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Metković to Mostar: Pynchon and the Balkans

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360903422758

1470-1308

Samuel Thomas,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 689. All subsequent references in the main body of the text are to this edition. Qtd. in Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 230. See Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006). I used this formulation, which Said adapts from Adorno, with the proviso that his oft-cited characterisation of ‘lateness’ as ‘intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction’ (p. 7), as well as the uncanny stylistic effect of being ‘in but oddly apart from the present’ (p. 24) applies, at least superficially, across the body of Pynchon's fiction. It is here, perhaps, that we find the beginnings of a productive intersection between the peculiar aesthetics of ‘lateness’ and the Jamesonian notion of the cultural logic of ‘late’ capitalism. More straightforwardly, the question of Pynchon's ‘late style’ is of course complicated and/or extended by the appearance of Inherent Vice (2009), published as this article was being written. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Vintage, 1995 [1973]), p. 696. From the closing lines of Pynchon's much-discussed promotional blurb for the novel: ‘If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.’ To date, Graham W. Benton has contributed the most substantial critical material on the subject of Pynchon and anarchism. See, for example, ‘Thomas Pynchon and the Political Philosophy of Anarchism’, Oklahoma City University Law Review, 24(3) (1999) and ‘Riding the Interface: An Anarchist Reading of Gravity's Rainbow’, Pynchon Notes, 42–43 (Spring–Fall 1998). See Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and Harris's The Bomb (1908). Although Harris remains something of an obscurity, these three works, published within months of each other, have become the unofficial holy trinity of early twentieth century novels dealing with anarchist violence, at least with regard the UK and the USA. Their contrasting visions range from a kind of ‘conservative radicalism’ (scornful of both authority and those who choose to resist it) to, in Harris's case, an unambiguous and vigorous celebration of proletarian force. The specific repercussions of the invention of dynamite (by Alfred Nobel, no less) and its impact on literary fiction is discussed by Sarah Cole in ‘Dynamite Violence and Literary Culture’, Modernism/Modernity, 16(2) (2009). I borrow here from the French anarchist Émile Henry, responsible for the 1894 Café Terminus bomb in Paris, who spoke of the ‘voice of dynamite.’ Qtd. in George Woodcock (ed.), The Anarchist Reader (London: Fontana, 1986), p. 192. In his advocacy of revolutionary syndicalism, Sorel writes ‘We must be careful that the keen sentiment that we have of the necessity of such a morality, and our ardent desire to see it realized does not induce us to mistake phantoms for forces capable of moving the world’. See Reflections on Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme with amendments by J. Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 250. By emphasising this sense of critical uncertainty in Pynchon's treatment of anarchist violence, I propose a more ambivalent attitude – ultimately rooted in a quasi-Adornian understanding of ‘commitment’ – to the apparent ‘urgency and clarity’ of the novel identified by Kathryn Hume. While an ‘infinitely scriptible’ Pynchon is a notion which I have consistently opposed, I have reservations about the aggressive and relatively forthright ‘Anarchist Catholic’ vision which Hume attributes to Pynchon in this work (a reading that has some unacknowledged affinities with recent attempts on the left to recover a revolutionary/Leninist dimension in Pauline Christianity). According to Hume, the novel's ‘political program appears to favor attacking industrial infrastructures as the way to slow or derail capitalism, and he intertwines this program with a Christian and often specifically Catholic set of doctrines’. See ‘The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon's Against the Day’, Philological Quarterly, 86(1/2) (Winter 2007), p. 165. See Patrick Hurley, Pynchon Character Names: A Dictionary (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company, 2008), p. 92. From the Berliner Tageblatt, 15 July 1878. Qtd. in Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta Books, 1990), p. 146. Ibid., p. 144. A subject more extensively explored by Ishmail Kadare in Broken April (London: Vintage, 2003 [1978]). Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Introduction to Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1. Michael Wood, ‘Pynchon's Mason & Dixon’, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, 14(4) (1998), p. 126. Gravity's Rainbow, p. 281. Leo Bersani, ‘Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature’, Representations, 25 (Winter 1989), p. 113. Ibid. Hajduk, spelt variously, is a more-or-less pan-Balkan word (klepht in Greek) used to refer to the outlaws/highwaymen/freedom-fighters who have played such a crucial role in the formation of Balkan national identities and folk traditions. They can, in the terms of Eric Hobsbawm's classic study, be described as ‘social bandits’, representative of the most conscious, even institutionalised form of outlawism. See Bandits New edition (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000). The symbolic figure of the hajduk, however, takes on special significance in the context of my argument as it has