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“Late style” is a woolly term, and one that, when you really think about it, doesn’t seem to mean much. What do we make of the artist who dies accidentally? Or who is suddenly precluded from producing more work, either by political or personal forces? This same structural ambiguity organizes Edward Said’s bent in On Late Style. Unfinished and written in his final months—the book thereby taking up its object of study as its formal subject—On Late Style oscillates between genres, forms, and media. In the book’s first chapter, Said considers Adorno’s essays on Beethoven’s late style as themselves embodying Adorno’s own lateness as such: “Adorno is very much a late figure because so much of what he does militated ferociously against his own time.” In this way, Adorno’s own “lateness” is configured in his pre-occupation with Beethoven’s disfigured and dissonant “late style”: that is, for Adorno and Said alike, “artistic lateness” is imagined “not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction.”
The very irresolution within lateness as such—be it as theme, per Adorno, or as style, per Beethoven—gestures to late style’s central tension as a critical discourse. That is, there is no transcendental late style register. While we can tick off some boxes and thereby identify something as a realist novel (generically) or an American post-modernist novel (historiographically), there is no similar checklist for late style. Indeed, I do wonder if the recent fixation on late style—and note that this is in no way rigorous, but Google Books’ Ngram does indicate a dramatic increase in usage of the phrase beginning in the early 2010s—has tricked people into thinking that late style is broadly articulable along lines of genre: a series of signifiers, each related to the incorporation of death and the amplification of a given artist’s tropes.
My point here isn’t to argue per se that late style is a big stupid word, so why the hell are we using it so much? My point, rather, is to suggest that engaging with an artist’s late style is a necessarily historical move, one that requires a comprehensive understanding of an artist and their respective moment, and how the passing of time might each inform the other. Said’s book suggests the same instability, arguing, at times, that late style reflects attitudes towards the past, or attitudes towards the future, or stylistic excess, or a posture of minimalism, or a stylistic break, or a fluid continuity. Ultimately, there is no coherent enunciation of late style. Late work is marked only by a knotty, tensile obstinance, and is only capable of being read as such when properly historicized.
Which brings us to Thomas Pynchon’s newest novel, Shadow Ticket, his first since 2013’s Bleeding Edge. At 293 pages, the relatively short (for him, at least) novel is out October 7th through Penguin Press. Figured as a noir pastiche, the novel mostly follows one Hicks McTaggart, a private detective working in 1932 Milwaukee, contending with organized crime in the aftermath of Al Capone’s imprisonment and the waning days of Prohibition. At one time a notorious strikebreaker, Hicks gives up the corporate thuggery after nearly beating a “four-eyed troublemaker” to death—which isn’t to say that he stopped himself from delivering the crucial blow. No, Hicks’s MPD-issued “lead-filled beavertail sap” somehow disappears from his hand at the zenith of its death-intended arc. The close call—the knowledge of what he’s capable of, and on whose behalf—haunts Hicks into dropping strikebreaking work altogether. Needing to skip town, Hicks is roped into a seemingly quotidian job to find one Daphne Airmont—daughter of cheese tycoon Bruno Airmont, the “Al Capone of Cheese”—separate her from her Jewish klezmerizing musician boyfriend Hop, and return her safely to Wisconsin. In the course of doing so, Hicks is drugged then shipped to Hungary, where the search continues as he meets intelligence assets, Nazis, and Soviets, along with the requisite wizards and vampires and golems.
Properly attending to this novel begins, I believe, with a consideration of the thorny questions of late style: What do we mean when we designate a text as “late style”? What sort of hold does “late style” have in the social imaginary? And what might Thomas Pynchon’s late style look like? I’ve chosen Edward Said’s work on this discourse rather deliberately. Said’s focus on late style texts as those which formally project “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction” is in stark relief to those late works which, per Said, we can “readily supply”: those which “crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor. Rembrandt and Matisse, Bach and Wagner.” The lateness that Said considers, on the other hand, is marked by discordance and difficulty.
