'Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely': Serious Openings and Subversive Epigraphs in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon

Abstract

The American author, Thomas Pynchon, the focus of this paper, is famed, it could be argued, mostly for three things. The first is the extreme lengths of his novels and the bewildering numbers of characters and plotlines in said books. Gravity’s Rainbow, his 1973 work that remains unfinished by most who own a copy, contains over 400 characters for example. The second, and the point to which this paper is devoted, is the famous opening to that novel, which most readers do reach, the howl of the V-2 rocket that soars at supersonic speed above the landscape: “a screaming comes across the sky” it reads. The third is that this novel was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize but denied the prize at the last minute on the grounds of being “turgid, overwritten, and obscene”