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After a brief comparison of Ian Hacking’s intellectual history The Taming of Chance to William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions (1955), chapter two analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), and argues that its sophisticated use of narrative chance creates an aesthetic response to totalitarian political fictions. One of the first big postmodern American novels, V. merits sustained analysis in the context of chance’s role in Cold War culture because it thematizes the function of narrative chance. Pynchon suggests a novelist’s own potential complicity in creating a fictional universe in which putative moments of chance are actually products of authorial design. V.’s innovative form is a way to work out the inclusion of chance in a novel and to level a critique of both totalitarian political systems and also Cold War norms back in the States, a comparison that became widespread in American fiction in the latter half of the 20^th century. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), and Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991).

This chapter argues that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) not only represents the temporality of capitalism but also contests it through an aesthetic strategy of idleness or sloth. It analyzes how Pynchon recuperates nineteenth-century traditions of anarchism, work refusal, rioting, and the commune as a way of responding to contemporary conditions of labor under capitalism. Putting Pynchon into conversation with the Italian Autonomist Marxists—most notably, Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti—it shows how Against the Day frames class struggle as a conflict between capitalism and workers regarding the social organization of time. It explains that Pynchon links the utopian reinvention of the United States to a political version of idleness, or a willful refusal of capitalist efficiency. It also situates Pynchon’s utopian imagination in respect to the social forms of the riot and the commune.

The typescript drafts of Thomas Pynchon’s first novel V. demonstrate the depth and extent to which Pynchon struggled to come to terms with the influence of logical positivism. Although Pynchon would strike most of the extended passages on positivism and the fact/value problem, traces remain in the published version. Pynchon explicitly refers to positivist doctrines such as the verificationist criterion of meaning and the emotive theory of ethics, particularly with reference to the word “love.” His reference to the first proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in the “Mondaugen’s Story” chapter testifies to his critique of literary modernism and logical positivism alike: their aspirations for totality are premised on a false and solipsistic concept of completeness, one that simply ignores that which falls outside of its purview, including questions of value and the voices of objectified colonial subjects. In response, Pynchon develops a negative aesthetic strategy that represents an ethical relation to others based on acknowledging their status not as sovereign subjects but as material beings, a relation characterized not by totalizing representation but by incomplete knowledge.

This chapter examines Thomas Pynchon’s trilogy of California novels, The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and Vineland. Pynchon’s novels create a model in which there are “two Americas,” the mainstream one represented by the American way of life, with its interlinking of political and commercial interests; and the true, alternative republic whose promise is perpetually betrayed. Pynchon, I suggest, uses the logic of American exceptionalism in order to argue that America perpetually fails to achieve the ideal state it imagines itself to be, producing a left-leaning narrative of national self-betrayal. In these novels, the promise of authenticity resides with the outcasts, the left-out and leftover, who have no place in a mainstream America that is wholly inhabited by consumer culture and so retreat to hidden enclaves where the promise of the republic may be revived or reinvented.

This chapter aligns artist Robert Smithson with Thomas Pynchon, a novelist whose treatment of ruins mediates his preoccupation with time, as well as his celebrated critique of conventional historiography. Both were considered key figures in the emergence of postmodernism within their respective disciplines, and shared many preoccupations during the 1960s and 1970s, such as entropy and the paradox of representation without resemblance. Moreover, while Smithson is best known for his site-specific projects in visual and plastic media, he was also a prolific writer of narrative and essayistic prose. Pynchon is most readily appreciated for his experimentation with narrative form, he was equally interested in material sites, or what he calls “nonverbal reality”.

This chapter positions Thomas Pynchon's encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow alongside recent models of human-object interactions such as biomimetics, actor-network theory, and new vitalism. Pynchon's characters view the social histories of two important objects in the novel—the V-2 rocket and celluloid plastic—as either linear or circular. In the case of the former, objects are designed to maintain their structural integrity over time, which completely separates producers and consumers and, for Pynchon, catalyzes the environmental crisis of the late twentieth century. In the case of the latter, commodities, like natural materials, operate in a constant state of flux and thus have no singular use-value. This ecological model of an object's social life destabilizes the producer-consumer divide, reclaims the commodity as a site of creative re-production, and partially ameliorates the environmental crisis unleashed by industrial design procedures.

Mason is an astronomer, Dixon a surveyor, and their paired scientific skills allow them to score with mathematical precision an eerily straight border that begins south of Philadelphia and scrolls forth westward. Like all parallels, the Mason-Dixon Line is written in invisible ink, but that hardly undercuts its powers and presence. Thousands of trees disappear in its path, thousands of indigenous people, too. The mapping project, a triumph of the Age of Reason, is therefore imbued with an ongoing production of the spectral. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, though written five centuries after Columbus's diary, shares with that text a profound preoccupation with an America created by absent presences.

