Tore Rye Andersen (Aarhus University)
In April 1964, Thomas Pynchon wrote in a letter to his agent Candida Donadio that he was facing a creative crisis with four novels in progress, which – if they came out on paper anything like they were inside his head – would be “the literary event of the millennium” and would have publishers dueling for the rights to publish them.
Given Pynchon’s penchant for privacy, we may never learn which particular four novels he was working on. It seems very likely that one of them was The Crying of Lot 49, later disparaged by Pynchon as a “potboiler.” We also know from other letters from the period that one of them was Gravity’s Rainbow. I will suggest that the last two novels may very well have been Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. At any rate, those two novels share so many conceptual, formal, stylistic and thematic features with Gravity’s Rainbow that it is feasible to consider them parts of a coherent novelistic project conceived by the young Pynchon back in the early sixties.
In many ways, it is a fool’s errand to attempt to categorize Pynchon’s uncategorizable novels, to squeeze those loose, baggy monsters into neat little boxes. Nevertheless, in my paper I will operate under the assumption that Pynchon’s oeuvre – with the exception of V., Pynchon’s first novel and a special case – falls into two categories: The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Inherent Vice are the California novels which mainly deal with contemporary California and seem to be derived from personal experience. The second category is Pynchon’s world-historical novels, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. In my paper, I will concentrate on outlining the many shared traits that make it feasible not only to place these three novels in the same category, but, I would argue, to think of them as three installments in a single project.
Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are structurally remarkably similar: Unlike Pynchon’s shorter novels, they are divided into 3-5 named parts, and each contains 70-something chapters. Crucially, all three novels take a historical crossroads as their starting point: The Enlightenment, World War 1 and World War 2, respectively. In a letter in support of Ian McEwan, Pynchon described himself as a writer of “historical fiction,” and it is in these three novels that his interest in history reaches its peak.
In an encyclopedic fashion, all three novels map the complexity of the historical transition point in question, both the familiar aspects and the repressed possibilities, in an attempt to show us both what actually happened and what could have happened. All three novels have global reach, spanning several continents and including many different languages. Attempting to recreate the collective mindset of each period, all three novels are written in a style corresponding to its historical setting: The beautiful 18th Century English of Mason & Dixon, the more modern but still slightly stilted and arcane voice of Against the Day, and the hyperflexible and ultramodern vernacular of Gravity’s Rainbow.
Taken together, the three novels attempt nothing less than a retelling of the world’s history through the last 250 years through a mapping of the era’s most important historical nodal points. The three periods depicted correspond, coincidentally, to Ernest Mandel’s three phases of capitalism: Market capitalism, monopoly capitalism and late capitalism, which in turn correspond to three stages of technology: mechanical, electrical and electronic – each of which is amply treated in the three novels. Combined, the three novels tell a bleak story of modernization and of the progressive immachination of mankind, while also portraying the shrinking of alternative visions (embodied in e.g. the Hollow Earth, whose entrance is much smaller in Against the Day than in Mason & Dixon).
Other American authors from Pynchon’s generation, such as Don DeLillo and Philip Roth, have been devoting their careers to writing Great American Novels. Pynchon aims wider and higher. Instead of America, Pynchon writes of the world, or “if it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two,” as the jacket copy for Against the Day (penned by Pynchon himself) states. With Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon has written a coherent trilogy of world-historical novels which together can be said to constitute nothing less than a Great Global Novel.