been sculpted over the centuries, consciously and unconsciously, both inside and outside of an ‘authentic’ Balkan social framework. As Wendy Bracewell explains, tales of hajduci have undoubtedly been used by Western writers and travellers to ‘characterize Balkan society as backward and lawless, at the same time affirming Western order and rationality (while suppressing any acknowledge of analogous deficiencies in their own societies). But such approaches, by focusing solely on Western images, ignore the part played by the people of the region in inventing and manipulating the myth of the Balkan bandit […T]he image of the bandit as romantic hero, as opposed to common outlaw, was developed by Balkan national revivalists, sometimes inspired by Western models as much by local legend, and then adopted (or mocked) by Western observers’. See ‘The Proud Name of Hajduks: Bandits as Ambiguous Heroes in Balkan Politics and Culture’, in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case (eds), Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 22–23. André Gerolymatos, The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 85. David Cowart, ‘Pynchon and the Sixties’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 41(1) (Fall 1999), p. 11. During her campaign for the Presidential candidacy in 2008, Clinton was embarrassingly forced to concede that she ‘misspoke’ after it emerged that her description of dodging sniper-fire at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia during the Yugoslav war was grossly exaggerated. See, for example, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7313117.stm. Ivo Andrić, The Bridge Over the Drina, trans. L.F. Edwards (London: Harvill Press, 1995 [1945]), p. 258. Literally, from Bosnian, ‘cantons’ and ‘municipalities’. See Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner (London: Vintage, 1995 [1984]), p. 17. John Gunther, Inside Europe (New York: Harper, 1940 [1936]), p. 437. I was lead to this source, it should be noted, by the shorter quotation used in Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 140. From a recent interview with Žižek at the Sarajevo film festival, 12 September 2008. See http://www.euronews.net/2008/09/12/euronews-talks-films-and-balkans-with-slavoj-zizek/. Todorova, p. 3. Ibid., p. 11 and p. 9, respectively. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London, Sydney and Auckland: Pan Books, 1992 [1897]), p. 12. Todorova, p. 9. Ibid., p. 20. Dušan I. Bjelić, ‘Immigrants as the Enemy: Psychoanalysis and the Balkans' Self-Orientalization’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 87(3) (2009), p. 489. Todorova, p. 11. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid. The traditional mode of social and agricultural organisation among South Slavic peoples – a kind of semi-autonomous, extended family commune. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 10. Glenny, p. xxi. Gunther, p. 437. Slavoj Žižek, ‘You May!’, London Review of Books, 21(6) (1999). Archived online here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/zize01_.html. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (London: Vintage, 1995 [1966]), p. 89. My italics. Žižek was a presidential candidate for Liberalna Demokracija Slovenije in 1990. Bjelić, p. 507. As Pynchon explains, the monastery belongs ‘to a sect descended from the ancient Bogomils who did not embrace the Roman Church in 1650 […] but chose instead to go underground. To their particular faith, over the centuries, had become attached older, more nocturnal elements, going back, it was claimed, to the Thracian demigod Orpheus, and his dismemberment not far from here […] The Manichaen aspect had grown ever stronger – the obligation of those who took refuge here to be haunted by the unyielding doubleness of everything. Part of the discipline for a postulant was to remain acutely conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between darkness and light proceeding, inescapably, behind the presented world’ (pp. 956–957). Bjelić, p. 508. He refers here to a letter of 1922 from Freud to Eduardo Weiss, a Trieste psychoanalyst whose Slovenian patient was proving resistant to treatment. Herbert Marcuse's phrase, from the title of his 1965 essay. See Robert Paul Wolf, Barrington Moore, Jr. and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 81–123. Serbian proverb meaning ‘Fear has big eyes’. See Traian Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe (Armonk, New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), p. 51. Pynchon, ‘Under the Rose’, in Slow Learner, p. 137. Gravity's Rainbow, p.14. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 62. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Reflections on Media and Politics and Cinema’, Interview with Geert Lovink, InterCommunication 14, 27 February 1995. Archived online here: http://www.lacan.com/zizek-reflections.htm. