into Pynchon today, I thought I would just take a

few moments to look back over the books that we've read and

talk about the visions of language that they have offered

us, and also just to reflect for a

moment on the relationship imagined between those visions

of language and what is happening outside of fiction in

what we might call the real world.

We started this course talking about Black Boy and the

way that a whole world of pressure--political pressure,

racial tension--pushed on the borders of that work and

actually changed its very material form.

After that, I began a series of readings of novels that

emphasized more what you might call the history of literature,

the history of literature's forms and ambitions.

And so, beginning that series we had O'Connor embodying a new

critical craft of fiction that comes out of modernism,

imagining nevertheless that the craft is reflective of a

transcendental order in the world,

a religious order. When we moved on to Nabokov,

we had an author trying to imagine a work of art so

autonomous from the world that it could be something like an

autonomous form of life. That, of course,

I argued in those lectures, opened it up for the threat of

mortality. If you imagine your artwork is

living, it can also die. It's a kind of hauntedness that

surrounds Nabokov's vision of aesthetic bliss as one's

response to that autonomous artwork.

Kerouac represents a whole group of writers,

the Beats, who reject the formalism embodied by both

O'Connor and Nabokov. They reject that formalism as

an impediment to language's access to the real,

and to our access to the real through language.

They dream of an unmediated relationship between experience

and the word. They don't think so much of

language as a mediating force as an expressive force.

I argued in my second lecture on On the Road that,

in the end, that dream looks quite deflated when Dean can't

even speak in a coherent sentence,

and he has to be rejected by Sal as Sal drives off to the

jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. Nevertheless,

that dream is spiritualized. It's a way of becoming not just

close to the real, but also part of some mystical

unity. That thread of the mystical

quality of language at its extreme of literary power is

what I drew out of Franny and Zooey. So,

Salinger, too, has the dream that the artifice

of literature, of literary language,

the performance of language in the style of his novels,

can somehow be the essence of the human soul,

that it can somehow communicate the truth of the universe just

through its form: its human,

distinctive form. It's a way of thinking about

form that has more to do with individuality than it does with

convention. Remember that way that Franny

can identify the timbre of her brother's voice very

specifically: it's like no other.

So, Salinger imagines that the literary art imitates that kind

of voice, and in that way it is a sacred practice,

a sacred art. Barth rejects the idea that

language is an unmediated form of access to the real:

absolutely impossible for Barth to countenance that idea.

He sees life as continually, always already mediated by

language. Now, I should say,

as someone from the class who came up to me after lecture and

asked me about this, that Barth's understanding of

language as preceding human understanding,

preceding any sense of ourselves,

in a sense always slipping out of our control,

is very much in concert with what was going on at very

high-level language theory at that time.

So, the work of Jacques Lacan in France in the 1950s and '60s

and of Jacques Derrida who brought deconstruction to the

United States, actually to Johns Hopkins first

of all in the 1960s where Barth was teaching.

He presented that work in a very famous lecture in the late

'60s. This is all part of a way of

thinking about language that became very powerful through the

next decade and a half, and we're going to see it some

too next week when we read Morrison and Maxine Hong

Kingston. So, this is part of a larger

intellectual trajectory. Barth is not alone in thinking

these things about language. I argued that Barth tried

to counter that sense of helplessness at the hands of

language by imagining that the human effort at connecting with

another person through the mechanisms of love and desire

always renewed the possibility for language to do new kinds of

work in the world. So, if language seems exhausted

because it's always preceding you, everything has always

already been said, there's no new plot to be had,

the world is full of stock phrases, how do you use them to

embody an experience that seems fresh to you?

How do those stock phrases alienate you from the very

experience you hope that they can describe?

He thinks that following out desire can renew language,

and Menelaiad, I think, is his attempt at doing

that. So, now we arrive at that

tension, and I want to suggest that Barth was still dreaming of

a pretty autonomous version of the literary art,

even though in his 1987 preface to Lost in the

Funhouse--I don't know if any of you read it--he says

about these stories, which were published throughout

the '60s: The high '60s,

like the roaring '20s, was a time of more than usual

ferment in American social, political, and artistic life.

Our unpopular war in Vietnam, political assassinations,

race riots, the hippie counterculture,

pop art, mass poetry reading, street theater,

vigorous avant-gardism in all the arts together with dire

predictions not only of the death of the novel but of the

moribundity of the print medium in the electronic global

village: those flavored the air we breathed then,

along with occasional tear gas and other contaminants.

One may sniff traces of that air in the Funhouse.

I myself found it more invigorating than disturbing.

May the reader find these stories likewise.

