Genetic Criticism

The term I use for this issue of TSLL comes from Herman and Krafft's study of the manuscripts of Pynchon's V. at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas. By sorting out Pynchon's revisions of a typescript of V. with the completed novel, with the help of letters between Pynchon and his editors, Herman and Krafft show how the text developed, cutting some elements and further developing others. That is one important type of genetic study. Another, more psychological approach is evident in how Lowe and Meyer elaborate Plath's and Sontag's created topologies of early loss and trauma. Lowe demonstrates how Plath's poems and stories set in beaches in Massachusetts, England, and France play out the lost paradise of the originary beach at Nauset that she associates both with the traumatic loss of her father and her own recurrent wish to join him in death. The beach becomes the border not only between land and water but also between life and death, with Plath yearning more and more toward the latter of these oppositions, dissolution of self by water. Sontag was conceived in China, and her father died there in an unknown location. This underlies her account of an imaginary trip to China, embracing both postmodernist dispersive virtuality and a contradictory "insistence on origins, a return to sources." Like Plath, Sontag in her anti-narrative is "reenacting emotional states," one reason, besides the postmodern always already known aspect of tourism, that it is pointless to actually make the trip. Meyer describes her imaginary trip as "a textual trip towards a vanishing point of reference," which sounds rather like a summary of V. Finally, Selinger compares Lacanian psychoanalysis and Navajo ritual as procedures for dealing with trauma and loss via inducing a curative form of psychosis. The Navajo method resembles our other essays in drawing on "origin stories." The patient is "taken back ceremonially to and through the time of the first illness," a form of cure that embraces psychotic dispersion as a mode of accepting a primal division of the self as an "interdependence of opposites" instead of projecting one term of the binary to external enemies. Yet, as Selinger notes, the Navajo, like us, went on periodical witch hunts as a way of relieving cultural pressures.