The Metaphor of False Epiphany in Literature as Explored in Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo's Works - Assignment Example

The Metaphor of False Epiphany in Contemporary Literature as Explored Through Selected Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo Early nineteenth-century literature saw the emergence of a modernist movement, which sought to up-end the staid norms of literature. Rebelling against the priorities placed upon the proper balance of linguistic form in relation to subject matter, the modernists aimed at probing deeper into the human psyche. Running parallel to this literary movement was the scientific progress of quantum physics and, most notably, Einstein’s theory of relativity. Naturally, then, literature of the time emerged in a way that highlighted interconnectivity of humanity in terms of the physical world (i.e., the works of Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams) and also in terms of the spiritual world (i.e., T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams and James Joyce). Through a natural artistic progression of action/reaction, then, the post-modern movement that followed the modernist movement, used the trappings of relativity to examine and express that the juxtaposition of random events to expectations of relativity creates the illusion of an epiphany. In this essay, I will cite examples from two well-respected and critically acclaimed authors, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, to illustrate how they achieve this aim in contemporary perspectives, namely sociological and technical. Before we get to our examples, however, we need to start with the idea of epiphany and its recent place in literature. Long has the term “epiphany” been part of the Christian lexicon. It wasn’t until James Joyce introduced the term in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that it gained a new connotation—one that deeply permeates literary fiction still today. An epiphany, as presented by Joyce, can be seen as the moment when a character comes to an illuminating realization wherein all that has been learned, or at least presented to the reader, makes sense as interconnected parts of a whole. For instance, in Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man, that moment comes when the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who spends much of the book struggling to understand the justice of Christianity and his place in it (among other things), comes to a moment wherein he sees God and God’s love in all things, as they comes together like puzzle pieces that form a new picture of Stephen’s reality. The reaction to this, then, is that all of the elements we encounter in everyday reality are not related, however, in any objective sense, but products of randomness in which we assign relative meaning to them; thus we create our own epiphanies. While his first three books (V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow) are considered the holy trinity of post-modernism, Thomas Pynchon presented this notion of the random overlap of simultaneous event to present what appears to be relative matters in his short story “Entropy,” which was first published in the Kenyon Review in 1960 and later in his collection of short stories, Slow Learner, in 1984. “Entropy” begins in the apartment of one Meatball Mulligan, where one humdinger of a party is entering its 40th hour. On the floor kitchen floor amid a litter of empty champagne fifths, were Sandor Rojas and his three friends, playing spit in the ocean and staying awake on Heidseck and benzedrine pills. In the living room Duke, Vincent, Krinkles and Paco sat crouched over a 15-inch speaker which had been bolted into the top of a wastepaper basket, listening to 27 watts’ worth of The Heroes’ Gate at Kiev. (Pychon 81) From this brief description, a tone of disarray, if not chaos, is clearly evident. Pynchon continues to tell us of the downstairs neighbors who have built themselves a virtual sanctuary to guard themselves from the distractions of the outside world; yet it is still not enough to keep the sound of Mulligan’s party from coming though the floor and to the attention of the apartment’s inhabitants, Callisto and Aubade. The most pressing issue for Callisto and Aubade is that the thermometer has remained at 37 degrees for the last three days, despite changes in the weather that have brought sun, gale force winds, snow and, at the moment the story takes place, rain. The radical nature of the party and the weather juxtaposed against the fixed temperature reading is an omen to Castillo and Aubade, who assume the only logical conclusion to be entropy itself and the complete halting of existence. This epiphany as realized by Castillo and Aubade eventually bring about their own demise, as in the story’s final paragraph, Aubade smashes out the windows to the apartment and “turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of motion” (Pynchon 98). In actuality, the attempt to succumb to the eventual entropy gleaned in a false epiphany by Castillo and Aubade can be seen as one more act in an already eventful span of three days. Until that moment, however, Pynchon also has the reader buying into the notion of relativity between the chaos of the environment and the steadiness of the temperature; so that we, too, like Castillo and Aubade, begin drawing our own conclusions about an eventual event to bring these to elements out