May 8th, 2010 was Thomas Pynchon’s 73rd birthday. Seventy-third. Seven plus three equals ten. Ten is a one and a zero, a binary, an important idea of Pynchon’s ideology from Oedipa Maas’ binary realization near the end of The Crying of Lot 49 to McClintic’s “flip and flop” worldview in V. Now the connection between the number seventy-three and Pynchon’s binary theory might seem… tenuous at best, completely insane at worst. Yet, it is this type of empty symbolism that permeates all of Pynchon’s work and is clearly a topic he and his characters are obsessed with. Obsession is the key word. Pynchon’s characters and perhaps Pynchon himself tend towards an obsession with finding meaning in vague symbolism—connecting dots that seem unrelated, solving puzzles that may or may not exist, reading into things that require no exegesis and reading between the lines when only empty space exists therein. Yet Pynchon, more so than his characters, does this with a disconnected irony that is meant to bring to light the reader’s expectation of meaning in the novel, to analyze it, and perhaps to destroy it altogether.
V. comes to mind as the foremost example of this problem, though many similarities between V. and The Crying of Lot 49 exist in this regard. First there is the title, the letter V, but punctuated with a period, meaning that it is an abbreviation for something, a symbol. What does V. stand for? This problem also arises in Lot 49, when Oedipa discovers W.A.S.T.E., an acronym that unabbreviated means trash, garbage, rubbish. Yet add in the periods and it suddenly becomes a mystery, a symbolic representation of a greater idea. Many explanations are offered in the novel as to what the V. stands for. It could be a person’s name, a woman’s name, Veronica, Victoria, Venus. It could be a place. It could be the actual shape of the letter itself that indicates its meaning. In fact there are an endless number of possible explanations and the novel exhausts quite a few of these. But what Pynchon is after isn’t that a symbol can symbolize anything, but rather that it symbolizes nothing. The symbol is empty, cleaved from its referent and left floating in the symbolic order as a simulacrum, attracting all manner of interpretations from people desperate to find meaning—or more to the point—desperate to stave off meaninglessness.
Both Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard offer explanations of this empty symbol phenomenon. Lacan links it more to the psychological aspect of the symbolic order, that men create symbols in order to avoid the traumatic real which contains no inherent meaning. Lacan postulates that all symbols are ultimately empty, in that they only refer to something else in the symbolic order and have no connection to “reality” per se. This lack of connection is one of the key drives behind human desire. We are born with the need to fill this emptiness and we fill it with symbols. Our search for these symbols, for unweaving some cosmic or mystical or historic pattern that will finally leave us with “the truth” is the impetus of our action. Stencil in V. is the champion of this idea. His search for V. is as important and as fruitless as man’s search for innate, self-evident meaning.
Baudrillard offers a different perspective. Simplified, Baudrillard suggests that meaning once existed, that symbols once had referents, but that these referents have been lost due to unwarranted focus on the symbols themselves and that the knowledge of what the symbols represented has died many generations ago and modern people are left going through the motions with hollow, meaningless simulacrums, simulating the interaction that their ancestors experienced for real. Baudrillard ties this idea into consumer capitalism as the heart of its immortal machine. This is more of the struggle that Oedipa Maas experiences in The Crying of Lot 49, though Pynchon hints more than once that a “historic referent” in fact never existed. Both Lot 49 and V., as well as Gravity's Rainbow, suggest that answers to modern questions can be found in the past. However, Pynchon equally suggests that these answers do not exist and all of his novels end without the tight resolution readers expect from fiction.
Pynchon and his readers share a strange experience. Like Stencil, Pynchon and his readers search for meaning in the very story itself. Pynchon, writing the story, seeks to find the meaning his characters seek; the readers try to “unlock” Pynchon’s mysteries. They assure themselves that with enough re-reading and exegesis the key to the symbols will be revealed “like a heirophany.” But both Pynchon and the reader can also laugh at Stencil’s misguided search. They can laugh at the futility of the quest, because it is their own quest and, also unsolvable, can only be laughed at.
This half ironic, half sincere approach to existential issues is the cornerstone of post-modern fiction. Pynchon exemplifies it like no other, weaving vast labyrinths of potential meaning without ever conceding its existence. Perhaps meaning, in the “grand” definition can only exist in potentiality and it is in this potentiality that we, as both readers and human beings, carry out our struggle.
However, in the end, there is meaning, though it’s not to be found in the words of Pynchon’s novels and his characters rarely find it themselves. It is as Albert Camus said: to live in an absurd world, without God, devoid of meaning, one must simply resist in order to create meaning. Resist the desire to stop resisting. Resist hopelessness. Resist resignation. Resist complacency. In this, Pynchon’s readers and his characters share a common bond, that of continuing the struggle against inertia to find meaning in the world and in their lives. This bond is the empathy that allows people, lovers, friends, family, readers, and authors to share the struggle of their human experience—and thereby lessen its burden.
Mark Brendle is a writer living in Oregon. His short fiction is available on the web at http://brendlewords.blogspot.com
