The sixth chapter focuses on a decisive common dimension in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, namely, their treatment of anthropocenic and planetary concerns. These related concepts have featured prominently in recent literary studies, but studies of Pynchon’s relation to the Anthropocene are still largely absent. Moreover, recent discussions in literary criticism of anthropocenic and planetary concerns are primarily centered on works published in the twenty-first century, but the chapter shows that the concerns are extensively prefigured in the early novels of Pynchon’s global trilogy. The notion of planetarity is often seen as incompatible with the idea of globalization, but the chapter shows that the anthropocenic and planetary themes in Pynchon’s novels grow naturally out of the global and world-historical issues discussed in Chapters 1–4. At the same time, it demonstrates that Pynchon’s ideas of humanity’s harmful exploitation of the planet draw on a long tradition in American literature and on the ecological ideas of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Pynchon depicts language as a significant force in the Anthropocene, and with a discussion of the trilogy’s recurring portrayal of giants as ancient planetary avatars poised to reclaim the Earth.

Chapter 4 proceeds to the first published, but chronologically last, installment of the trilogy, Gravity’s Rainbow, and begins with an analysis of the multiple temporalities of that novel, which are discussed in dialogue with the historiographical theories of Reinhart Kosseleck. It then examines Pynchon’s both bleak and desperately funny depiction of how modernity reached its dark apogee in World War II, where humanity’s romantic affair with technology was finally fully consummated. In particular, this theme is traced through a meticulous analysis of the theme of immachination, which runs through all three novels but reaches its natural (or unnatural) culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow. In dialogue with important critical work by Ali Chetwynd as well as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, the chapter concludes by revisiting the pervasive metaphor of the crossroads and the related theme of complicity in order to discuss whether the novel – and the global trilogy in general – is as relentlessly negative as they argue or whether it poses possible alternatives to the status quo.