Clément Lévy (Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne)
In most of his novels, Thomas Pynchon mentions diverse theories on the planet Earth. Lost continents, the history of the universe or the physical laws that explain it are involved in these hypotheses. Some of them are even litterary myths which were told and retold in different literary genres: the lost continents of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu, the Hollow Earth theory and the Flat Earth Society appear quite often in Pynchon’s œuvre. Other allusions are perhaps more obscure and uncanny: no clear answer is given to the reader who wonders by which hidden ways travel the Inconvenience in Against the Day or the Golden Fang in Inherent Vice. On a smaller scale, unknown countries are to be found in most of Pynchon’s novel, from Vheissu to Shambala and Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island.
These attempts in “parageography” (Mason & Dixon, 141) introduce the reader with the widest domains of the author’s imagination. They may engage us in a deep study of ancient tales, strange theories and sometimes real conspiracies.
But my goal in this paper is not to confront Pynchon with older versions of these myths that were proposed by Plato, E. A. Poe, E. R. Burroughs or H. P. Lovecraft. I wish to study how his versions of these myths of Earth build a series of fictional worlds that help produce a consistent discourse on ecology.
Thomas Schaub already studied the presence of ecological discourse in Gravity’s Rainbow (“The Environmental Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow and the Ecological Context.” Pynchon Notes 42–43 (1999): 59–72) but I want to expand the scope of my paper to the whole corpus of Pynchon’s novels, which was not the case in an earlier article by Douglas Keesey (“Nature and the Supernatural: Pynchon’s Ecological Ghost Stories.”Pynchon Notes 18–19 (1986): 84–95).
Moreover, I wish to confront Pynchon’s myths of Earth with famous theories on the world as an autopoietic system that were developped in the last forty years, as Gaia (J. Lovelock) and the living Earth that M. Serres recently called “biogée” (Michel Serres. Temps des crises. Paris: Le Pommier, 2009).