Is Edward Snowden Thomas Pynchon?

Of course he isn't. The former National Security Agency intelligence wonk now bearing the displaced burden, holed up as he is in Moscow's airport, of being the next in a line of on-the-lam whistleblowing leakers is probably, certainly, most definitely not the guy whose dense and arcane fiction has earned him the National Book Award in 1973 for Gravity's Rainbow, perennial candidacy buzz for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and devout followers who pore over his stories, or at least say they do.

So don't get it wrong. That title up there? That is me being facetious. Deal.

And yet. And yet! The two international men of mystery have a lot in common. The deeper you burrow down through the rabbit hole--you're a bit character wading through a steady leak of state-spying secrets while rereading something like Mason & Dixon for the sixth time (you psycho!) in Snowden's (Pynchon's) would-be bio-fic authored by Pynchon (Snowden)--Edward Snowden starts looking a whole lot like Thomas Pynchon. Or it is Pynchon who starts to look a lot like Snowden?

Either way, it's almost uncanny. If you've got the conspiratorial streak in you, or if you just get a kick out of a batshit conspiratorial yarn, here's what I mean.

THEY ARE VIRTUALLY FACELESS 

Let's start with the most (un)glaringly shared trait: Snowden and Pynchon are not ones for photos. Not at all. I can count the total number of existing images (believed to be) of the leaker and the writer on less than two hands, and that's being generous. Which is pretty remarkable, no?

True, Pynchon has been playing the anonymous card for decades. Avoiding the cameras and the press is his thing. It is why he is Thomas Pynchon, who like Snowden never wanted it to be about him. It is why "Thomas Pynchon" has transcended the possibly-still-snaggle-toothed 76-year-old who spent two years in the Navy before picking up the pen and reinventing the wheel. It's why most of his cult are all about just letting the man be. It's why his fans and even his critics lament the thought of shithead paparazzi stalking 'ol Pynchon on the streets of New York City. Dude just wants to be left the hell alone.

"Let me be ambiguous," he chided CNN over the phone in 1997. "I prefer not to be photographed."

But that was 1997. In the relentless march of technology, 1997 is basically 50 years ago. It's 20-goddamn-13 now, and you'd be an idiot to think those very shithead paparrazi and scoop-driven local photographers aren't still trying to get the shot of Pynchon or, increasingly, of Snowden. And if you don't have some sort of camera on your person, or otherwise aren't inhabiting semi- to full-on urban milieus literally anywhere across the world, where near-blanket closed-circuit surveillance is seemingly unavoidable, you're either the Luddite of Pynchon's catalogue or rightfully on Tor, or both.

Someway, somehow, Snow and Pynch remain hidden in plain sight. Which of course only stokes the intrigue.

THEY HAVE THE "SAME" NAMES

OK, not really. (Just go with it.) They're a single character off. (Two if you include Pynchon's "Jr.") E-d-w-a-r-d T-h-o-m-a-s S-n-o-w-d-e-n (18); T-h-o-m-a-s R-u-g-g-l-e-s P-y-n-c-h-o-n (19). But hey, Pynchon's first name is Snowden's middle name. That has to mean something.

THEY AREN'T REAL

Thomas Pynchon? He's not a person at all. He's really the handle for a backroom panel of literary wizards writing collectively just to fuck with everyone. Edward Snowden? He's actually a gay alien.

THEY BANDAGE THE BLEEDING EDGE

Pychon is dropping a new novel--his eigth--on September 17. It's called Bleeding Edge. Penguin Press, Pynchon's longtime publisher, calls it "a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet." True to Pynchon's knack for detective romps, Maxine Tarnow, Bleeding Edge's protagonist, gets caught up in some serious shit after poking around the finances and goings on of Booz Allen Hamilton some big computer-security firm along Silicon Alley. It's this uncovering of what's perhaps extremely privileged and sensitive information that finds Tarnow:

mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

So reads the novel's official description, at least. We should believe all that only after we've read the thing. For now, we're left with this first-page tease:

The point, though, is that both Pynchon and Snowden take pains to lay bare the dangers and sweeping transgressions that may come along with using new tools that may seem to do the trick (and more!) in the shadows, but that are slipshod or largely untested, and thus only serve to make things worse for everyone in the end.

Which is to say they warn against not those tools and technologies that are already available en masse, but rather those technologies, software, programs, and beyond in use by only a select few today, and that will remain so new, so advanced so as to remain out of the reach of the masses until far into the future--and that's if they even reach the point of trickling out to the everyperson. It's the difference between, say, your email account and the algorithms behind PRISM; between the clunky geo-survey tools in Mason & Dixon and the dreaded Schwarzgerät ("black device") of Gravity's Rainbow. (Maybe Doc Sportello's piffy weed in Inherent Vice is the great equilizer?)

Think of it this way. Edward Snowden and Thomas Pynchon, in their respective projects, take good, long looks over the precipice of such bleeding-edge technology to  see what's to come, or possibly already here, and then spead the news. In Snowden's case, it meant spending a few years at the bottom of the cliff as a government spy before saying enough is enough, and giving everything up to pull the curtain off the whole system, the whole global-digital dragnet, in a sort of self immolation. In Pynchon's case, I'm admittedly taking a big leap here--again, Bleeding Edge isn't out yet. So who knows, I'm maybe wildly off base here. But if the reclusive author's treatment of technology, which across his entire body of work, as one Pynchon scholar told me last year, "doesn't necessarily present technology as a good thing," is any indication, it means crafting his most "recent" reflection on the slow unspooling of the West.

THEY ARE THE UNRAVELERS 

As my colleague and self-professed Pynchon-head DJ Pangburn recently pointed out, the reclusive author is not known for sparing his characters and everything in their fictional worlds from the slow crumble of entropy. Like any closed system, including this planet and the entire cosmos, the far-flung weirdos and heros cutting across Pynchon's tomes are all suspect to a breaking down--of mind, body, and beyond.

"Every system succumbs to an unraveling," Pangburn wrote.

And maybe, just maybe, does that go for the dragnet. For what Snowden, who's expected to meet today with human rights lawyers in that Moscow airport international transit zone, would tell you is just the ground floor of a towering spire of Spying.

"Now," mused Pynchon in Mason & Dixon, "nothing in the Sky looks the same."

@thebanderson