). He sums up the many teasing invitations to embrace full-blown paranoia:
 

Pynchon clicks, clicks, and clicks on the hyperlinks coded into the page source of 9/11—advance warnings given to Jewish brokers or Muslim cabbies by Mossad or al-Qaeda, suspicious groups of men seen on rooftops before or after the attack, the purported destruction of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 by a shoulder-mounted Stinger missile, unusual trading in the stock of American and United Airlines in the days leading up to September 11. His scorn for all this weak sauce is most sharply evident when it dribbles from the lips of [March Kelleher,] an otherwise affectionately rendered old-lefty liberal New Yorker. (68)

The reader, in other words, must not mistake the “weak sauce” for heavy hermeneutic gravy—must resist indiscriminate linking of, say, Kugelblitz the psychotherapist, Kugelblitz the school, Kugelblitz the atmospheric phenomenon, and Kugelblitz the anti-aircraft weapon. More seriously, the reader would err to take the emergent catalogue of paranoia’s hyperlinks as adding up to a coherent theory of 9/11’s grassy knoll. Although the novel “unnervingly plays footsie with 9/11 trutherism,” as Jonathan Lethem observes, “the discomfort this arouses is intentional. Like DeLillo in Libra, Pynchon is interested in the mystery of wide and abiding complicity, not some abruptly punctured innocence.” Even as he assembles the ingredients of conspiracy, then, the author resists its powerful undertow. Fox News, after all, has given paranoia a bad name.
 
Part of history is its reception—not what happened but what it was thought to mean. The author of Bleeding Edge reminds readers that many saw the terrible events of 9/11 as being likely to put an end to the irony with which the American intelligentsia couched its critiques of the nation’s political and cultural folly. But Pynchon has little patience with the pundits who faulted irony as a failure of moral discrimination. “One good thing could come from this horror,” declared Roger Rosenblatt shortly after 9/11:
 

it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years—roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright—the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously. Nothing was real. With a giggle and a smirk, our chattering classes—our columnists and pop culture makers—declared that detachment and personal whimsy were the necessary tools for an oh-so-cool life.

No. In the toolkit of truth, irony is at once saw, hammer, and screwdriver. Without irony, a writer is a surgeon without a scalpel. Storytelling without irony eventuates in little more than the meretriciousness of “reality” TV— “suddenly all over the cable,” as Maxine’s friend Heidi Czornak says, “like dog shit” (335). Heidi subjects the reasoning of Rosenblatt and his ilk to Aristophanic scorn. Not for her the argument
 

that irony, assumed to be a key element of urban gay humor and popular through the nineties, has now become another collateral casualty of 11 September because somehow it did not keep the tragedy from happening. ‘As if somehow irony,’ she recaps for Maxine, ‘as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious—weakening its grip on “reality.” So all kinds of make-believe—forget the delusional state the country’s in already—must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.’ (335)

Maxine knows what her friend means. At the Kugelblitz School, she has noticed an especially worrisome development: fiction will no longer figure in the curriculum. The repudiation of “make-believe,” addressed in a small way by the hearty endorsement of Santa Claus by Ziggy and Otis’s father (397-98), threatens some final diminution of the creative engagement with the world—some askesis of the imagination that resists and subverts official versions of reality. (Pynchon historicizes this agon in Mason & Dixon, in which the Juggernaut rationalism of the eighteenth century drives before it the last vestiges of magical and spiritual thinking.)
 
In his one concession to those who would dispense with irony, Pynchon always refers to the destruction of the Twin Towers—synecdoche for all of the terrorist acts that day—as “the atrocity” (321, 328, 376). But he repudiates any and all naïve yearning for a post-ironic episteme. Even a brief suspension of irony will allow supremely unimaginative entities (journalism, government, religion, media) to back a bewildered country into puzzled patriotism—that blunt instrument of national purpose. Thus Pynchon subjects history, notably the horrific events of 9/11, to scrutiny that resists the call to embrace and echo the un-ironic discourse of those who would presently lead the nation into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Irony contests what Don DeLillo calls the “flat, thin, tight, and relentless designs” of official history, written in “a single uninflected voice, the monotone of the state, the corporate entity, the product, the assembly line” (63). In his insistence that, confronted with “the reeking hole with the Cold War name at the lower edge of the island” (373), irony becomes all the more indispensable, the last thing thoughtful people ought to relinquish, Pynchon affirms this ancient figure as truth’s box-cutter, an edged tool that sharpens perception. In his honesty, he also affirms that every such “cutting edge” twins itself as “bleeding edge.”
 
I have argued here that Pynchon’s ironic engagement with history, along with his probing of the archive (both psychic and cyberspatial), places Bleeding Edge on the shelf of truly distinguished fictions on the national trauma that was 9/11. As trauma embeds itself in the psyche, it becomes a wound that cannot heal, a bleeding edge never stanched. As a work of art, Pynchon’s novel restores perspective, effects the “working through” that alone can neutralize trauma, picks its readers up off the barroom floor of history, perhaps even affords them a little of the grace invoked—ironically—in the title of that Joyce story. Another ironist resisting the infantilization of public discourse, Thomas Pynchon situates himself at the bleeding edge of epistemic perception; like Joyce, withal, he takes up a position at the bleeding edge of the art that defines his moment in literary history.