functions of the quest hero while acting, dressing, and speaking out of the preoccupations of mass culture, thereby deflating corresponding connotations of high seriousness. Plots are labyrinthine and endlessly self-referential: if narrative design is always incipiently a synonym for global conspiracy, paranoia is the state of mind not only of characters struggling to apprehend their place in the pattern but also of readers struggling to comprehend a text that works actively to implicate and overwhelm them. The recurring suggestion is that the reader's own world is a text that behaves in the same way, inscribing ostensibly free agents in preexisting stories that ultimately determine them. Pynchon's novels amass historical evidence documenting this extreme vision of control at the same time as they advance other sources for intimations of fatality: paranoia as a predisposition to 'read into' reality for connections and meanings that have only psychological necessity.
Pynchon's first two novels develop the distinctively postmodern motif of the 'real story' and explore the implications of a formal refusal to authorize one version of fictional reality as definitive. In V (1963), the central action of the quest reflects the reader's act of interpretation while the structure of the novel raises questions about the structure of historical knowledge. The title initial refers to a mysterious woman who seems to turn up at key moments of chaos during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Allusions to The Education of Henry Adams suggest that this V personifies a force analogous to the physical principle of entropy and that this force destines Western civilization to increasing decadence until it arrives at a terminal condition of inanimateness. -716-
But all these manifestations of the elusive V are identified and connected only in retrospect, by a bumbling quest hero named Herbert Stencil, who is committed to reading history for signs of V in order to construct a reality that gives his own life some meaning. Stencil and the other protagonist, the self-proclaimed schlemiel Benny Profane, inhabit a postwar world in which people and inanimate objects have come to resemble each other so completely that Stencil suspects V has already achieved most of her aims. Yet the existence of V is increasingly in doubt as the quest proceeds, to the point where Stencil begins to wonder if she may amount to nothing more than 'the recurrence of an initial and a few dead objects.' His need to locate a force or conspiracy that will explain the contemporary world may have led him to interpret random phenomena as manifestations of that force or conspiracy. The dilemma is characteristically Pynchonesque; the ending of the novel refuses to resolve it.
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is a shorter and generally more straightforward novel, in which actions occur in chronological sequence, so that readers are less involved with the problems of making connections within the story and more traditionally placed as observers of a hero who makes connections — which is to say, either discerns them in or projects them onto a satirically envisioned landscape of southern California at mid-century. The protagonist here has the quester's resonant name of Oedipa and the deflating surname of Maas — close to 'more' in Spanish and 'measure' in German — and is joined in her search by characters with names like Manny DiPresso, Stanley Koteks, and Genghis Cohen. The parodic names reinforce a theme of limits on human endeavor and especially on knowledge, most evocatively knowledge of 'another mode of meaning behind the obvious.' Like V, The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the 'plot' of history, conceived simultaneously as a threat to the quester and as a promise of 'transcendent meaning.'
The publication of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973 both secured the reputation of Thomas Pynchon and made him the most controversial figure in contemporary letters. On the strength of this 760- page encyclopedic work, Edward Mendelson declared, 'Pynchon is, quite simply, the best living novelist in English,' but the editorial board for the Pulitzer Prize, wary of the book's notorious difficulty and lowcomic iconoclasm, overrode the unanimous opinion of the nominat-717- ing jurors that this was the best American novel of the year. Both the acclaim and the hostility testify to the innovation of Gravity's Rainbow. In certain respects a sequel to or pre-text for V (its central symbol is the V-2 rocket), it develops narrative voices, themes, structural elements, and even characters introduced in the earlier novel while drawing even more extensively on literary, intellectual, economic, and social history and on the physical and biological sciences, as well as on theology and occultism, popular culture, folklore, social and linguistic theory, and mathematics. Gravity's Rainbow deals with the development during the Third Reich of the V-2 rocket, the prototype of all guided missiles, which would become the delivery system for the nuclear armaments being developed in the United States during the same period. The merging of the two technological 'advances' culminates a 'dream of annihilation' that according to Pynchon 's visionary historicism has obsessed Western civilization for centuries. 'Gravity's rainbow' symbolizes both the arc of the rocket and the possible trajectory of civilization itself, as it proceeds toward seemingly inevitable self-destruction.