of balance and toward a final resolution. In the end, though, all that has been presented is an overlapping series of events that appear to be related in a coherent way; but, alas, they are not. While Pynchon’s story couples social bedlam against the scientific eventuality of atomic bedlam, Don DeLillo, in his book, Mao II, examines, among other issues, the nature of crowd mentality and communal belonging with that of individuality and its ability, or inability, to flourish in such an environment. The book begins with massive communal wedding ceremony in Yankee Stadium. DeLillo tells us: Here they come, marching into American sunlight. They are grouped in twos, eternal boy-girl, stepping out of the runway beyond the fence in left-center field. The music draws them across the grass, dozens, hundreds, already too many to count. They assemble themselves so tightly, crossing the vast arc of the outfield, that the effect is one of transformation. From a series of linked couples, they become on continuous wave, larger all the time, covering the open spaces in navy and white. (1) Marriage, in Western society, is seen as the entering of a couple into a relationship that is bigger than the couple itself. By choosing to start his book this way, DeLillo cites an example of that mentality taken to the extreme. As the 6,500 couples are getting married at the same time and place, they can be seen as entering into larger community—one that is both timeless and bound. This notion illustrates a group mentality wherein sociological concerns of belonging and behavior have a clearly defined role in the culture of one’s community, bringing about the epiphany or understanding of relative-ness of all parts working together in a way that fosters understanding. Just as quickly as we learn of the enormous wedding ceremony, DeLillo continues: “Karen’s daddy, watching from the grandstand, can’t help thinking this is the point. They’re one body now, and undifferentiated mass, and this makes him uneasy” (1). An experienced father fears for his daughter’s false epiphany, knowing that, even though all of these couple are sharing this moment, they will each go home to different house, eat different dinners, sleep in different beds, go to different jobs, and lead very different lives. In this respect, the whole notion of communal belonging is lost; and rather than becoming on undifferentiated mass, they are simply sharing a single event that offers the illusion of communal togetherness—the false epiphany. In his 2003 novel, Cosmopolis, DeLillo addresses the nature of human reaction to a ceaseless flow of cultural stimuli, including riots, monetary exchange rates, subtle conflicts of sexual relationships and, for our purpose, technology. Eric, the protagonist of the story, is traveling around the streets of New York City in a limousine that is shielded in a physical sense (bullet proof), but also in a technological sense (via extreme network security). In the limousine, there is an inner surveillance system that allows him to see every part of the limousine, inside and out—including himself. This utter control of his environment, including his place in it, foster an epiphany of control and thorough understanding of cultural relativity and his place in it. Soon, however, a technological blip calls the whole thing into question. Eric watched himself on the oval screen below the spycam, running his thumb along his chinline. The car stopped and moved and he realized queerly that he’d just placed his thumb on his chinline, a second or two after he’d seen on-screen. “Where is Shiner?” “On his way to the airport.” “Why do we still have airports? Why are they called airports?” “I know I can’t answer these questions without losing your respect, “Chin said. “Shiner told me our network is secure.” “Then it is.” “Safe from penetration.” “He’s the best there is at finding holes.” “Then why am I seeing things that haven’t happened yet?” (22) This clairvoyant monitor surfaces several times throughout the book, each time presenting a glitch in Eric’s understanding of order; and each time he attributes it to a technological error. His false epiphany has caused him to miss the obvious glitch in physical nature of space-time that should make this phenomenon impossible. Instead of addressing this troubling possibility, he dismisses it as a technological mishap and perhaps even a security breach. Eventually, Eric comes to his own undoing because all other aspects of his life and understanding behave in ways he has not predicted. One is left to wonder, though, if Eric had paid heed to the disturbing harbinger of unpredictability as delivered by the surveillance monitor, might he have been able to prevent his own death. Since he doesn’t recognize the significance of the monitor, his false epiphany leads directly to his own demise. While numerous other contemporary authors employ this metaphor of false epiphany (i.e. William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, etc.), most works by these authors follow a direct path back to Thomas Pynchon and lean heavily on forms and concepts introduced in the works of Don DeLillo. Works Cited DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner, 2003. ---. Mao II. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991. Joyce, James. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Dover, 1994. Pynchon, Thomas. “Entropy.” Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1984 Read More