In 1973, Thomas Pynchon unleashed his mega-meta epic on an America in between two epochs. His novel captured the (dis)spirit of the age—and foretold much about the nation's future
Now, though, compared to the internet, even an enormous feat of fiction likeAnd anyway, readers now prefer fiction with an unfussy, straightforward style, where the author—or the fact of one—is wholly absent from the narration, an enforced order operating invisibly……which brings me back to my initial point about Pynchon’s insight into our present contentiousness, culturally and politically—a point I needed all of those contextual detours to be able to make.
It’s no coincidence that an age rife with conspiracy theories is also a time when an unsettling amount of people willingly consent to authoritarianism. This is what Pynchon saw: in the absence of formerly monolithic institutions and belief systems, people will not only accept reasons supplied by Them, but they will actively seek them out, and embrace them like long lost loved ones.Pynchon gets a real big kick out of historical coincidences.
overflows with foolery. But I think Pynchon is suggesting that our foolishness goes deeper and darker: existence and foolishness are intertwined. Whether we view the world as a series of causes and effects, as the result of elaborate conspiracies, or through the prism of the Rocket , it’s all the same fool’s errand. The entire arc of humanity is folly.
At one point, Slothrop has an affair with Katje, who works for the White Visitation. This is before he’s discovered the truth about his Dr. Jamf’s experiments, but he senses something—a room somewhere in his past that will explain everything, that will show that “all in his life of what has looked free or random, is discovered to’ve been under some Control, all the time, the same as a fixed roulette wheel.
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