Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon

by Stefan Mattessich, Stanley Fish (Editor)

For Thomas Pynchon, the characteristic features of late capitalism—the rise of the military-industrial complex, consumerism, bureaucratization and specialization in the workplace, standardization at all levels of social life, and the growing influence of the mass media—all point to a transformation in the way human beings experience time and duration. Focusing on Pynchon’s novels as representative artifacts of the postwar period, Stefan Mattessich analyzes this temporal transformation in relation not only to Pynchon’s work but also to its literary, cultural, and theoretical contexts.
Mattessich theorizes a new kind of time—subjective displacement—dramatized in the parody, satire, and farce deployed through Pynchon’s oeuvre. In particular, he is interested in showing how this sense of time relates to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining this movement as an instance of flight or escape and exposing the beliefs behind it, Mattessich argues that the counterculture’s rejection of the dominant culture ultimately became an act of self-cancellation, a rebellion in which the counterculture found itself defined by the very order it sought to escape. He points to parallels in Pynchon’s attempts to dramatize and enact a similar experience of time in the doubling-back, crisscrossing, and erasure of his writing. Mattessich lays out a theory of cultural production centered on the ethical necessity of grasping one’s own susceptibility to discursive forms of determination.

Genres: Literary Criticism

304 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

STEFAN MATTESSICH is the author of four novels: Point Guard, a coming-of-age story set on the Northern California coast of Mendocino; East Brother, a satire about gentrification in a fictional California beach town; A Precarious Man, about the search for love and belonging in neoliberal times; and The Riverbed, about three imaginative young people coming to learn about the darker sides of their suburban home. The Riverbed is the recipient of a Literary Titan Book Award. He went to Yale College and has a PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he wrote a monograph on the fiction of Thomas Pynchon entitled Lines of Flight, published by Duke University Press. He has also written a wide variety of literary criticism and cultural theory. He teaches English at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Magnus Ver Magnusson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nuff sed: "What you felt stirring across the land... it was the equinox... green spring equal nights... canyons are opening up, at the bottom are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell... human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spolier had to be brought in before it blew the Creations apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong."

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a highly theoretical analysis of the counter-cultural theme in the novels of Thomas Pynchon. Mattessich employs the theories of postmodern thinkers Deleuze/Guattari in his approach to Pynchon's fiction, and as I have not read Deleuze and Guattari, I cannot say whether I agree with Mattesich's analysis or not. However, for readers of Pynchon who are familiar with concepts like "the body without organs" and "schizoanalysis," this might be something to try.

Acquired Aug 30, 2005
abebooks.com