America as Discourse

AmericaasDiscourse David Cowart. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale:Southern Illinois University Press. 1980.154+ ix pp. James M.Mellard. The Exploded Form: TheModernist N01·elin America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1980.208 + xvpp. Sanford Pinsker. Between Two Worlds: TheAmerican Noi·el in the 1960:S.Troy.N.Y.: TheWhitston Publishing Company. 1980.139+ x pp. ThomasHill Schaub. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana:University of lllinois Press. 1981.165+ x pp. John0. Stark. Pynchon :SFictions: ThomasPl'nchon and the Literature ol/n/ormation. Athens:Ohio University Press. 1980. i83 +ix pp. MarkRoydenWinchell. Joan Didion. Boston:Twayne Publishers. 1980.185pp. Ga,y F. Waller America doesn·t exist. I know-I've lived there. (Alain Resnais: Mon Oncle dAmerrquel Toto. I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore .... (Dorothy arriving in Oz: epigraph to Part J of Gravity :SRainboirl··Why... is everybody so interested in texts'?"'I The C,ying of Lot 49) "If," Roland Barthes asserted in his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Literary Semiology at the College de France, ··by some unimaginable excess'' all but oneof our learned disciplines ··were to be expelled from our education system , it is the discipline of Literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences, are present in the literary monument.'' 1 That is a large claim and, coming from the iconoclastic semiologist of SI Zand Le Plaisirdu Texte, gratifyingly soothing to beleaguered humanists. It is after allin part because of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and other members of the French nouvelle critique that the much-cherished American insistence on the autonomy of the literary text and the uniqueness of the artistic vision hasbeen so disturbingly and fundamentally challenged in recent years. With Barthes on our side after all, are we perhaps permitted to see texts as more than nodes within differential networks of significance carrying with them anillimitable force of multiple, disseminated meaning'? Perhaps we can cautiouslycontinue to privilege "literature" as society's unusually acute understanding (or lack of understanding) of itself'? Celebrating the festival of words,we might after all learn to cheat the facticity of the world. If we can still privilege "literature," even in what sometimes seems a barbarous new jargon far from the lucid clarity valorized by New Critics and OldHistorians alike, what about criticism'? The nouvelle critique asserts that the best criticism is not to be distinguished, at least in its cultural functions, Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 1983.207-18 208 Ga,y F. Waller from what has (for historically explicable if unacknowledged reasons) been delimited as "literature." Certainly, even in their differences, Leavis, Winters Barthes, MacCarthy, Bloom, Derrida, Foucault, Krieger or Fiedler haveall wrestled with and articulated literature's desire to defy universal entropy as profoundly as Hemingway, Styron, Updike, Oates, Ashbery, Bellow or Ginsberg. There is a parasitic (or, more kindly put, a pedagogical) criticism just as there are plodding poetry and novels, equally derivative upon the doxaof the age, complacent in their reductiveness, imperceptive of the problematics of language and society alike. All of which is commonplace enough, were it not that today we need, possibly more than for many generations, to look to poetry, to fiction and (as well) to criticism, since it is (as Barthes claims) arguably in our literature, increasingly marginalized by the so-called mass media in a process of subtle but devastating ideological repression, that we may discover how our sociocultural options can be broadened, the paradoxes and contradictions of our history admitted, and our hopes of change kept alive. The five works of criticism under review certainly strive to take the role of criticism seriously, yet all-even Sanford Pinsker's idiosyncratic, chatty survey of a random selection of 1960s novelists-never aspire to go beyond the boundaries of the established quietist, pedagogic criticism, explication de texte, biograph· ical gossip, accounts of philosophical, scientific, literary and social·· origins," "sources'' and parallels. David Cowart's book, for instance, traces the impact of science, painting, film, music, language and literature on Pynchon; John0. Stark's provides some stolid paraphrase-along with some extraordinary pedestrian explanation of what he terms the "information'' in Pynchon; while, in...