The Sensibility of Postmodern Whiteness in V., or Thomas Pynchon's Identity Problem

The Sensibility of Postmodern Whiteness in V., or Thomas Pynchon's Identity Problem

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In Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V. (1963), the character McClintic Sphere, a jazz musician based primarily on Ornette Coleman, utters what has become the novel's most famous catch-phrase: "Keep cool, but care." This concise, metrically balanced imperative has functioned as a temptingly simple rubric through which to interpret Pynchon's complex plots and self-evidently ironic discourse; indeed, W. T. Lhamon has argued that "keep cool, but care" is the "creed" Pynchon teaches his readers (236). This may well be a fair interpretation. Pynchon's sympathies with the values of both the New Left and the counterculture of the 1960s are fairly well-established by critics, and the identification of sociopolitical commitment with jazz experimentation implicit in this utterance certainly seems to underscore such an understanding of his fictional project.¹ What is fascinating about the prominent place of this utterance in the novel and its reception is the way in which it evokes the subtle, and not always successful, machinations of those movements associated with the sixties to define themselves against the mainstream liberalism of the fifties. In its evocation of avant-garde jazz as a locus of cultural value, the phrase suggests the New Left and countercultural hope that the art of marginalized social groups might help to create not the hybridity or heterogeneity often celebrated by multiculturalists but rather a newly integrated and progressive mainstream culture.² In its evocation of contemporary politics, keeping cool and caring may indeed imply an even more conservative ethos, one that was acquiescent toward cold war foreign policy and that accepted the slow progress on civil rights still advocated by many centrists and liberals at the turn of the sixties.

Whether the creed is wholly authorized, its utterance by the novel's only major African American character invites attention to the construction of racialized identity in V.³ The scene in which Sphere utters the creed is set during an important moment in the evolution of the civil rights movement—August 1956, the middle of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott. The scene also occurs at an important point in V.'s own plot: Sphere's lover, Paola, the Maltese wife of an American sailor, has just decided to return to Malta after reading the "confessions" of her father, Fausto Maijstral. This decision, in turn, brings together Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil, the dual white male protagonists around whose movements and points-of-view the novel is organized, on the trip to Malta that concludes the story. Sphere had known Paola as "Ruby," a Negro prostitute working at a "cat house" in Harlem, and it is when she tells him "about who she was, about Stencil and Fausto" that he decides he must "keep cool, but care" (393). Although very little narrative space is devoted to the novel's theme of racial passing, both the resolution of its plot and the utterance of Sphere's creed hinge on Paola's decision to return to "who she was."⁴ The creed, then, involves a lesson about how to manage the feelings associated with questions of racialized identity. Pynchon omits the details of what Paola tells Sphere, but the conversation alters his perception of both art and politics: he tells Paola he has been "blowing a silly line all this time" and thinks he must "keep cool, but care" because "[n]obody is going to step down from heaven and square away . . . Alabama, or South Africa or us and Russia" (393).

When Sphere refers to "Alabama," he must have in mind the Montgomery boycott. The creed's precise meaning remains mysterious, however. Is Sphere preaching liberal moderation? Nonviolent direct action? If the amount of narrative space a novel devotes to a character or a theme establishes its hierarchy of concerns, Sphere is a minor character and the civil rights...