Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:36:58.279Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

After the Counterculture: American Capitalism, Power, and Opposition in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2016

CATHERINE FLAY
CATHERINE FLAY*
Affiliation:
English and Humanities Department, Birkbeck College, University of London. Email: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Although Thomas Pynchon has continued to publish long after the postwar American countercultural era, his politics are critically characterized in relation to that movement's values. The dominant critical positions associate power with rationalism and functionality, and political opposition with creativity and pleasure, positioning Pynchon's novels at a politicized intersection between postmodernism and the counterculture. This article problematizes this dominant critical position, taking Mason & Dixon (1997) as exemplary of Pynchon's reconsideration of the nature of power and potential opposition to it in response to the countercultural movement's failures and successes, and to developments in capitalist social organization in the 1980s.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2017 , pp. 779 - 804
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hite, Molly, “‘Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive’: Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature, 51, 4 (Winter 2010), 677–702, 682CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Baker, Jeff, “Politics,” in Dalsgaard, Inger H., Herman, Luc, and McHale, Brian, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 136–45, 137Google Scholar.

3 Cowart, David, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History: Against the Day,” Modern Philology, 109, 3 (Feb. 2012), 385–407, 387CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid., 390.

5 Malpas, Simon and Taylor, Andrew, Thomas Pynchon, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 8 Google Scholar.

6 Freer, Joanna, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Madsen, Deborah, “The Business of Living: Gravity's Rainbow, Evolution, and the Advancement of Capitalism,” Pynchon Notes, 40–41 (Spring–Fall 1997), 144–58, 144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Ickstadt, Heinz, “History, Utopia and Transcendence in the Space–Time of Against the Day,” Pynchon Notes, 54–55 (Spring–Fall 2008), 216–44, 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 McEntree, Jason T., “Pynchon's Age of Reason: Mason & Dixon and America's Rise of Rational Discourse,” Pynchon Notes, 52–53 (Spring–Fall 2003), 185–207, 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ickstadt, 216.

11 Boyle, T. Coraghessen, “The Great Divide,” New York Times, 18 May 1997, 9 Google Scholar.

12 Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall, “Introduction: The Times of Mason & Dixon,” in Hinds, ed., The Multiple Worlds of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon: Eighteenth-Century Contexts, Postmodern Observations (New York: Camden House, 2005), 3–24, 4Google Scholar.

13 See also Howard, Jeffrey, “The Anarchist Miracle and Magic in Mason & Dixon,” Pynchon Notes 52–53 (Spring–Fall 2003), 166–84, 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ian D. Copestake, “Enlightenment Communities and the Mental State,” in Hinds, The Multiple Worlds, 171–84, 176.

14 Although the phrase is discussed in Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1972; first published in French 1971)Google Scholar, I am invoking the phrase as developed by Foucault in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotext, 1997). In this later text, Foucault develops the concept of the “will to truth” specifically in relation to critique and the Enlightenment, for example at 61.

15 Thoreen, David, “In which ‘Acts Have Consequences’: Ideas of Moral Order in the Qualified Postmodernism of Pynchon's Recent Fiction,” in Copestake, Ian D., ed., American Postmodernity: Essays on the recent fiction of Thomas Pynchon (Bern: Lang, 2003), 49–70, 58.Google Scholar

16 Thomas, Samuel, Pynchon and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2007), 33 Google Scholar.

17 McEntree, 185.

18 Eve, Martin Paul, Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Adorno (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 19–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Booker, M. Keith, “ Vineland and Dystopian Fiction,” Pynchon Notes, 30–31 (1992), 5–38, 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Pynchon, Thomas, Mason & Dixon (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997) (hereafter M&D), 5Google Scholar.

22 Tanner, Tony, The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 255 Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 225.

24 Cowart, “Pynchon, Genealogy, History,” 343.

25 Ibid., 347.

26 M&D, 349.

27 Ibid., 350, 351.

28 Pynchon, Thomas, Vineland (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1990), 267 Google Scholar.

29 McEntree, “Pynchon's Age of Reason,” 200.

30 M&D, 151.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 63.

33 Ibid., 80.

34 McEntree, 191.

35 Ibid., 192.

36 M&D, 412.

37 Ibid., 692–93.

38 Ibid., 418.

39 Ibid., 418.

40 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (with prologue) (London: Duckworth, 2007; first published 1981), 33–34 Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., 34.

42 Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Malden, MA: Polity, 2000), 3 Google Scholar.

43 M&D, 411.

44 Ibid., 4.

45 Brian Thill, “The Sweetness of Immorality: Mason & Dixon and the American Sins of Consumption,” in Hinds, The Multiple Worlds, 49–76, 50–51.

46 M&D, 78, for example 424–25.

47 Howard, “The Anarchist Miracle and Magic in Mason & Dixon,” 173.

48 M&D, 69.

49 Ibid., 303.

50 Ibid., 299.

51 Ibid., 272.

52 Ibid., 150.

53 Ibid., 697.

54 Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian, The New Way of the World: on Neo-liberal Society, trans. Elliott, Gregory (New York: Verso, 2014; first published in French 2009), 260Google Scholar.

55 Wall Hinds, “Introduction: The Times of Mason & Dixon,” 18–19.

56 Dardot and Laval, 260.

57 M&D, 44.

58 Ibid., 394.

59 Ibid., 478, 669, 755.

60 Ibid., 42.

61 Ibid., 59.

62 Ibid., 478.

63 Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, 20, original emphasis.

64 M&D, 610.

65 Ibid., 752–53.

66 Thomas, 21–22, Bernstein's emphasis.

67 Pynchon, Thomas, “Nearer My Couch to Thee,” New York Times, 6 June 1993, 3 Google Scholar.

68 Ian D. Copestake, “Postmodern Reflections: The Image of an Absent Author,” in Copestake, American Postmodernity, 7–13, 9.

69 M&D, 189.

70 Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 260.

71 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 198.

72 Wall Hinds, “Introduction: The Times of Mason & Dixon,” 14.

73 M&D, 156; 190–93, 196, 554, 559, 629, 679, 638.

74 Ibid., 316.

75 Ibid., 755.

76 Thill, “The Sweetness of Immorality,” 62.

77 McEntree, “Pynchon's Age of Reason,” 201.