Because, honestly, I had a difficult time with this novel. And I’m not new to Pynchon: my Pynchon novitiate occurred when I was 18 and a freshman at Ohio University. I declared an English major because I liked to read but almost fully figured I’d just read a lot and indulge a silly hobby for four years before packing it up and heading off to law school or getting a desk job or etc. After a few weeks of sitting in class, I decided I was stupid and under-read and in turn decided to, in the background of coursework, read a few books a month that would make me more conversant with the discipline. I shortly thereafter started Gravity’s Rainbow, which I’m pretty sure I only picked up because some anon on /lit/ said it would be too hard for me. I spent weeks reading and rereading the novel, spending Saturdays on all-day reading stints at Alden Library’s sixth floor and skipping homework to decode just what the hell was going on within those ellipses, those figurant impressions and narratological shifts in register. I read the companion books and Wikis and cut my teeth on literary criticism by going to JSTOR and searching up “Pynchon.” Thus, to a large extent, the present essay can credit its existence to its writer, at one point, reading a big book by Thomas Pynchon.
And I really do hate to do that whole divagations-into-personal-history thing that seems to be a requisite for the majority of criticism these days, but insofar as this review is out before the novel, and insofar as we seem to have one of the earlier critical words, I truly do feel like it’s necessary to establish all this history before I say what I say next:
After my first read, I kinda wasn’t sure if I liked Shadow Ticket very much.
Yikes! Hate to even write that. But I really hated thinking it, so I read it again.
Nope. Didn’t love it.
So what now? Well, to be an honest critic, you sit on it for a week. You think about what it’s doing. You let it simmer in the back of your mind, reread other books by the author (in this case Lot 49 and Bleeding Edge, ballasted by a still-fresh Gravity’s Rainbow reread back in June), think about what the new book is doing stylistically compared to these latter couple-three. You think about doing a shorter review, tepidly genuflectory, titled something like “An 88-Year-Old Thomas Pynchon Is More Relevant Than Ever,” and in this one you tabulate, maybe, the funny names in the book (there’re some great ones! My favorites being Glow Tripforth and Porfirio del Vasto, a turbulent couple whose first names’ relation to the chemical properties of piss yet suggest a sort of base star-crossedness); then maybe articulate some in-universe connections between this novel and Pynchon’s corpus as such (fellow Against the Day–heads stand up: Lew Basnight returns!!); then index some of the real world-historical elements at play (MI3b, for instance, hinting at the relationship between Yugoslavian politics and the birth of the modern surveillance state); and then end by sagely enunciating that we still live in Pynchonian times, or that it’s Pynchon’s world and we’re just livin’ in it. And, scene.
But I believe that thinking with this deceptively difficult novel begins with attending to the specific ways in which one might be disappointed with its specific formal and aesthetic registers. In using Edward Said’s articulation of late style—that is, again, lateness qua intransigence––we can reorient the work’s ostensibly lacking qualities as not bug but feature: fully historicizing the novel allows us to recognize Shadow Ticket as, within Pynchon’s oeuvre, not so much a difference in degree as a difference in kind. What do these seeming limitations actually afford? And how do they contribute to Pynchon’s project as such—aesthetic, formal, and political?
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What are some key formal elements of Pynchon’s late style? Let’s first consider our imagination of the contemporary Anglophone late style approach to the sentence as such. We likely tend, here, to project a refined attenuation on the level of prose. DeLillo’s The Silence, Coetzee’s The Pole, Auster’s Baumgartner—these contemporary late style novels mobilize a series of declarative, skeletal sentences, formalized around the sparse logic of subject-predicate, which thence congeal into a slimmer novel. Maybe think about how the chapters in Everett’s James usually begin with a sort of summary of the concluding pages of the preceding chapter. Or consider how Davis’s already refined short stories constrict around what begins to feel like an entirely alien symbolic order, predicated on the delivery of a single sentence or two and their relationship to the piece’s evocative title.
