Fantasy and Dream in Thomas Pynchon's "Low-lands"

Fantasy and Dream in Thomas Pynchon's "Low-lands" David Seed University of Liverpool Thomas Pynchon's early stories present gestures of disengagement or subversion. In "The Small Rain" (1959) circumstances lead Nathan Levine into a disaster area where he is to participate in rescue work after a hurricane has destroyed a small Louisiana town. He seeks relieffrom the drudgery in asexual encounter with a local girl which fails to arouse any pleasure in him and then sinks back into the lethargy of army routine.1 "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (also 1959) centres on a party in Washington at which a character called Siegel has to act as proxy host.2 His disenchantment with the party finds unexpected satisfaction when an Ojibwa called Irving Loon runs amock with a hunting rifle. Both stories take disenchantment as their subject-matter; they are about it rather than enacting disengagement in their form. Indeed "Mortality and Mercy" turns partly on the unlikely coincidence of an Ojibwa's being at a Washington party and Siegel remembering from lectures that the tribe is subject to periodic bouts of paranoia. The coincidence suggests that Pynchon is colluding with his protagonist's dislike of the party by introducing an agency for its destruction. Pynchon's third story, however, avoids the need for this kind of coincidence by enacting a process of disengagement in its very form. "Low-lands," which appeared in the annual anthology New World Writing in 1960, focuses closely on its protagonist Dennis Flange. When the story opens he has been drinking and listening to Vivaldi on his stereo outfit with Rocco Squarcione, his garbageman. Upstairs his wife paces angrily to and fro, waiting for them to stop. The last straw comes with the arrival of Pig Bodine (a sailor who is AWOL) which sends Cindy the wife into paroxysms of fury. She drives the three men out of the house, Flange "for good," and they go to the local rubbish dump which is presided over by a negro 1."The Small Rain" appeared in the Cornell Writer, 6 (March 2, 1959), 14-32. 2."Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" was first published in Epoch, 9 (Spring, 1959), 195-213. David Seed55 named Bolinbroke. In his shack they swap sea stories over wine until lights out. During the night a girl's voice summons Flange from the shack and lures him into a secret part of the dump where she lives with other gypsies. The story ends with Flange promising to stay with her. There is a simple but well-defined plot-sequence to the story which opens with a scene of flawed domesticity and then moves off in pursuit of more satisfying pleasure and fulfilmen. Flange and his wife Cindy live in a mock-English cottage on the north shore of Long Island. Cindy has become a personification of the restraints and futility of domesticity. She has persuaded Flange to spend $1,000 on a stereo set and then used it as a stand for cocktail trays. She and Flange have appropriated an abandoned Nassau County police booth which she has then domesticated by growingivy on the outside and decorating it with Mondrians. She even objects to Flange's friends, including Squarcione the garbage collector. The story does not concern itself with why Flange's marriage has broken down. Suffice it that the monotony of his life with Cindy, his job (he works for a firm of attorneys in New York), and his suburban surroundings give impetus to Flange's withdrawal. The domestic references here are as ironic as at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49 when Oedipa Maas fusses over her cooking, with the difference that Flange is more aware of his dissatisfaction. This does not mean that he consciously rejects monotony, however, because, as we shall see, passivity has a positive value for him. The theme of the story thus emerges as Flange's desire for pleasure or happiness which is unobtrusively underlined by the Vivaldi piece on the gramophone, /Î piacere. Pleasure figures in terms of escape from restriction into irresponsibility, hence Flange's nostalgic reflections on the Episcopal bootlegger who built their cottage. This sort of action is...