Abstract

Power and resistance are considered two of Pynchon's principal themes, examined thoroughly by scholars. This presentation will provide an alternative reading of resistance and examine a change in how it is portrayed in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, where it appears as much more powerful and a potential successor to existent authority, creating a need to reexamine the dichotomy between authority and preterite. In Mason & Dixon there is already a clash between the old and the new regime, religion and science, evident even in the background of the two protagonists; furthermore, the resistance, as is depicted by a nascent movement for American independence, is not a failure; its ideals will metamorphose it into the state tyranny shown in Vineland. In Against the Day, anarchism, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, is presented as an alternative to capitalism and employs similar techniques to those used by the latter, based on the anonymity of its hierarchy and the victimization not only of those outside its network, the never innocent bourgeois, but also the individuals that follow it. The theoretical framework for such an analysis will need to distance itself from an – otherwise useful – Marxist approach and move towards Foucault's idea of authority as was expressed in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Resistance is not external to authority; it is an opponent within the power network, a node through which power can flow. This kind of analysis would not have been possible without Mason & Dixon and Against the Day and the presentation will mostly focus on those two novels.

Highlights

  • The juxtaposition of power and resistance has always remained at the forefront of the analysis of Thomas Pynchon's works, and various theoretical approaches have been used to tackle an issue that has been prevalent in all his novels.[1]

  • What was sought after was a study of positions within the network of power and Mason & Dixon's revolutionaries and Against the Day's anarchism prove invaluable for such research

  • The further we move towards the end of the twentieth century, the weaker, the more mundane or delusional the resistance is depicted by Pynchon

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Summary

Introduction

The less information disclosed, the more freedom of movement or action both an individual and an organized group can have, but in the former, anonymity is a method of hiding and blending in (until, as in the case of Reverend Cherrycoke, one is made to sign, to give a name to his or her activities), and in the latter it is part of an effort to distance the acts of power from its assignors This anonymity (especially anonymity-as-resistance) is an excellent transition to start discussing Against the Day, since it is again used in two very different ways: the first in the same manner as above; a person with no name and no papers (or multiple ones) could evade the authorities, just like the ancestor of the Zombini family, but that was before the modern era when a person's identity is defined by his or her record: “Today we are used to thinking of identity as no more than the contents of one’s dossier. It is worth noting the fact that the brothers did try to join organized resistance, only to end up following their own rhythms and desires

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