We imagine the sparseness of these sentences as simply focused on telling a story how it is: the movement of a narrated body throughout narrated space (and here we think of the late stylist par excellence Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece of movement, the punningly titled Comment C’est, a French phrasing that plays on both “comment c’est”—literally, “how it is”—and “commencez,” this being a sort of command to start or begin, and which then too carries over into English and suggests “come on say,” which reads like a particularly Beckettian stage-direction). This formal attenuation and focus on simple action is partly intended, I would argue, to return us to the body: specifically, to the body’s brute functioning, which, when put into conversation with the age of the writers in question, suggests something about how the breakdown of bare function encodes the literal process of dying.
The sentence-level logic of Pynchon’s late style, as figured in Shadow Ticket, seems to play with this notion in some ways, and negate it in others. That is, where a DeLillo may refine his once aurally-forward sentences to simple action conveyed via subject-predicate, Pynchon’s sentences likewise focus on movement: and, yet, in many ways, he still upsets a simple construction. Of Shadow Ticket’s first four paragraphs, for instance, three are one-sentence-long, with each sentence at least four lines in length. This approach persists throughout the novel. The prose thus feels less like the novelist constricting himself to a Procrustean and skeletal rhythm, and more like he’s sitting back, stretching out his legs, and just getting what he needs to say out of the way. See this sentence, quoted in full, from the second page of the novel:
“Over the next few hours till the happiness twins are back on the train again, Hicks gets to hear a number of different stories, related to gangland matrimonials or hooch heists everybody’s heard about before, not much of it helpful, even at the combination drug and hardware store plus lunch counter known as Oriental Drugs, heart and soul of the East Side and Hicks’s usual source of reliable lowdown in Milwaukee, and sometimes lunch when it isn’t too close to payday, which sends him instead over to Otto’s Oasis, a speak disguised as a neighborhood Imbisswagen, with a refreshments list ranging from hours-old bathtub product to blockade-run imports of the real McCoy, where by dumb luck he happens to arrive next to the kitchen door just at the exact moment Otto’s wife Hildegard is bringing a platterful of free lunch items out to the bar area, so while others are making grabs at Hildegard, Hicks, still brooding about the Sicilian food back at Pasquale’s, manages to divert enough eats his way to see him through a couple more hours at least.”
Of course, for the Pynchon obsessive, a sentence of this length does not immediately strike one as odd. Indeed, consider the famous first sentence of Lot 49, one of the finest first sentences in all of American fiction:
“One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”
But note the difference in subject focus. Lot 49’s sentence careens and twists around on itself both spatially and temporally, delivering its final dependent clause in a sort of baldly expository mode, an exposition whose depth of familiarity suggests at the same time a shared history between Oedipa and Pierce; the conclusive slippage of subject between Oedipa and Pierce likewise suggests at once an entanglement and power imbalance: a war occurring on the level of the novel’s free indirect discourse that, ultimately, formally produces the work’s unique paranoid affect: Who is narrating? And who is being narrated? And this rhetorical move is in no way unique to the novel that the Man Himself refers to as both a “potboiler” and a “piece of shit.” That selfsame slide between subject/predicate, on a sentence-level logic, and the tricky relationship between narrating subject and narrated predicate is, as Pynchon scholar Steven Weisenburger suggests in his brilliant essay “Hyper-Embedded Narration in Gravity’s Rainbow,” part-and-parcel to Pynchon’s poetics as such, which latter remains consistent throughout his career. Indeed, even Bleeding Edge—a novel so frequently introduced as “Pynchon-Lite,” itself a useless and condescending phrase, and which carries the same tone as offering to post the novel on the fridge, right there, so we can all see it—organizes its poetics around a similar sentence logic.
