A Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (2013

Eve, Martin Paul

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Martin Paul Eve

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Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (2013)

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Review of Terrorism and Temporality In The Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by James Gourley

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ISSN: 2044-4095Author(s): Martin Paul EveAffiliation(s): University of LincolnTitle: Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works ofThomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury Academic,2013)Date: 2013Volume: 2Issue: 1URL: https://www.pynchon.net/owap/article/view/60DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.1.60Abstract:Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and DonDeLillo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works ofThomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury Academic,2013)Martin Paul EveAlthough we are a mere decade into the new millennium, it is alreadyclear that certain thematic areas are in a favoured critical period of “ascent”,as Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow might have it. Taking Peter Boxall'srecent Twenty-First-Century Fiction as a canonising authority that inscribesits “archaeologies of the future” while also avoiding a purely descriptivistapproach, we can clearly outline a literary focus in the past decade on, amongothers: altered modes of metafiction; extreme forms of posthumanism; a re-prioritisation of the embodied, material subject; an engagement with globaldemocracy and its discontents; and new forms of temporality.1 It is to thislast phenomenon, in the wake of 9/11, that James Gourley devotes his recentvolume, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and DonDeLillo.In this work Gourley sets himself a difficult initial target: to demonstratethat Pynchon's and DeLillo's respective “conceptualization[s] of time” (2)change after the terrorist attacks in New York of 2001. While this mightbe obviously expected in DeLillo's progression towards sparse Beckettianminimalism – seen in The Body Artist, Falling Man and Point Omega, the latterof which is clearly pre-occupied with manipulating time in its depiction ofthe Gordon installation – readers of Pynchon might be harder pressed to seehow his post-9/11 novels, and particularly Against the Day, deviate from thisprior trajectory. After all, as Pynchon reads it in his essay on the sin of Sloth,“Nearer my Couch to Thee”, at a certain historical moment:Sloth was no longer so much a Sin against God or spiritual good asagainst a particular sort of time, uniform, one-way, in general notreversible – that is, against clock time, which got everybody early tobed and early to rise.2Copyright © 2013, Martin Paul EveLicense (open-access): This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction inany medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The citation of this article must include:the name(s) of the authors, the name of the journal, the full URL of the article (in a hyperlinkedformat if distributed online) and the DOI number of the article.DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.1.602 Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchonand Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)In other words, clock time has long been the deified force against whichPynchon's (counter-)entities have striven to fight, be it in their mad time-searches, their anachronistic histories or their proleptic transatlantic ICBMs.Gourley's challenge is difficult because to suggest a radical “reconsiderationof time” (4) in Pynchon's already radically temporally warped structuresseems a tall order.In order to address this phenomenon Gourley structures his work intotwo distinct sections with the initial four chapters devoted to DeLillo (onMao II, Cosmopolis, Falling Man and Point Omega) and the final four onPynchon (Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day and Inherent Vice).3 This hasthe distinct advantage of affording each novelist his own protracted segmentfor analysis but also tends to segregate the writers more than might bejustified. For instance, although Gourley ultimately argues that “[t]hese twonovelists, so consistently linked […] have diverged in the past decade” (178),there are overlaps that are here ignored in order to make this point. As justone example, during the otherwise convincing and innovative discussion ofBeckett, Proust and Falling Man, Gourley writes on Alzheimer's disease anddifferent types of memory failure in the wake of terror (65-70) but does notlink this to a discussion of Against the Day, where Pynchon writes of hisallegorical post-9/11 populous as an “embittered and amnesiac race”.4This initial criticism is indicative of a more general trend throughout thiswork, namely that the readings of DeLillo's novels more plausible than thoseof Pynchon's. Indeed, at its high-points, Terrorism and Temporality has muchto offer, with one of its triumphs lying in the redemption of Cosmopolis,a novel that has been poorly received, as Gourley rightly notes. Taking, inthe chapter devoted to this