The postmodern sublime in Thomas Pynchon’s gravity’s rainbow

Abstract EN

Thomas Pynchon, alongside only, perhaps Vladimir Nabokov, stands as the dominant figure in post- world War II American fiction.

Pynchon's three novels of the nineteen sixties and the early nineteen seventies- V.

(1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity’s Rainbow 97 sublime in literature.

Each work intimates the presence and power of another order of being: the inanimate in V., the Tristero in The Crying of Lot 49, and quite literally unending series of cabals, conspiracies, and gnostic realms in Gravity’s Rainbow T “ w ” finally unrepresentable; we receive intimations and manifestations of their presence within, or impingement upon, our everyday, profane or secular world; “ ” w ; I P ‟ w encounter things that seem to lie beyond cognition.

As the threshold between worlds is crossed, these other realms are revealed as overwhelmingly destructive, and each novel is propelled toward an apocalyptic conclusion.

The effects of the sublime encounters mark the novels as partaking of the postmodern sublime, for Pynchon depicts in each work an inexorable isolation, alienation, and fragmentati of America as hopelessly fallen, careening toward an entropic apocalypse.

The dominance of these motifs has made Pynchon the greatest master of negative sublime at least since Faulkner and West.

T P ‟ Gravity’s Rainbow, as an example the dominant postmodern aesthetic of the sublime evinced in Pynchon's works.