Music as Dialogic Sounding Device in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

Abstract

Combining key aspects of literary, musical, and cultural theory, my thesis investigates the significance of music in the work of the contemporary American novelist Thomas Pynchon. His novels, along with a handful of short stories, are so saturated with musical references and fictional songs that it borders on eccentricity. It is my argument that understanding musical presence and the way it is represented here is of crucial importance to our understanding one of the overarching themes of Pynchon’s writing: that of communication, and specifically the persistence of communication from the margins of society in the face of restricting and divisive political forces. My aim is to establish a positive view of Pynchon’s representation of music as a site of social intercourse, in the literal sense – a shared territory between language and artistic expression, through which both listener and performer are placed in a socially communicative framework; but also metaphorically, as a model for dialogic interaction that can undercut official discourse. As with all things in Pynchon, hope is tempered with a degree of cynicism: his depiction of musical media, for example, is varied and complex, and can be seen as a commentary on issues such as authenticity, the commodification of art, and corporate co-optation of subcultural expression. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of music in Pynchon is such that the attempt to communicate is persistently foregrounded. Chapter one establishes the techniques by which Pynchon incorporates the subject of music into his writing, before setting the significance of the author’s enterprise against the light of critical debates concerning the social efficacy and political energy of musical expression. The subsequent four chapters offer an in-depth look at Pynchon’s engagement with music in the light of themes that feed into the broader, overarching compulsion signalled above.