Giuseppe Episcopo (University of Edinburgh)
My proposal is focused on approaching the literary plot from the perspective of fractal geometry in Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day. The paper will consider the fractal nature of narrative forms of discourse that, juxtaposing non-linear mosaic narrative with time-related sequences, are fixed in a non-Euclidean space, so that the basic coordinates of “Inside”, “Outside”, and “Center”, are far from a stable form. Mise en abyme, Chinese box structures, frame and crosscutting diegetic patterns: Pynchon’s novels define a new paradigm of mimesis, a mimesis that emerges from an alternative world perception of science: non-linear systems, dissipative systems characterized by turbulence (rather than control and order), relativity, complexity theory, stochastic theory.
Those qualities are especially expressed in specific loci, such as the “Selva” during the Medieval Age. In Thomas Pynchon’s novels, both the “Zone”, the warfare sector in GR, and the “bilocated areas” that abound in ATD can be considered as a topothesia or chorography, ancient terms related to descriptions of places and regions. To consider the “Zone”, the Zone of Silence, fractal coastlines, doubling microcosms as postmodern “Selva” means thinking of their description as a literary topos: to be more precise, the topos of locus horridus, which is a variation of the locus amoenus. With the rise of courtly romance in verse such as La Chanson de Roland, we see — according to E.R. Curtius — the emergence of the important motif of the wild forest, as exemplified by the “selva selvaggia et aspra e forte” of Dante’s Commedia and by Percival growing up in the forest. The manner in which the locus amoenus is embedded in other canonical works such as Le Roman de Thèbes, El Cid and Orlando Furioso explains why this textual locus is often home to narratives of misfortune, the supernatural, and suspension of traditional images of reality.
The dualism locus amoenus/locus horridus has been a central motif from the Middle Ages right through to the Postmodern remote era. The Pynchonian zones’ quality of infinite permutation and fertility, their familiar/unfamiliar features, their boundary’s aspect are all at the same time far from, as well as close to, the chaotic range of shifting possibilities of strangeness in the European epic of the sixteenth century. In making a comparison between the topos of the locus amoenus/locus horridus and the GR and ATD fractal zones’ topothesia, the Book XIII of Tasso’s poem Jerusalem Delivered comes to mind. The postmodern “zone”, just like Saron’s forest, is a locus amoenus turned into a locus horridus and placed in No Man’s Land. Those are the regions where personal myth becomes case and cause of common obsession: as a breach in the static “order,” the shadow of the uncanny falls on the reality. This dissolution, this interregnum, this in-between time can be said to represent the postmodern selva where novel’s characters become — just as the Heideggerian Abgeschiedene — parted from their homeland and simultaneously a-part from/of it.