Yet the question of inevitability is an ambiguous one in this novel, not only in terms of theme but also in terms of structure. The trajectory of the initially 'main' plot, which concerns a GI named Tyrone Slothrop who appears to be erotically stimulated by being in London locations the V-2 will eventually hit, is complicated by so many subplots that it is difficult to ascertain what happens to this schlemiel-hero or what his denouement might mean. The clues that proliferate at first in apparent testimony to 'the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul' continue to proliferate — and to lead in different directions. Moreover, characters (over 300 are developed in some detail), situations, and events burgeon wildly, and the narrative voice shifts without warning from slangy Americanism to the highminded musings of German idealism to oddly private reflections and reminiscences to passages of rhymed verse. If this riotous multiplicity signals an absence of controls or limits, it also occurs in a context where controls or limits are rarely benign. Characters tend to be free to the extent that they evade outside attempts to define them. Inasmuch as the novel itself evades reduction to a single 'authorized' reading, it suggests that no trajectory is ever wholly determined, and -718- that perhaps the 'course' of history allows for deviation and thus possibility.
Vineland (1989), Pynchon 's first new fictional work in sixteen years, was the first of his novels to receive seriously mixed reviews, perhaps only an indication that Gravity's Rainbow was an impossible act to follow. Vineland continues the tradition of satirically named characters (Zoyd Wheeler, Isaiah Two Four, Weed Atman, and even Mucho Maas, carried over from The Crying of Lot 49) and deals with a conspiracy of indefinite proportions, in this case involving the FBI and its informers among the student radicals of the 1960s. But in this novel the emphasis is less on a corresponding tendency to 'plot' connections in order to arrive at some sort of historical coherence than on character and the local relations between individuals, especially the relations of family. The central quest is that of a daughter for her absent mother, and while the process by which the two are united involves an impressive accumulation of information about international corporate practices and structures, the history of the Left in California, the effects of Reaganomics and the War on Drugs, and the popular culture of the 1980s, there are no epistemological impasses or withheld revelations. The 'real story' is fully visible; in fact, Vineland is the closest Pynchon has yet come to a realist novel, its mode similar to the magical realism of such Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez (whom Pynchon has called the greatest living writer) in its easy accommodation of a group of latter-day Undead called the Thanatoids into the parodically heightened but recognizable California landscape.
Like Pynchon, Don DeLillo evolves complex narrative structures that mimic and develop his themes, which have to do both with contemporary political and social situations and with real and projected bodies of abstract knowledge. His great encyclopedic novel Ratner's Star (1976), which deals with the efforts of a fourteen-yearold mathematical genius to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, is an elaborate formal system that reflects and returns on itself like the meta-mathematics its protagonist is struggling to develop. Within the apparent self-containedness of this edifice, however, DeLillo's emphasis is on the ungrounded nature of knowledge, Goedelian uncertainty as the fundamental condition of contingent human being. -719-
The uncertainty theme recurs in DeLillo's work, from the relatively early novels End Zone (1973) and Great Jones Street (1974), in which the systems explored for their coherence and explanatory capabilities are football and rock music respectively, to The Names (1982), which works with analogies between systems of language and economic and political systems: multinational capitalism and the oppositional communities and interests in the Third World. White Noise (1985) again focuses on language as a system, this time as an attempt to close off a contingency experienced as fear of death, and on the entropic waste produced by the various purportedly closed systems of American consumer culture. The brilliant and iconoclastic Libra (1988) uses the available information on the assassination of John F. Kennedy to construct a new and heavily conspiratorial explanation, like Coover's The Public Burning ventriloquizing a number of public figures, among them Lee Harvey Oswald.
