Seán Molloy (University of Edinburgh)
The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of Pynchon’s politics by reference to the influences of Mikhail Bakunin and Friedrich Nietzsche upon his conceptualization of both the human condition and the future of humanity. Pynchon does not refer to either author explicitly in his work, but a close critical reading of the Traverse novels (Vineland and Against the Day) reveals that Pynchon is effectively detailing two kinds of resistance to the System that he outlines in the most terrifying manner in Gravity’s Rainbow, but which is present in all his novels from The Crying of Lot 49 onwards.
The most obvious political debt of Pynchon is to Bakunin and anarchism in general. Against the Day is typified by a sympathy towards the various strands of anarchism, both American and European, that were current in the nineteenth century. The Traverse-Becker clan resist and the flee the power of the System in Against the Day and Vineland and they constitute some of the more sympathetic characters in the Pynchon universe. Pynchon’s writings are replete with nods to Bakunin’s God and the State and Statism and Anarchy – most particularly in Against the Day. The anarchism in Pynchon’s work has been the subject of much discussion (most impressivelu by Graham Benton), but I demonstrate that this is merely one aspect of Pynchon’s political theory, and by no means the most significant. In Stray Brigg’s memorable dismissal of Yashmeen Halfcourt’s anarchist musings: “‘em things never work out.”
Pynchon’s politics are deeply pessimistic and bound up with a cosmology predicated on the anschluss of Earth with its sister sphere, Hell as outlined by Pynchon in Vineland. Earth is inevitably sliding towards Hell, and only those with the wit, luck or determination to reach for the sky will escape this fate. Thus for all his sympathy with anarchism, Pynchon ultimately rejects all politics and instead embraces a process of transcendence based on escaping the hell bound Earth altogether. Pynchon’s vehicle for exploring this idea is the devil may care crew of the airship Inconvenience, The Chums of Chance, whose evolution throughout the book is from larking, adventure seeking gadabouts, and occasional stooges of unseen powers, to a veritable sky community, ‘flying toward grace.’ The Chums of Chance renounce all politics and leave the world below to its fate. The one quality the Chums of Chance and their sky brothers and sisters possess that differentiates them from the rest of humanity is a Nietzschean froliche wissenschaft, which enables them to escape the fate of the ‘groundhogs.’ Despite his sympathy with the anarchists, Pynchon is ultimately revealed in this paper as a Nietzschean elitist, who promises salvation only for a chosen few, not for the beleaguered many.