So, all this to say: it is perhaps aesthetically disappointing that the sentences Pynchon employs in Shadow Ticket are, comparatively, devoid of a similar poetics. They focus on the same movement in space culturally imagined of late style prose: just extended, percolated through Pynchon’s (admittedly always delightful) elongated style. Indeed, the sentence quoted at length above operates according to a simple logic of spatial and diachronic linearity; exposition is delivered via those dependent clauses for which Pynchon has become so famous, but the sly confusion between temporality, narrative subject, and narrated predicate is smoothed out. Why’s the sentence this long, constructed in such-and-such a way? Because Hicks had some stuff to do, it feels like, and this is simply the most efficient way to go about telling us about some of the stuff that he had to do. We are here reminded of how wizened critic Bailey Trela, writing about Coetzee’s The Pole in CRB, enunciates the imagination of late style: “the absence of youthful pyrotechnics”—those twists and turns of early Pynchon, the details of the more mature Pynchon—is culturally imagined as reflecting either “a generalized mental debility” or the writer’s “own encroaching death.”
In other instances, it is odd, too, to read Pynchon elide description of place, particularly as figured through descriptions of travel. Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon alike, after all, both basically become road novels, arguing a place for themselves within that Great American Tradition (after all, in Slow Learner’s autobiographical intro, Pynchon reminds us that On the Road is “still . . . one of the great American novels). Gravity’s Rainbow in particular gets a lot of mileage out of articulating the infrastructures and traditions of various German towns, as well as the ideological and historical parallels therein. Again: even Bleeding Edge, often imagined as a simpler novel, does not elide describing our built environment and how infrastructure affords certain political or ethical imaginaries.
Shadow Ticket, on the other hand, quite literally elides these moments almost completely. The novel’s discourse shuttles our characters from setting to setting, snappy dialogue exchange to snappy dialogue exchange, with very little in the way of concrete description. The focus here is shifted to the dialogue almost entirely. While Pynchon’s work—especially the more recent novels—has always been heavy on the chatter, it is not typically at the expense of constructing the environment—and its history—in which our characters talk.
Take this. Hicks is aboard the Stupendica, the transoceanic passenger ship he has been drugged and smuggled onto, where he meets the aforementioned Glow and Porfirio, along with the British Alf and Philippa “Pip” Quarrender, “neither [of whom are] quite old enough for the story they’re peddling” and who turn out to be intelligence agents with MI3b. At the end of a chapter that in turn marks the end of Stupendica as setting, we are treated to a brief scene between Glow and Porfirio disembarking at Tangiers, the “first port of call.”
The very next chapter begins abruptly: “The train stops at Belgrade for about an hour. Hicks, nodding in and out of slumber” disembarks with Alf and Pip, who head “out the door, onto the platform, off into early Yugoslavian night, as a new and slippery customer arrives to replace them, introducing himself as Egon Praediger, International Criminal Police Commission.” The sudden transition between place—colonial Africa to central Europe—belies the sheer distance between the two localities, as well as the distinct ways Hicks and the Quarrenders could arrive in Belgrade in the first place. Do they also disembark at Tangiers? Do they take the train from the south of Spain? Do they continue through the Mediterranean, disembarking in Greece or Fascist Italy, or perhaps traverse north through the Adriatic and thence embark from Fiume? It reads as if Pynchon is daunted by the effort involved in representing—or even gesturing to—the heterogeneous environs and political realities of the 1930s. As if it is simply easier to pick up and deposit Hicks where next he needs to be, occasioning in turn another snappy dialogue exchange. For a writer whose perspicacious historicizing has always afforded, in turn, a gifted eye for the singular localities comprising a wider state and the frictious differences therein—be it the competing attitudes in the PNW and California, or the difference in traditions within Germany’s states and villages—it is disappointing for these historical realities to be elided.
