Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology, and: Pynchon Notes 42-43: Approach and Avoid: Essays on "Gravity's Rainbow." (review)

These two books approach Thomas Pynchon's work from opposite directions. Cyrus Patell's Negative Liberties is an extended essay on political theory illustrated by close readings of the novels of Pynchon and Toni Morrison. Pynchon Notes 42–43, originally published in 1998, is a double number of the serial devoted to the explication and theorization of the six novels Pynchon has published since 1963.

This issue of Pynchon Notes, under the guest editorship of Luc Herman, contains nineteen papers delivered at an International Pynchon Symposium at Antwerp in 1998. They do not coalesce into a coherent reading of Gravity's Rainbow but instead illustrate the power of Pynchon's novel to stimulate critical response and evoke diverse readings and intellectual connections. For instance, Thomas Schaub posits that the burst of environmental awareness in the United States after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1963 and the sudden public perception of plastic as both a health threat and a term of hostile derision provided contextual fodder for Pynchon's novel. Hanjo Berressem employs a series of paintings by Mark Tansey to illustrate the psychic implications of the reversal of the usual sequence of sound and sight created by the silent falling of rockets on London in 1945. He aptly describes Pynchon's narrative technique as "based on the creation of narrative vortices that form chaotic attractors and whirlpools rather than on laminar (that is, linear) narration. And everybody always wonders how Pynchon can keep it all in his head in one giant map, and maybe the point is that he cannot, that the narrative forces he evokes are beyond his grasp, and willingly and consciously so." In "Riding the Interface," Graham Benton promises that "[b]y viewing Gravity's Rainbow from an anarchist posture steadfastly wary of totalizing moves, we gain a deepened sense of Pynchon's vision, see it as having a sort of coherence, as a sustained meditation that calls into question the validity of all representations and ordered systems."

The titles of the papers offer a challenging critical menu and testify to the variety of responses Gravity's Rainbow invites, or incites, in the postmodern critical world: "Terrifying Technology: Pynchon's Warning Myth of Today"; "The City, The Labyrinth and the Terror Beyond"; "Before the Oven"; "Dogsical Reading: Gravity's Rainbow's Reversals of Reader Response Criticism"; "Kant, Terror and Aporethics"; and "Gravity's Angels in America." The diversity among the papers suggests not so much a hostile competition for preeminence as a joyful feeding frenzy where all are welcome so long as no one runs off with the kill.

Less trendy, but also less stimulating than these diverse papers, is the orderly and sustained thesis Patell constructs in Negative Liberties. After an inquiry into the origins and development of such concepts as individualism, freedom, and liberty in the cultural narrative of U.S. liberalism, Patell focuses on Emerson as the most powerful proponent of liberty conceived as freedom from constraint on human behavior or the development of selfhood. This kind of freedom Patell calls "negative liberty," the freedom from restraint or compulsion, in contrast to "positive liberty," the freedom to think, act, and build in community with others. Patell reads in Emerson's exhortations to self-reliant individualism an insufficient philosophical basis for the development of cooperative alliance and a benevolent community of interests. In Emerson's later essays, Patell sees only a tardy and theoretical prediction of the evolution of communal virtues out of the practice of enlightened self-interest. In this reading, Emerson represents Americans' strong attachment to independence, individualism, and a laissez...