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Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienned'etudesamericaines Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 1995, pp. 63-100 Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern Liberalism Jerry A. Varsava Introduction 63 Thomas Pynchon has written some of America's most imaginative and intellectually suggestive fiction of the postwar period. And, responsive to his work's richness, critical attention has in due course been paid to a myriad of topics he has examined. One important subject, however, has not been adequately addressed in Pynchonian scholarship. No sustained effort has been made to see Pynchon's work as embracing a determinate political stance or political philosophy. 1 It is the latter that will provide the focus of this essay. It should be said from the outset that important features of postmodern American fiction have discouraged readers from looking for philosophical coherence of any sort. As reflected in various works by, for example, Walter Abish, Paul Auster, Frederick Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick, unrelieved epistemological doubt and antic involution of form do not provide the methodological foundations for a coherent political philosophy. Scepticism typically yields local and often ambiguous insights, not comprehensive understanding. And for its part, formal experimentation-and certainly postmodern fiction's recurrent obsession with parody-inevitably invites readings that, advertently or otherwise, emphasize aesthetic autonomy. 2 In the case of Pynchon, readers have quite astutely identified the general lines of his critique of modern America and Western civilization as a whole, but, with rare exception, Pynchon's political philosophy has typically been either overlooked or 64 Canadian Review of Amencan Studies Revue canadienne d'etudes americaines reduced to an amorphous postmodern disillusionment or some sort of dark pessimism or even disappointed humanism. 3 Quite frankly, my own reading of Pynchon has, until recently, followed this general pattern. His two so-called big novels, V. (1963) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), do indeed have the kind of epic scope-"encyclopedic" even, as Edward Mendelson notes of the latter work-that coaxes readers into general assertions about the "postmodern condition,,, about entropy, technocracy, power relations, and endemic moral decline, when seeking to summarize their philosophical claims. They provide panoramic depictions of world history, of "the street of the 20th Century 11 in the metaphor of V., encouraging allegorization and mythhunting (T. Pynchon 1964, 303). Alternatively, a more particularistic and more politicized reading comes to mind, however, when we concentrate on (what I will call) Pynchon's "domestic" novels, those set (primarily) in America-The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990). 4 Indeed, within the context of the Pynchon corpus, the appearance of Vineland has produced the kind of change to the whole-cited by Gestalt psychologists-when a part thereof has been altered. These novels are not merely about some monolithic postmodern Zeitgeist but rather about the determinate political culture of the United States in the postwar period. It is my thesis here that Pynchon's two domestic novels provide a powerful, if often diffuse and indirect, defense of American political liberalism. By liberalism-to simplify for the moment-I refer to that short list of beliefs that liberals have traditionally called virtues-toleration, respect for civil liberties, acknowledgement of property rights, concern for the disadvantaged, (qualified) faith in reason, etc. And, any consideration of liberalism must make direct reference to the palpable social and political consequences of these and allied beliefs. I read Pynchon as an exponent of liberalism, though not of a retroliberalism determined by the social and political exigencies of 1776 or the 1930s, but a "postmodern" version shaped by both liberal traditions and those cultural circumstances and impetuses peculiar to the late twentieth century. Certainly, irony, self-doubt, and even self-deprecation figure more prominently in Pynchon's liberalism than in classical manifestations. At the Jerry A. VarsavaI 65 same time, by exploring such generic liberal themes as individual rights, economic distribution, due process, and the public/private distinction, these two novels deploy a liberalism that is arguably more pluralistic, more postmodern even, than the constrained liberal position advanced in those American postmodern novels that privilege one or another of various micropolitical agendas. American liberalism has been under attack from different quarters throughout...

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