This chapter presents a reading of Thomas Pynchon’s novel V.. It examines how it presents the history of late capitalism by tracing the emergence of biopolitical forms of control in the first-world metropole and the colonial periphery. The novel describes a series of encounters between people who construct themselves as subjects of history (colonizer) and people who are constructed as the objects of history(colonial people), and portrays the inability of the colonizer to have control over the colonial people. It demonstrates the resistance to biopolitics and the shift from a state-administered biopolitics and thanatopolitics to a more economic-based regime of biopolitical and thanatopolitical production.

The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.

A careful analysis of an early story by Thomas Pynchon, “The Secret Integration,” shows that it exemplifies all the major features of post-modern narrative, as identified by Fredric Jameson and others. Post-modern narrative differs from the post-modern condition in having as its goal a revelation through fiction of what our condition these days is. The problem with this periodization, however, is that a short novel such as Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” one of his “Exemplary Tales” (1613), already contains, no doubt in a different way from Pynchon, every one of the features that are said uniquely to characterize post-modern fiction. A full analysis of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” suggests that period characterizations are always suspect. Cervantes’s greatness partly lies in the way he employed four hundred years ago all the narrative devices and themes that in different mixes would characterize fiction in the West down to the present day.

This chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. The prominence of mathematics in this book is exceptional even for Pynchon. Two of the main characters are at least part-time mathematicians; Hilbert, Minkowski, and Gibbs make cameo appearances; and several chapters are set in the Göttingen mathematics department. Inger H. Dalsgaard suggested that “a novel like Against the Day may be read in non-linear fashion, in keeping with the operations of a time machine.” No critic, however—not even the “seventeen of the foremost heavyweights from over forty years of Pynchon criticism” who contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon—seems to have taken seriously the possibility, which is explored in this chapter, that his narrative style might in fact be quadratic.

This chapter looks at novels marked by various types of excess. In Pynchon’s great work Gravity’s Rainbow, the reader is assaulted with erudition, puns, and possibilities. At the same time, the excess is directed toward logical ends, and it mimics, in a fashion, the insanity connected with the Second World War and the potential for nuclear annihilation. The book also, within the context of the mainstreaming of pornography and excess in films premiering during in 1972, deals with domination and submission in sexual relations. Such themes appear raw in Delany’s novel from this period, Hogg, which features the varieties of sexual practice—including the grossest. His major science fiction novel from this period, Dhalgren, is about identity, community, and destruction, as well as the potential for liberation, with a storyline that is meant to lead one down various blind alleys of comprehension, in the mode of postmodernism. They were exploring transgression with abandon, as were others in this period, such as film director John Waters.

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

This chapter considers what total mobilization during World War II meant for American culture at large, beginning with a reading of Joan Didion’s first novel, Run River, which depicts the transformations wrought upon California by the war, alongside a 1966 article Didion wrote about the legacy of the war in Hawaii, analyzing how wartime demands for mobilization affected civilians and discussing how historical remembrance functions through the mediation of memorials, narrative, and generational memory. Didion’s later work, concerned with the limits of empire, reconnects us to Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, two dissimilar novels that nonetheless share key interests, specifically an interest in total war as a form of capitalism. One way they differ, however, is that while Shaw’s novel finds ethical meaning in the American effort to end fascist genocide, Pynchon’s novel abjures any ethical or political meaning at all, seeing the war as a metaphysical force beyond human reckoning. The chapter finishes by following the transformation of World War II in the 1970s from political history into metaphysical myth through Pynchon’s novel, Paul Fussell’s critical masterwork The Great War and Modern Memory, and George Lucas’s film Star Wars.

This final chapter brings the historical argument to a close by examining forms of immanent critique in post-World War II American novels attempting to grapple with the geopolitics of the so-called “American Century.” Particular attention is paid to motifs of dangling, drifting, and “yo-yoing” in novels by Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon as well as relations between the irony of immanence and postmodern, postcolonial, and anti-imperialist re-imaginings of historical narrativization and representation. The chapter concludes by focusing on Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony in order to consider how the trope of “ground zero” first emerged in reference to the testing of the atom bomb in the American Southwest, and how the military-industrial development of uranium mining and nuclear power remain closely connected to concerns about American empire and cultural, ecological, and planetary survival in the post-9/11 era.

The millennium and fears of its ‘bug’ confirmed how far the modern world remained in thrall to exacting temporalities. Some early C21st-century novels – e.g. by W.G. Sebald– extended the resistive strategies of modernism, alongside recent ones described in Chapter Six. Others – by Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon – suggested different strategies for evading temporal constraints, and also some of the latter’s origins in the eighteenth century ‘Age of Reason’ and Industrial Revolution. Examining this age clarifies how far the rise of the novel (in its modern mode) may be attributed to newly-exacting influences of the clock on contemporary life, and how extensively these were resisted by early practitioners of the form, particularly Laurence Sterne. Resistance to the clock’s orderings can of course be further retraced, though Shakespeare’s plays – even back to Roman times – with much C20th writing suggesting it shares in wider, perennial antinomies between human reason, or agency, and nature. Though perhaps perennial, such antinomies should be seen as historically specific in scale and nature, and particularly inflected within C20th imagination. Tracing this inflection, as this study has shown, offers a powerful means of understanding the century’s history and the ways this has shaped its imagination and narrative forms.