This elision is reflected in the almost perfunctory way in which the built environment is described. Zoltán von Kiss, for instance—Hicks’s contact in Budapest—“works out of a modern-style office building.” Zoli’s client—Zoli is an “asportist,” see: a sort of wizard who disappears (or “asports”) objects and then reappears (or “apports”) objects in a different place—lives on the “upslope or Buda side of the river.” The square in which the two characters meet, the Oktagon, is “jumping.” Again: this is a writer who historically finds poetry in our infrastructure, in how our political and ethical imaginations alike are both determined by and reflected in our approach to constructing the real. (We think here of Slothrop noting how the peaked gabled roofs of German churches “endure, like monuments to Analysis,” inspiring mathematicians who “three hundred years ago . . . were learning to break the cannonball’s rise and fall into stairsteps of range and height.”) The environment in Shadow Ticket, though, is figured as something closer to a Beckett play: an abstracted plane in which characters emerge, talk, and then evaporate, as new and slippery customers enter stage-right to replace them.
There is also the way in which Pynchon’s labile raw material—history itself—is here refigured into something closer to lore. That is, Pynchon of course has his fun and takes liberties with the quotidian minutiae of history. In so doing, though, he obliquely argues, perpendicular to Fredric Jameson, that history cannot be “touched.” Indeed, as Jameson argues in his masterpiece The Political Unconscious, “History is the experience of Necessity”: the “reorganization of otherwise chronological and ‘linear’ data” into a story that tells us why (not how) what happened “had to happen the way it did.” Thus, “History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force.” We can only feel it: History is, for Jameson, “what hurts.”
Pynchon’s approach to history, in this sense, is micrological. While Pynchon critiques the narrative structures and reified representations of history, he does so inductively; that is, he simultaneously attends to those causes of history: attends to all the contradictory, microscopic, and even ludicrous energies that become laminated as official narrative and simple cause-and-effect diachrony. Remixing history as such feels truly novelistic. In revealing reified history as little more than the awkward crystallization of infinite variegated interests and energies, Pynchon—like any great realist novelist—in turn considers how simple decisions and hang-ups, neuroses and obsessions, reverberate over time, ultimately congealing into something simultaneously abounding with and devoid of meaning.
But, crucially: we yet exit these novels with a deeper feeling for what these very real competing interests and energies are. Pynchon does not necessarily invent his raw material whole-cloth; he invents fictional characters to then deposit among real infrastructures and ideologies. The fact that his protagonists are often, frankly, idiot-shamuses affords the intimattion of historicized totality. His idiots discover subterranean energies and structures that are very real, world-historically speaking; or other characters explain to them (or explain away) concrete historical contexts; or he embeds real history via digressive side narratives. In the case of this latter: the story of Byron the Bulb in Gravity’s Rainbow considers the very historically concrete Phoebus lightbulb cartel, and likewise how this cartel—run “pretty much . . . by the General Electric Company in America”—provided Nazi Germany a price-fixed edge regarding tungsten carbide: “The guidelines settled on were $37–$90 a pound in Germany, $200–$400 a pound in the U.S. This directly governed the production of machine tools, and thus all areas of light and heavy industry. When the War came, some people thought it unpatriotic of GE to have given Germany an edge like that. But nobody with any power. Don’t worry.” While Byron is invented, the imaginative context that activates his creation is not. Simple as it might be to say, you basically always come out of a Pynchon novel smarter about the movements of history—on both its grand and microscopic scale.
In Shadow Ticket, though, these reified representations of history have a way of simply dissolving into background lore—particularly when the novel shifts settings to Europe in its latter half. Considering that a healthy chunk of the novel occurs in Budapest, it is, again, odd that nothing is made, for instance, of Hungary’s unique historical and linguistic situation.
That is, Magyar, Hungary’s official language, operates in central Europe as a living palimpsest of displacement. Hungary was first settled by Prince Árpád in the ninth century, who organized tribes from the Pontian-Caspian steppe and rode east, bringing with them a Uralic language. This language, which becomes Magyar and is formalized as Hungarian, is uniquely singular in Europe, belonging as it does to neither the Latin, Germanic, Slavic, or Turkish lineage. This singularity breeds a unique form of nationalism, one predicated on imperial resistance as much as it is on dominance. Indeed, the Austrian-Hungarian empire is a bit of an awkward misnomer: Hungary’s German-speaking population was typically privileged, whereas the Magyar population was imagined as backwards and parochial. Thus, as Hungarian historian John Lukacs (not that Lukács!) notes in Budapest 1900, nineteenth-century Hungarian nationalism takes on a “near-maniac” intensity, with a particularly emblematic example being the pronouncements of historian István Horváth, who argued that the “Magyars had descended from Adam and Eve, and that the ancient Greek language was Magyar in origin.” The singularity of a language whose closest relative is Finnish—and which, to that point, it is occasionally facetiously stated that Finnish and Magyar are about as close as English and Persian—activates an almost solipsistic nationalism, in which all of history is percolated through the original primacy implied by true individuality.
