Out in the farthest reaches of the internet, mediated only by e-mail and a
rudimentary code of interpretive etiquette, five men are discussing the
first page of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Not the
uncharacteristically straightforward first sentence (“Later than usual one
summer morning . . .”), nor even the title page, but the dedication and
publishing information —the dates, addresses and typographical notes that
most readers skip on their way to the fictional meat. “There’s no dedication
in V or The Crying of Lot 49,” one reader remarks. Gravity’s
Rainbow is dedicated to Richard Farina and Against the Day is
dedicated to the light in the darkness and Thelonious Sphere Monk.” This is
the beginning of a Pynchon-L “group read”, and a beginning in every sense of
the word.
Pynchon-L, the Thomas Pynchon discussion forum, was set up more than 15 years
ago and still runs on the same basic system. As Jules Siegel puts it in Lineland,
his bizarre account of this literary fringe group: “You join a list by
subscribing to it. Members send their thoughts by e-mail to a central
computer and all those messages go out to everyone subscribed to the list.
To get off the list, you unsubscribe.” It’s a simple arrangement, but one
that has survived the social networking revolution and the ultra-plurality
of the blogosphere.
In fact, it feels strangely appropriate in the case of an author such as
Pynchon who, in a 1984 piece for The New York Times, set out the case
for a particular sort of enlightened Luddism. While his sprawling novels are
sometimes said to have anticipated the speed and hyperconnectivity of the
internet, it’s a lot easier to imagine the infamous recluse sending a few
anonymous e-mails than, say, updating his Twitter feed.
Despite the list’s sizeable academic membership, it remains open to anyone
with an e-mail address and maintains an eclectic standard of discussion —
topics range from rigorous, line-by-line exegesis to vaguely relevant news
stories.
The jewels in the electronic crown are the list’s “group reads”. Situated
somewhere between the common or garden book group meeting and the academic
symposium, these readings often take months to complete — sections of the
book in question, usually about 50 pages long, are assigned to volunteers,
each of whom then takes his or her turn to make a virtual presentation and
to lead the discussion as the group rolls along. As a method of
collaborative criticism the group read is innovative and exciting, and it
works. Having organised painstakingly meticulous expeditions through the
best part of Pynchon’s oeuvre, the list has built up a considerable body of
interpretive knowledge, much of which has been translated into the pages of
the Pynchon Wiki project, a Wikipedia-esque attempt to create open and
hyperlinked guides to all six of the author’s major works.
Pynchon isn’t the only author to have been graced by such digital scrutiny —
since 1996 waste.org has also played host to Wallace-L, a discussion group
dedicated to the work of the late David Foster Wallace. When Wallace died in
September last year Wallace-L was one of the first places to know, and the
following few days received a flood of personal remembrances from fans,
friends and former students, all more true and moving than any of the
newspaper obituaries. This is not to say that these obituaries weren’t taken
into account — on the contrary, list members spent weeks collecting every
scrap of media coverage, fragments shored against Wallace’s already
formidable reputation. And as everyone else looked over at the brick on
their bookshelves and thought “I really must read that some time”, the
members of Wallace-L began their third in-depth group read of Infinite
Jest.
A similar phenomenon occurred six months later on the main J. G. Ballard
mailing list when the cult science-fiction author finally succumbed to
prostate cancer. The Ballard list served as a focal point for discussion
during the exhibition in Barcelona last summer, a mixed-media retrospective
of the author’s career, from early sci-fi stories to car-crash erotica and
suburban anarchism. Members of the Ballard list also recently tracked down
the “concrete island” of the author’s eponymous novel, a patch of grass and
rubble in West London on which a commuter is forced to survive after
crashing his Jaguar. Based on quotes from the book and on the biographical
details of Ballard’s life in the area (as one member remarked, “A small part
of North London is like the inside of Ballard’s mind”) the “island” was
pinpointed as a “thin, V-shaped grassed area to the south of the Westway
interchange, trapped between the two arms of the West Cross Route . . .” The
group’s mediation between life and work has, however, not always been so
simple. When a meet-up was proposed in Ballard’s home town of Shepperton,
word reached the man himself and the event was vetoed — as a member put it:
“I’m sure he immediately thought we’d be raiding his place at midnight &
puking on his Granada.”
Pynchon, Wallace, Ballard. These aren’t the only writers with active
mailing-list followings: Foucault-L is fairly popular, as are lists on Joyce
and a number of late Modernist poets. Still, they do suggest a certain
correlation, sorted roughly along the shared lines of the postmodern, the
“cult” and the pre-Baby Boom. When John Updike died in January a few
Facebook groups were founded in his memory, but there was no Updike-L to
organise a communal run-through of the Rabbit series or to collate
his obituaries into a handy list. Similarly, Wallace’s cult reputation seems
to have added an imaginary decade to his bibliography — contemporaries such
as Franzen and Chabon barely get a look-in. And, yet, the work of these
mailing lists is never quite as stable as it seems. The prevalence of
outdated technology means that discussion lists such as Pynchon-L straddle
an uneasy line between permanence and ephemerality: the archives are there,
but are as difficult to navigate as they are to maintain, especially when
the software garbles all hypertext messages into indecipherable strings of
formatting code. Projects such as the Pynchon Wiki are a partial solution,
bringing members slightly closer to fluid interactivity of Web 2.0, but in
truth represent only a tiny fraction of the list’s accumulated expertise.
Perhaps, ultimately, this is the damning fate and the fundamental essence of
the literary mailing list. Since October last year the Penguin publicity
department has been gearing up for the release of Inherent Vice,
Pynchon’s latest slice of Sixties California. The members of Pynchon-L have,
predictably, been dancing a delicate foxtrot with the publisher, teasing out
titbits here and there and using their expert knowledge to fill in the
blanks. And it’s this agility that, more than anything, gives the mailing
list its power — the sort of freedom to manoeuvre that can be gained only by
a group of enthusiastic, highly trained individuals, linked only in the most
tactical and provisional sense.
All the speculation will, of course, be obsolete by early August when the book
hits the shelves, but for Pynchon-L that’s just part of the game. Within a
few days, no doubt, there will be a group read running and an argument going
over its first page — not the first sentence, nor even the title page, but
the dates, addresses and disclaimers of its publishing information.
Pynchon-L and Wallace-L are both at www.waste.org,
while the Ballard list is located at groups.yahoo.com/group/jgb/
. Sign-up instructions are available at both sites
