Thomas Pynchon and the postmodern language

In "Thomas Pynchon and The Postmodern Language" I have attempted formal analyses of Pynchon's three major novels. I accept Fredric Jameson's argument that the essential problem embodied in postmodern texts like Pynchon's is the problem of late capitalism itself: how can the individual situate him- or herself in relation to a multi-national economic system with dimensions far beyond the grasp of the individual. In the Introduction I discuss the relation between Pynchon's curiously detached, amoral narrative voice, which refuses to place for the reader the episodes it describes, and the unsituated quality of all language transmitted through the mass media. Pynchon scrupulously avoids defusing the anxiety-producing detachment and ambiguity of his narrative voice with a visible authorial persona. I discuss V.. which presents thematically and embodies formally the concept of reification, in terms of Walter Benjamin's conception of allegory, and analyze "Mondaugen's Story" as an example of the moral neutrality of language transmitted through the mass media. The Crying of Lot 49 is an attempt to portray the experience of cultural fragmentation (in the 1960's) from the point of view of an American with no culture or community of her own. Dramatizing a strong notion of cultural relativism, Pynchon leaves his story incomplete, stranding the reader at that enchanting and solipsistic aesthetic distance at which the character is held during her adventures. Gravity's Rainbow is a full-blown example of postmodern ecriture, composed of manufactured objects, both of the order of the signifier and signified, constructed in a present tense pastiche which reproduces their generative forms or models rather than exploiting their expressive potentials. Mediated by a voice which yields itself to the unconscious fantasy evoked by each form or object, a voice of pure pathos without ethos, these images are linked by a variety of plots which lead back always to the causation of an ungraspable totality of relations, Them. This system is surveyed by an additional, quasi-lyrical analytic element so iron-clad in its sociological reductivism as to become yet another reified element of the totality--all interwoven in a textual movement so unpredictable as to deserve the name schizophrenia.