In “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism” Rachel Adams writes this of her students’ responses to The Crying of Lot 49 and Tropic of Orange:
Their responses caused me to realize that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pynchon’s novel [The Crying of Lot 49] has ceased to read as a work of contemporary fiction, even though many critics continue to use postmodern and contemporary as synonymous term. While my students find Tropic of Orange no less challenging, they are willing to grapple with its difficulties because they recognize its form, which evokes the internet’s polyvocality and time-space compression, and its theme–the human and environmental consequences of transformations taking place at America’s borders-as belonging to their own contemporary moment. (2)
Looking at these texts from an undergraduate pedagogical perspective, this seems to be a fairly onerous lesson. Even if pairing these two texts together produces a distinction within literary postmodernism, it seems more of a salvage mission than one of intellectual curiosity. If The Crying of Lot 49 (or any text for that matter) only “works” for those experientially familiar with Cold War paranoia, “nuclear apocalypse, and newfound distrust of a government enmeshes in secrecy and conspiratorial activity” (2) then does it really offer a spring board for scholarly discussion (outside of: This text will inform the other texts we will be reading)? Is it only possible for students to value the text after they have read a “relatable” contemporary text like Tropic of Orange? Taking it a step further, are we merely teaching The Crying of Lot 49 for contextual/historical reasons? Is it possible to make it more relevant to students?
Though I do not disagree with Adams pairing of the two texts, I am curious to whether she believes them to be short-term “cultural capital” or appreciating assets on the road to canonization. Though either point could be argued, for the purposes of this discussion (as well as arguing for its inclusion in this course), I am more interested in the latter. Though Adam’s experience with her students initially points to the texts as holding short-term “cultural capital,” this need not be the case. First and foremost, a reader, even a reader as potentially resistant as a student, must have some sort of connection with a text. Even if it manages to “generate a more precise understanding of literary postmodernism” (10) that lesson will be lost if it is not more than a simple history lesson. Therefore, to make The Crying of Lot 49 relevant to an undergrad population, one must have an appropriate framework for discussion. Adams seems to draw a connection between using The Crying of Lot 49 as a point of entry to discussing Tropic of Orange. “These novels are an ideal pair because each translates the cultural and political dilemmas of its time into the aesthetic and thematic innovations of narrative fiction. Any attempt to define what makes Yamashita’s moment distinctive will require different forms of literary, historical knowledge, and attention to emergent sensibilities that break from earlier understanding of ‘the contemporary'” (10). I think she falls short in using the more remote text to inform the more “relatable” one. Drawing from Robert Scholes, I would stay she demonstrates “the tendency to follow a line of ‘masterpieces’ until the end, [which] no longer serve their purpose. It is not simply that the line is too narrow, though it is, but that this material does not reach student effectively because they do not know why they know why they need it. . . To put it simply, we much begin where we are, at the end, and start asking how we got here” (115). Perhaps, it would be wiser to read the “relatable” Tropic of Orange first. Only then is it possible to spark the intellectual curiosity necessary to take The Crying of Lot 49 to task.
Works Cited
Scholes, Robert. “A Fortunate Fall.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 111-119.