Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern Liberalism

Abstract

Introduction Thomas Pynchon has written some of America's most imaginative and intellectually suggestive fiction of the postwar period. And, responsive to his work's richness, critical attention has in due course been paid to a myriad of topics he has examined. One important subject, however, has not been ade- quately addressed in Pynchonian scholarship. No sustained effort has been made to see Pynchon's work as embracing a determinate political stance or political philosophy.1 It is the latter that will provide the focus of this essay. It should be said from the outset that important features of postmodern American fiction have discouraged readers from looking for philosophical coherence of any sort. As reflected in various works by, for example, Walter Abish, Paul Auster, Frederick Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Ronald Sukenick, unrelieved epistem- ological doubt and antic involution of form do not provide the method- ological foundations for a coherent political philosophy. Scepticism typically yields local and often ambiguous insights, not comprehensive understanding. And for its part, formal experimentation—and certainly postmodern fiction's recurrent obsession with parody—inevitably invites readings that, advertently or otherwise, emphasize aesthetic autonomy.2 In the case of Pynchon, readers have quite astutely identified the general lines of his critique of modern America and Western civilization as a whole, but, with rare exception, Pynchon's political philosophy has typically been either overlooked or reduced to an amorphous postmodern disillusionment or some sort of dark pessimism or even disappointed humanism.3