So, for an author always attuned to the ways in which territory and language are bound up—who can forget Tchitcherine and the Kirgiz Light?—it is just, again, odd for this to not be considered on the registers of either narrative or discourse.
This is not the only political/historical structuration that Pynchon evades vis-à-vis Hungary. Leopold Bloom (or Lipóti Virág, as Joyce dubs him) is, after all, perhaps literature’s most famous Hungarian Jew. The Danube River that sunders Budapest into two likewise articulates a line dividing language, occupation, and religion: a borderline that feels ripe for Pynchon but which goes unacknowledged. And Theodor Herzl—the founder of modern Zionism—was Hungarian. Indeed, Zionism as such remains almost entirely unacknowledged in Shadow Ticket, beyond a predictable joke in which an inchoate Krav Maga is referred to as “Jew Jiutsu.”
I am not necessarily demanding here that every author currently working embeds a perspicacious critique of Zionism. But this is the same author who once wrote: “It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zionists out and doing, finally: what will drive you out of your soup-kettle? Has it already happened? Was it tonight’s attack and deliverance? Will you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait there for your Director to come?” This is our writer most attuned to surveillance, capital, and territorial violence, the triangulation of which basically engenders Israel as the Ideal State.
Further, as academic Helga Tawil-Souri explicates in her essay “Israel’s Telecommunications Lines and Digital Surveillance Routes,” the state of Israel and its borders are built along the parts of the land that are already embedded in telecommunications network. British and Ottoman railway and shipping lines, developed in the 19th century, later map the development of telecommunication infrastructures. Britain’s particular development of telecommunication networks in Mandate Palestine between 1920 and 1948 was intended to serve British exports and Zionist interests. As Tawil-Souri writes: “If the land could speak, it would tell us where the State of Israel would emerge: [within cities that were] wired and connected with more robust and expansive infrastructure.” Insofar as surveillance networks rely on physical infrastructure, then “[t]elecommunications’ territorial existence undergirded the territorial location of the State of Israel.” Shadow Ticket’s MI3 characters and temporal setting—1932—alike trace an epoch in which the interarticulation of surveillance and territory is directly observable in contemporary ramifications. And, sue me, but yes: I think it’s a little disappointing that this history is elided.
In Shadow Ticket, real history frequently dissolves into the background, adding a density that, if you’re aware of it, sure, can occasionally prove rich; but likewise which, more often than not, suggests an elision of what we—or, at least, I—love about Pynchon so much in the first place. Pynchon’s richly historicized environments simply cease feeling real. In Shadow Ticket, history is transposed into lore: a textural form of knowledge that maybe enriches immediate experience but which is neither required of nor guaranteed to the reader.
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With this, I’ll end my adumbration of what I perceive as Shadow Ticket’s most emblematic weaknesses. It is not so much that the novel is yet another “Pynchon Lite” when I wanted a Gravity’s Rainbow, Part II. No, Shadow Ticket can read as stunted in elementary ways—ways that feel essential to loving any Pynchon novel.
