“Pressing the Wrong Button”: Pynchon’s Postmodernism and the Threat of Nuclear War in The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract

ABSTRACTDrawing on recent and excellent critical work uncovering Pynchon’s relation to the historical moment in which his novels were written, this article argues that Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is motivated by an uncertainty that can be traced to the potential deployment of the bomb. I begin by examining the characteristically postmodern features of Pynchon’s text—its investigation of the communicative properties of language and its fracturing of a cohesive narrative into contingency and chance—to uncover their political valences. I argue that the text pivots around a nuclear anxiety that becomes evident in Pynchon’s treatment of language as communication and that links current generations to future ones. The bomb threatens to undo narrative progression, connecting Pynchon’s famously bizarre narrative to the development of nuclear weaponry: from its inception, the bomb was designed to never realize its own use, ushering an era where narrative progression deteriorates into absurdity.