Read Joyce to Read Pynchon
August 7, 2009
The internet and media are currently abuzz with talk about Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice. The book is something of a hardboiled noir set in the receding tide of ‘60s drug culture, with a cast that’d be hard to put anywhere else. Like Middlemarch, Inherent Vice attempts to flesh out a given time and space in its entirety—it might be considered an attempt to create a time-capsule containing an event that never was, but could have been.
Pynchon’s tale traces, as all noirs ought, the path of a private eye, in this case “Doc” Sportello. Doc, though, is not someone that Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett would have filled their pages with; Pynchon’s protagonist is a stoner whose witticisms turn more on weed jokes than bravado. And while Inherent Vice may not hit every letter in the noir alphabet, it does boast a motley assortment of lowlifes and rough-around-the-edges survivors. But the carnival of characters and absurdities is less what makes the novel Pynchon’s own than the meticulous care he has taken to reconstitute Los Angeles in the spring of 1970. That, and multilayered puns.
In creating a glimpse of the past that exhibits an encyclopedic array of factoids and markers of the time, Pynchon is, of course, mining the vein discovered (or unveiled) by James Joyce, whose Ulysses set a distinctive standard for novels that attempt to cram the world into a book. And while Pynchon has earned notoriety for writing difficult novels, to hear people talk about Joyce’s impenetrable prose you would think that Pynchon is writing kids’ books.
Which means that very few people try to get through Ulysses, much less Finnegans Wake. This is a shame, since Joyce’s books are not only brimming with apt observations and spot-on descriptions—like when one of his characters praises the fish-gooeyness of a lady’s lips—they are rib-splittingly funny. In order to help readers access Joyce’s work, his keen eye and shiv-like wit, MBP is putting out Everyman’s Joyce, by W. Terrence Gordon, Eri Hamaji and Jacob Albert.
Everyman’s Joyce, part of a MBP series that presents the work of significant thinkers in light of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities, presents readers with the tools they will need to trailbraze through the linguistic jungle that Joyce has sown for them. It does this by exploring particular passages of Joyce’s writing in conjunction with illustrative images. And, after getting equipped for a drunken stroll through the night streets of early 20th century Dublin, a pot-hazed jaunt in ’70s Los Angeles begins to look like a walk in the park.
–JCD