Though something about the novel stuck with me, even after the second read. Particularly a couple-three passages towards the end of the novel, enunciating the historical ignorance that affords the rise of fascism. These passages, I believe, crystallize part of Pynchon’s project with Shadow Ticket. That is, Pynchon suggests that nascent state fascism cannot be imagined as sheer tyranny. Rather, state fascism as imagined by Pynchon is enabled in the first place by what poststructuralists par excellence Deleuze & Guattari would call “microfascisms.” With the bit of space remaining, I’d like to argue for a way of reading Shadow Ticket that takes its aesthetic limitations as, rather, formal affordances. Maybe this is just cope, a way of recuperating a novel by an author I love. But let’s just call this a “generous reading” and move on.
“Microfascisms” are those forms of fascism that begin at the “micropolitical” and “molecular” levels. Before being organized into formal state apparatuses, institutions, and infrastructures, fascism is first visible in looser, what D&G call “supple,” forms of social being. These latter include “postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc.” So—rhyming on the one hand with Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling,” and on the other hand with Said’s own “structures of attitude and reference”—the novel form, a supple form tracing as it does other supple forms, thereby becomes a crucial way of articulating microfascisms. Before becoming legible in infrastructure and real social space, the desire for desire’s own repression can be attended to in culturally dominant forms of storytelling, reflecting as they do these selfsame attitudes, postures, and semiotic systems. The form that, well, form takes is, after all, contingent on its content—its raw social material.
Thus, fascism, when it arrives, is not imagined by the people as a tyranny: it is instead witnessed as a sort of liberation, a total emancipation of desire from supple subtlety into organized state politics and ethics. The question becomes: How can we spot the desire for desire’s repression in our own everyday behaviors, postures, and attitudes?
To reintroduce Shadow Ticket: Taking place as the novel does during the emergence of Nazi state fascism, Shadow Ticket perhaps traces, through the suppleness of form, the attitudes and semiotics of pre-emergent fascism. We can thus read Shadow Ticket’s limitations as a historiographical move, rather than an expression of what the mature Trela gestures to as “generalized mental debility.” How might the molecular desire for fascism infect our very aesthetic forms, the modes by which we narrativize and make sense of our world? A consideration on the register of form evades the dull move of historical comparison, of using the past as a yardstick against which we can measure our present. It rather allows us to attend to our own microfascisms: to meditate on our own postures, attitudes, and semiotic systems, and how these might be expressed and identifiable in the ways we tell stories about our present.
Shadow Ticket’s difficulties hence mushroom into a form more expansive than one may initially think. The novel’s elision of territorial history and built environment, for instance, no longer reads as a relaxed approach to and focus on the story at hand. We can now read this as an allegorization of fascism’s—both micro- and macropolitical alike—theory of history. That is, specifically, as an allegorization of how fascism evacuates historical meaning from social space. In de-historicizing our environment, fascism in turn disavows historical structures of repression, further mystifying real social relations. Things just are because they are; a retreat to the comfort of sheer ontology thereby shores up complacency with and complicity in very real histories of subjugation. And in evacuating history, fascism can thus present itself as a radical break, rather than what it is: the continuation of a millennia-long story of oppression. Presenting itself as something truly new allows fascism to posture as emancipation, figuring the revolutionary dream of desire’s absolute deterritorialization.
We can even read those long, spatially-oriented sentences—so quietly odd in the context of Pynchon’s oeuvre—as reflecting likewise the molecular logics of microfascism. It is indeed Jameson’s famous formulation, in Postmodernism, that postmodernism is “dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time.” The championing of space over and above time engenders the same disregard for the past as does the transposition of history into lore. Moreover, Pynchon’s displacement of this generic postmodern tic—from the post-WWII organization of capital to the pre-WWII rise of State fascism—ultimately suggests a deeply historical approach that is only ostensibly belied by Shadow Ticket’s sentences. That is, Pynchon disavows any notion of sudden beginnings. Our current forms of domination and imagination alike are seeded within the deep past: they just await the moment in which they can find real expression.