novel, a preparatory note for the work thatwas eventually integrated into DeLillo's post-9/11 essay “In the Ruins of theFuture”, Gourley positions Cosmopolis as a text that simultaneously straddlestwo different modes of temporality: prochronism and parachronism. This is aviable reading and the focus within the chapter on the novel's spycam is wellintegrated with a theoretical backdrop that draws strongly on Paul Virolio'sconcept of dromoscopy.When Gourley turns his attention to Pynchon, however, the result is lesspalatable. After a nine-page reading of Gravity's Rainbow in which thecomplex overlay of voices is elided to simply brand the text as “withoutdoubt a sentimental novel” (102), a more serious structural flaw in the bookemerges pertaining to the sequence of causality that it attributes to terrorism.Although “September 11, 2001” is described as the “motivating force” (161)for the altered time structures in Pynchon's later novels, this is undercut timeReview of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchonand Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)3and time again by a lack of corroborating evidence. That Pynchon representsthe 9/11 attacks in Against the Day (and now also in Bleeding Edge) ishardly sufficient to attribute it as a cause for the novelist's focus on strangetemporalities. This is clear from the fact that, in several of Gourley's chapters,such as the seventh, which ably explores Pynchon's interaction with Futurism,terrorism is hardly mentioned. By all accounts, the work on Pynchon andFuturism here, as one example, is interesting and important, but the tenuousconnection to terrorism makes it feel somewhat oddly placed within this book.Furthermore, a core problem of Gourley's book is the range of criticismto which he does not refer and the duplicated effort in which this oftenresults. For instance, Simon de Bourcier has written an entire book on timeand relativity in Pynchon's later novels, but this appears nowhere in sight,despite passages on Newtonian vs. Einsteinian time and Minkowskian space-time (118, 130) in Terrorism and Temporality. Neither does Katherine Hume'sseminal 'The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon's Against the Day'emerge, which many have read as the most important work on terrorism inPynchon criticism to date. Finally, for Gourley's appraisal of DeLillo's affiliationto literary Modernism in Point Omega (85), one would expect to see DavidCowart's excellent 'The Lady Vanishes' in which he notes that this text carriesa style indebted to a “modernist aesthetic that married a high standard ofeconomy to new representational challenges”.5In short, although this is a book well in-tune with contemporary trends inthe study of twenty-first-century fiction, I felt that this particular ascent wasbetrayed to gravity. While the die-hard Pynchon scholar will be intrigued bythe archival document in which DeLillo appraises the importance of Gravity'sRainbow as having “an unapologetic global range” (5), the central premisehere was problematic. For, perhaps, what lies beneath the criticisms that Ihave here laid out is the fact that, to some degree, many or all of Pynchon'sand DeLillo's novels have been not only about temporality but also aboutterrorism; that is, about forces that knowingly seek to threaten our livesin the pursuit of their own ends and forces that want us to know this. Ifthis hypothetical conjecture of terror as omnipresent in the work of thesenovelists could be made to hold up, then it might comprehensively explain aninterlinking of terrorism and temporality that doesn't revolve purely around9/11. Such a study is, however, despite the advances made in Terrorism andTemporality, not yet upon us.4 Review of James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchonand Don DeLillo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)End notes1. Peter Boxall, Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 214.2. In the latter case, Gourley gives two chapters to Against the Day.3. Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 153.4. David Cowart, ‘The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega’,Contemporary Literature, 53 (2012), 31–50 (p. 31). In this last case Iappreciate that it may have simply been a timing problem, although other2012 works are cited.Referencesde Bourcier, Simon, Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in ThomasPynchon’s Later Novels (London: Continuum, 2012)Boxall, Peter, Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2013)Cowart, David, "The Lady Vanishes: Don DeLillo’s Point Omega",Contemporary Literature, 53, 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cli.2012.0009, pp. 31 -50Hume, Kathryn, "The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon's Against theDay", Philological Quarterly, 86(1/2), 2007Pynchon, Thomas, Against the Day (New York: Penguin, 2006)Pynchon, Thomas, "Nearer My Couch to Thee", in Deadly Sins (New York: W.Morrow, 1993), pp. 10 - 23

Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels (London: Continuum,

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James Gourley, terrorism and temporality in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo [2013]

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