Hawthorne and Pynchon on the Line

E. L. McCALLUM Hawthorne and Pynchon on the Line For over 150 years, wired communications have enabled individuals to transmit messages across distances at great dispatch; whether telegraph, telephone, or internet, these teletechnologies involve people in networks that minimize or even transcend the limitations of time and space. Cultural texts that figure this tèletechnology abound in the late twentieth century, particularly in the cyberpunk genre, whose inception is frequently established as the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. But how do earlier texts anticipate and imagine the wired communications that we have inherited? As the telegraph, telephone, and computer networks insinuate themselves into people's everyday lives, these technologies seep into the peripheral vision of literature. This essay examines two texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables ( 1851 ) and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying ofLot 49 (1965), that not only peripherally illuminate wired communications—the telegraph and telephone, respectively—but prefigure the next stage of cultural development around these technologies. Their treatment of wired communications , however, goes further than simply topic or style, implicating their very structure and interpretation. It is no accident that the settling of an estate is at stake in both of these books, for inheritance is a material realization of the problem of communication. Hawthorne and Pynchon bring the failures of communication together with the representation of the very technology designed to augment individual communication; this ironic convergence, reiterated over a century apart, shows the devolution of the technological imagination. At the same time, these novels are confounding the presuppositions of communicaArizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 2, Summer 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 66E. L. McCallum tion insofar as each challenges its contemporary rules of the genre of novel, and particularly the assumption that a novel should convey determinate or determinable meaning. Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables offers an early literary representation of the telegraph and connects its communicative power to death, truth, and inheritance; Pynchon's meditation on these same themes will situate them in relation to the technology of the telephone network. Although Hawthorne's tale exemplifies a deep attachment to the past and the transfer of property, the resolution of the ancient conflict between the Maules and the Pyncheons and the move from the old house to the new indicates that the novel ends with an optimistic look to the future.1 The novel's technological confidence is tempered with a moral concern that may seem conservative. Yet Hawthorne's particular integration of materialism and morality serves as a useful precursor to reading both Pynchon and cyberpunk fiction, which depict characters adrift in a universe more deeply structured by technology than ethics, but nonetheless caught up in in a traditional struggle between good and evil and engaged in questions about the place of the human in relation to entities and forces more powerful than we are. Hawthorne treats themes that prefigure Pynchon's cybernetic concerns; the boundary between public and private serves as a crucial site of negotiation for his characters by delineating paradoxes of social standing between insider and outsider, particularly but not exclusively through the control of knowledge, of inheritance and dispossession, and of access to truth. My move from the Pyncheons of Hawthorne's text to the thorny maw of Pynchon's text is not simply taking advantage of a literary lineage (for Pynchon is a descendent of an early-nineteenth-century Judge Pynchon who lived for a time in Salem),2 but a delineation of the movement from telegraph to telephone to communications network. Lot 49 is a paradigmatic telephonic novel and offers a meditation on networks and their significance as a cultural force in the mid-twentieth century. Where the classical novel is marked by production and exchange of objects as materials or goods, by the rise of industrial capitalism , and by the system of representation that grounds meaning on reference to truth, the telephonic narrative is marked by flow—of information , subjectivity, or social relations—by dispersion and multiple connections, by the shift from material production to the intangible offerings of a service economy, and by the system of signification that Hawthorne and" Pynchon on...