Vejen til 1984

Thomas Pynchon skriver lærd og engageret om George Orwells fremtidsroman 1984, og i sin gennemgang af romanens temaer drager han en række diskrete og tankevækkende paralleller til vores egen historiske situation

“Falling into the sky”: gravity and levity in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon

My argument follows geographer Gunnar Olsson when he asks “What is geography if it is not the drawing and interpreting of a line? And what is the drawing of a line if it is not also the creation of new objects?” Using Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon about the drawing of the Mason-Dixon line, I explore how the mapmaker’s productive power is never merely reflective but generative too, constructing a world as much as representing one. I question the consequent relation between “above and below,” drawing on Farinelli’s insight that critique of such constructions must recognise an antagonistic humour in the production of maps and territories. Pynchon’s novel, I argue, is exemplary in the wit with which it pits the anomalous, strange and contingent phenomena of the below against the homogenising, categorising power of above. His approach helps us understand the dark heart of Enlightenment cartography and society

"Death Itself Shall Be Deathless”: Transrationalism and Eternal Death in Don DeLillo’s Zero K

The status of human mortality in the face of rapid and overwhelming scientific and technological change is by no means a new topic in DeLillo’s fiction. For many critics, death fulfills a crucial function in the author’s work, its very possibility operating to maintain the boundaries of time and space that are otherwise under threat of disappearance in post war culture. Don DeLillo’s eighteenth novel, Zero K (2016), offers an augmented examination of this conjunction between death and technology, depicting an industrial and scientific landscape where fantasies of eternal life can be legitimately realized via radical advances in cryonic technologies. Yet rather than circumventing death and prolonging life as intended, this article argues that DeLillo instead presents cryonic freezing as a form of eternal death. Subsumed within the technological matrix, death’s ineluctability is disturbed and remodulated, meaning that temporal and spatial boundaries become violently unhinged and entirely immeasurable. This boundlessness becomes vividly mirrored in the architectural and temporal logic of the “Convergence” facility itself, a “transrational” space that unravels concepts such as time, space, language, and subjectivity

The Crying of Lot 49

138 hal; 17,5 c

Thomas Pynchon and the Black Panther Party: revolutionary suicide in Gravity's Rainbow

This article pertains to the recent upsurge of interest in the politics of Thomas Pynchon. It considers Pynchon as an author very much of the 1960s counterculture, and explores the countercultural values and ideals expressed in Gravity's Rainbow, with particular emphasis on revealing the novel's attitude to the Black Panther Party. Close textual analysis suggests Pynchon's essential respect for Huey P. Newton's concept of revolutionary suicide, and his contempt for Marxist dialectical materialism, two core elements of Panther political theory. Drawing on an analogy between the BPP and Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, an assessment is made of the novel's perspective on the part played by various factors – including the Panthers’ aggressive militancy, the rise of Eldridge Cleaver through the leadership, and the subtle influence of a logic of power influenced by scientific rationalism – in bringing about the disintegration of the Panther organization by the early 1970s. Given the similarities between the paths taken by the BPP and the wider counterculture in the late 1960s, the article considers Pynchon's commentary on the Panthers to be part of a cautionary tale for future revolutionaries fighting similar forms of oppression