Ultimately, a consideration of Shadow Ticket on this subtly molecular level reveals something more profound about our current moment than can any liberal protest novel. Shadow Ticket becomes an historiographical broadcast from State fascism’s inchoate moment. We are invited not to perform a simple comparison on the level of content. We are invited to read closely the novel, considering in turn how its formal postures and attitudes might reflect the desire for fascism—even as many of its characters verbally claim a politics of anti-fascism. We are, again, here reminded of Deleuze & Guattari: “It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.” It’s just easier to talk: to move from dehistoricized zone to dehistoricized zone, engaging in snappy dialogue exchanges that, ultimately, add up to nothing.
I want to end by considering Shadow Ticket’s ending—or, I shall say, “endings,” insofar as there are three. In the first ending, a clandestine submarine crew, reminiscent of Squalidozzi’s crew in Gravity’s Rainbow and imagining themselves as an “encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time,” shuttles Bruno Airmont, the “Al Capone of Cheese,” off to exile. But this is not a simple spatial exile. And it isn’t really a temporal exile either, not a time-machine dip into another time. The crew’s destination is left delightfully ambiguous. This first ending ends mid-sentence: “Whatever counter-domain of exile this is they have wandered into, they will be headed not back into any sunrise but west, toward a frontier as yet only unsuspected, as the days sweep over them—”
We cannot know where they are headed insofar as it must be a place that is actually completely new. Where fascism proffers the myth of the revolutionary beginning, the submarine brings Airmont, capitalist par excellence, to an alternate history, an alternate world, where he cannot do any harm: and which, is thus, unrepresentable within our current forms.
But then the novel ends another two times. In the first sort of epilogue—signalled within the book by a mere paragraph break—Hicks is visited out of the blue by Terike, the motorcycle-riding Hungarian badass who has hitherto been the object of Hicks’s desire and who has likewise shown little interest in Hicks. The two share a very quick, very snappy dialogue exchange, ending with her abruptly kissing him: “She kisses him.” It is awkward, odd, even seemingly out of character for Terike, about whom we know very little aside from that she loves another man. After another paragraph break comes a letter to Hicks from Skeet Wheeler, a teenaged Milwaukee street urchin. Skeet tells Hicks he misses him, that he’s headed out West with his girl Zin, that the two of them have “sunsets to chase.” And yet again, this ending feels odd precisely because it likewise feels almost emotionally dishonest: Skeet and Hicks seemed like buddies, sure, but given that it has been 177 pages—over half the novel—since Skeet was last mentioned, it comes as a bit of a surprise to end with a reminder of the relationship between Hicks and Skeet.
But I wonder if these two endings represent, on a formal level, the ways that novels cannot proffer anything like escape. Contrary to a contemporary laziness endemic to certain literary critics—public and academic alike—who, so desperate to arrogate political relevance to their work that they conclude that fiction can help us “imagine new futures,” maybe these two endings instead formally project that impossibility. Escape from this world, into a whole new formal logic of organization and being, requires something like magic, and thus seems incapable of representation in our forms of storytelling. Indeed, our very forms themselves now seem tainted: there is, perhaps, no “anti-fascist” form of narrative that does not reproduce the very logics of domination that it is trying to disarticulate. While that first ending gestures to a genuine line of flight, these latter two more traditional denouements—one guy gets the girl, the other rides off into the sunset—trace the anxious need to supply some sense of an ending: to craft a narrative that is closed off, whole, and, above all, organized. To maintain our expectations of desire. To suggest that getting the girl and going West are all that stories need to do—or all that they can do. These two false endings simply do not work. They are awkward, sutured on, as if, after the vaudeville hook has pulled the performer offstage, the nervous MC has rushed in to assert that, it’s okay, everything will go on as it ever was, stay in your seats, and we’ll have more acts out here soon: and here, here’s that kiss you thought you wanted so bad: and fine, here: here’s that rideout into the sunset that you wanted, and here’s the forgotten child sidekick’s maturation into manhood that you wanted, and here, yes: here’s the closing invocation that friendship conquers all, and that all we need is each other: yes, and here’s that reminder that things don’t need to change anytime soon.
Cobi Chiodo Powell
Cobi Chiodo Powell is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. He is a contributing writer for the Cleveland Review of Books.