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953 [1925]), p. 217. Explicit references to The Time Machine (1895) and, more broadly, to fin-de-siècle pseudo-science abound throughout the novel. This notion is given greater substance when we consider the ‘genealogical’ connections between Against the Day and Pynchon's earlier work. As Bernard Duyfhuizen explains in his superlative review of the novel, ‘[t]he most obvious is arguably the major plot line in the saga of the Traverse family and their response to Webb Traverse's murder. At the end of Vineland [1990], Webb's grandson (Reef's son) Jesse is the patriarch of the Traverse-Becker family that gathers for its annual reunion, thus making him the father of Sasha, grandfather of Frenesi and great-grandfather of Prairie. The genealogical connections track not only family DNA, but the transformation of Webb's anarchistic spirit through generations of decline to Frenesi's role as a government snitch. In the larger story of America that Pynchon's oeuvre presents, Against the Day redirects our attention to Vineland and to the commentary each Pynchon novel makes about the forks in the road America did not take and to our collective complicity in those decisions’. See ‘The Exact Degree of Fictitiousness: Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day’, Postmodern Culture, 17(2) (2007). See http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.107/17.2duyfhuizen.txt. Glenny, p. 229. See also Stevan K. Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans: 1804–1945 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 186–207. Qtd. in Glenny, p. 228. Ibid., p. 229. Qtd. in Glenny, p. 232. My italics. Qtd in Cheney, p. 151. Glenny, p. xxii. For Žižek, the use of the term ‘Balkan’ as a pejorative within the Balkan region itself is a supreme example of today's ‘reflexive’ racism: ‘They are portrayed in the liberal Western media as a vortex of ethnic passion – a multiculturalist dream turned into a nightmare. The standard reaction of a Slovene (I am one myself) is to say: “yes, this is how it is in the Balkans, but Slovenia is not part of the Balkans; it is part of Mitteleuropa; the Balkans begin in Croatia or in Bosnia; we Slovenes are the last bulwark of European civilisation against the Balkan madness”. If you ask, “Where do the Balkans begin?” you will always be told that they begin down there, towards the south-east. For Serbs, they begin in Kosovo or in Bosnia where Serbia is trying to defend civilised Christian Europe against the encroachments of this Other. For the Croats, the Balkans begin in Orthodox, despotic and Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia safeguards Western democratic values. For many Italians and Austrians, they begin in Slovenia, the Western outpost of the Slavic hordes. For many Germans, Austria is tainted with Balkan corruption and inefficiency; for many Northern Germans, Catholic Bavaria is not free of Balkan contamination. Many arrogant Frenchmen associate Germany with Eastern Balkan brutality – it lacks French finesse. Finally, to some British opponents of the European Union, Continental Europe is a new version of the Turkish Empire with Brussels as the new Istanbul – a voracious despotism threatening British freedom and sovereignty’. See ‘You May!’ Ibid. My italics. Žižek's phrase. See The Plague of Fantasies, p. 64. Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991), p. 69. A young Lugosi, still known as Béla Blaskó, performs in an operetta entitled The Burgher King (!) watched by Kit and Dally in Szeged, Hungary (p. 915). This material might be usefully compared with the Kirghiz ‘ajtys’, or singing-duel, that Pynchon dramatises in the Central Asian sections of Gravity's Rainbow (p. 356) and, more broadly, to his portrait of the oral/bardic culture of Kyrgyzstan, which is under threat from the creation of the New Turkic Alphabet and a burgeoning Soviet bureaucracy. Theodor Adorno, ‘On the Social Situation of Music’ in Essays on Music, selected and with introduction by R. Leppert, trans. S.H. Gillespie (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), pp. 405–406. Ibid., p. 406. Theodor Adorno, ‘Kitsch’, in Essays on Music, p. 501. Ibid., p. 504. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 64. See Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). The documentary film Prerokbe Ognja (dir. Michael Benson, 1996), or Predictions of Fire, also explores the group's activities and the creation of their imaginary meta-state, the ‘Neue Slowenische Kunst’. Sontag, in a blaze of publicity, staged a production of Waiting for Godot during the siege of Sarajevo. On this at least, I am in full agreement with Jean Baudrillard: ‘Why not bring Bouvard & Pecuchet to Somalia or Afghanistan? But the worst is not about this cultural soul-boosting. It is about the condescending manner in making out what is strength and what is weakness. They are strong. It is us who are weak and who go there to make good for our loss of strength and sense of reality.’ See ‘No Reprieve for Sarajevo’, Liberation, 8 January 1994. Available in translation here: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-no-reprieve-for-sarajevo.html. Handke's Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (1996), shortened in English to A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, provoked major political controversy. During his prosecution in the Hague, Milošević asked that Handke be summoned to the tribunal as a witness for the defence. See, for example, the Palme d'Or winner Podzemlje (1995), Underground in English. Kusturica's riotous 3-h chronicle of Yugoslav history remains one of the most divisive texts in Balkan cultural politics. A favourite quotation of Žižek's. See, for example, his recent interview on Kosovan Television (RTK), part of the ‘Jeta në Kosovë’ anniversary celebrations. Archived in three parts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSytBnU6pFY. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 235. Empire, p. 302. See Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 428–429. Žižek, interview with Geert Lovink. V., p. 248. Qtd. in Todorova, p. 4. See Lord Byron, Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage (London: John Murray, 1859 [1812–1818]), Canto II: XLIII, p. 90. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1925]), p. 53.