Pynchon Pals Podcast Producer Patrick Perceives Parallel Pursuits Populating PTA's Picture

We started a podcast about reading Thomas Pynchon. I also saw One Battle After Another. Thoughts ahead!

Pynchon Pals—available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Podbean, and wherever else you can plug in an RSS feed—is "a podcast about finally reading Thomas Pynchon." It's co-hosted by me, my wife Duri, and our friend Andrew. And, for me, it's the culmination of a longtime dream of reading these books alongside smart, enthusiastic people. Several years out of grad school, and who knows how many years away from teaching a graduate seminar of my own, I thought a podcast would be the next best thing!

To some extent, we're capitalizing on the so-called "the year of the Pynch," with a new novel from the maestro arriving later this month and a new, albeit loose, film adaptation of his 1990 novel Vineland now playing in theaters. So maybe this post is a shameless plug! But it's also an attempt at putting some pieces together, based on our podcast's upcoming discussion (consider this a preview of next week's episode) of V. Chapter 3, "in which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations."

The chapter itself is a confounding mosaic. One of the book's main characters, the globe-trotting adventurer Herbert Stencil, is reclining on the sofa in the apartment of an Egyptologist who's the son of an Egyptologist Herbert's father Sydney knew from their days as espionage agents for the British Empire. Stencil the younger is obsessed with finding the titular V., an entity he knows only from the copious notes and contacts his father left him after a mysterious disappearance some years ago in Malta. The father of the present day's Egyptologist, one Eric Bongo-Shaftsbury, was responsible for the death of another colleague of Stencil the elder, a man named Porpentine, in Cairo at the turn of the 20th century.

The "eight impersonations" of the chapter's synopsis refer to Stencil's daydream imaginings of the events that lead to Porpentine's death, based—to what extent, precisely, we don't know—on his father's journals, which he undertakes from eight different perspectives. Here he's an anarchist manservant attending the pompous English during a gala at the Austrian Consulate in Alexandria, elsewhere he's a carriage driver in Cairo musing on his disbelief in the law and the apocalypse of the prophets, or a sex worker at a bierhaus eavesdropping on the drunken politicking over the fate of the English and French imperial forces soon to meet at Fashoda.

So progresses an intricate, balletic fracturing of a spy story, notable, whether or not you buy its psychological and political insight, at least for its confident confounding of narrative convention. As I mention somewhere in one of the podcast episodes, our perspective on the by turns bumbling and brutal English spies reminds me of the joke in the third Indiana Jones movie, which sees Indy threatening Nazi pursuers with his confidence in the ultimate cross-cultural acuity of his colleague Marcus Brody.

"Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan. He speaks a dozen languages. Knows every local custom. He'll blend in. Disappear. You'll never see him again."

Cut to: a bewildered English gentleman wandering through an open-air market in a white linen suit.

"Does anyone here speak English? Or even Ancient Greek?"

The spies in V.'s third chapter fare a little better, but our perspective on their exploits is always mediated by exteriority, or rather, by peripheral perspectives on their varied intrusions. We read the chapter from the points of view of what would be anonymous side characters in a traditional narrative of this type. And what's even more interesting is that we can say for certain that this off-kilter development is one Thomas Pynchon himself worked toward with intention—because this chapter is actually a revision of an earlier short story called "Under the Rose," published originally in The Noble Savage issue #3, two years before the novel.

Almost all of the perspective shifting, that is, almost all of the characterized commentary on colonialism, is absent from the original version, which makes for more or less standard spy stuff. Reflecting, in one of the few places he's ever done so, on his own work in the introduction to Slow Learner (1984), a collection of short story juvenilia, Pynchon would write:

So, if only for its feeble good intentions, I am less annoyed with "Under the Rose" than with the earlier stuff. I think the characters are a little better, no longer just lying there on the slab, but beginning at least to twitch some and blink their eyes open, although their dialogue still suffers from my perennial Bad Ear. [...] Readers may also feel shorted because of how, more than anyone, the masterful John le Carré has upped the ante for the whole genre. Today we expect a complexity of plot and depth of character which are missing from my effort here. Most of it, happily, is chase scenes, for which I remain a dedicated sucker- it is one piece of puerility I am unable to let go of. May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude. (p.19)

Sure enough, all the chase scenes—on foot, in carriages, through the streets, under the pyramids, and around the Sphinx—are basically absent from, or at least only implied in, the revised version of the story that features in V. Which tempers things, I suppose, since the whole book feels like one big, metaphysical pursuit. But it underscores a Pynchonian passion for chase scenes I couldn't help but think about as I watched Paul Thomas Anderson's latest.

Following on from his more faithful adaptation of Inherent Vice (Pynchon, 2009, Anderson, 2014), One Battle After Another loosely adapts—or, as the end credits put it, is "inspired by"—Vineland. But, having not read Vineland (tune in to Pynchon Pals, say, three years from now), what this film reminded me of the most is precisely the kind of chase scene to which Pynchon compared his earlier work. It's a little bit Three Days of the Condor (1975 [RIP Robert Redford]) meets The Long Goodbye (1973). Or The Bourne Identity (2002) starring the Dude (Jeff Bridges) from The Big Lebowski (1998). Hell, in that the whole movie is basically, not unlike V., one big chase scene, there's shades of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Anderson's new film really is a Looney Tunes riff, featuring Sean Penn as a kind of ethnonationalist Wile E. Coyote confounded by a cadre of revolutionary Road Runners. Who's Leonardo DiCaprio in this comparison? I'll leave it to you.

The film's venery (which, V. teaches us, by way of Merriam-Webster, means both "the art, act, or practice of hunting," and "the pursuit of or indulgence in sexual pleasure") culminates in the year's best and most nauseating car chase across endlessly rolling roads. I won't spoil much of the plot here, but I think it certainly clears the high bar that Pynchon admits he didn't meet in his own early work: instilling into a mad dash pursuit a profound psychological drama, an element of "the soul in flux" (p. 23), mediated, as always, by paranoid, ideological angst. "The Coyote could stop any time—if he were not a fanatic," Chuck Jones rules.

Here, here, Thomas! The Road Runner hasn't vanished. In fact, he's more heroic than ever.

POF