It's a very interesting little comparison he makes at the end.

He takes that whole foment of 1960s politics and

counterculture, and essentially he says,

"I found that invigorating as I hope you will find these stories

invigorating," as if the stories in this

very--almost, seemingly, hermetically--sealed

literary world that he offers us are somehow meant to have the

effects of a whole decade of foment,

social foment. If Barth only gestures

towards that world, the politics of that decade,

Pynchon actually lets us see it.

And if you look on page 83, this is just one of many,

many examples. But I choose this one just

because it's so obvious.

Oedipa is going to Berkeley looking for Emory Bortz,

and she comes on a summer weekday in the mid afternoon.

No time for any campus Oedipa knew of to be jumping,

yet this one was. She came down the slope from

Wheeler Hall through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with

corduroy, denim, bare legs,

blond hair, horn rims, bicycle spokes in the sun,

book bags swaying, card tables,

long paper petitions dangling to earth, posters for

undecipherable FSMs, YAFs, VDCs, suds in the

fountain, students nose to nose in dialog.

She moved through it carrying her fat book,

attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel

relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternative

universes it would take for she had undergone her own educating

at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat not only

among her fellow students but also most of the visible

structure around and ahead of them [that whole world of

government and social life].

Oedipa is in a different generation, of a different

generation, but we can see the social foment just in that

little snapshot of the Berkeley campus.

I don't know all of the acronyms.

I don't know what the FSMs are, but the YAFs are the Young

Americans for Freedom. The VDCs are the Vietnam Day

Committees. The Vietnam Day Committee

organized a 24-hour teach-in in 1965 against the Vietnam War.

There is a little anecdote from that teach-in that I want to

share with you, that I think embodies some of

the tensions in this novel. They invited Ken Kesey to come

and speak at the convention, at the teach-in.

Now, Ken Kesey, some of you probably know,

was a sort of performer, writer, not really an activist.

He was a purveyor of street theater and most famously the

advocate of LSD, and he and his Merry Pranksters

would ride around the country doing street theater,

advocating the use of LSD and marijuana.

Who, in 1964, do you think drove their bus,

which was called Further? Who do you think drove their

bus? Neal Cassady drove their bus.

When they came to the Vietnam Day at the Berkeley campus,

Kesey addressed the assembled people saying,

"Turn your back on the war. Look at the war,

turn your back on the war and say 'fuck it.'"

This is a group of people he was addressing who were intent

on doing something to stop the war, and this was Kesey's

response. That moment,

for me, embodies this tension right at the center of the

1960s, a tension between

countercultural self-development and an ethos of play,

"drop out,

tune in," and (I can't remember Kesey's little motto).

Essentially, leave the institutional life of

America--that means schools, government,

politics, all those traditional sources of order--and create

disorder. And do that as a way of finding

what's true about yourself; do it in the company of others.

It had this communal aspect, for sure.

On the other side, you have a growing political

movement among young people, and of course it's legendary.

By 1964, the Civil Rights movement had accomplished

amazing things. As a result of the Freedom

Rides, they had integrated interstate transportation,

at great cost to the volunteers who rode those buses.

They were beaten. Some were killed.

Civil Rights workers were murdered in various states.

It had come to a kind of crescendo with voter

registration drives and the Voting Rights Act of 1964.

At the same time, Lyndon B.

Johnson was ratcheting up the Vietnam War, so the Gulf of

Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964, which authorized bombing

raids on Cambodia. This was a new turn in the war,

and it promised to escalate it, and this really

galvanized--especially student--resistance.

So, this was a time of major political stakes,

and young people at universities--primarily at

universities, but also people out doing the

March on Washington, in the South,

in small towns--were really changing the face of America and

its role in the world. So, Ken Kesey,

on the one hand, is looking for that internally

directed, playful response to the oppressive order of the

world. And then there is this very

political response. Pynchon lets us see both.

And he's parodying both kinds of response in this novel,

so in that sense, the novel is very much of its

time. Now, I want to pause for a

moment there and ask you a question.

I want you to think about what kind of protagonist Pynchon

sends out into this world. What do you think of Oedipa

Maas? How does she strike you as a

character? How would you describe her?

Yeah. Student:

Desperate.Professor Amy Hungerford:

Desperate. Okay.

How else? Yeah.Student:

Powerless.Professor Amy Hungerford:

Powerless. Uh huh.Student:

Very confused.Professor Amy

Hungerford: Confused. What else?

Those are all pretty negative adjectives.

Does she bring any resources? Yes.Student:

She's especially attractive.Professor Amy

Hungerford: She's attractive.

Yes, she is. What else?

What other resources does she bring?