Interrogating New York City: The Detective as Flâneur in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, New York City is represented, as the epigraph suggests, as an “enigmatic suspect” in a mystery novel who hides “the real story” in many different ways. This puts the novel squarely in the category of detective fiction, albeit with Pynchon’s typical parodic tone, and also accentuates the role of New York as a secretive character, not just a location, throughout the narrative. Maxine Tarnow, the novel’s anti-detective figure, is thus obliged to acquire characteristics of that idiosyncratic urban hero, the flâneur, in order to be able to read the city and see through its phantasmagoria. It is the contention of this article that in his last novel, by emphasizing the role of love and empathy, Pynchon distances himself from the postmodernist pervasive parody and goes toward a new sensibility and moral responsibility, which are characteristics of post-postmodernist fiction.