Dark Margins: Invisibility and Obscenity in Thomas Pynchon’s V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow

• Main Author: Paul Jahshan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Française d'Etudes Américaines 2010-10-01
• Series: Transatlantica : Revue d'Études Américaines
• Subjects: Thomas Pynchon; Preterite; Elect; obscenity; invisibility; New Technologies
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/4860

This paper explores the inter-related themes of invisibility and obscenity in Thomas Pynchon’s V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, as they reveal a gradated movement from the struggle between the “animate” and the “inanimate,” to the resistance against the inanimateness of the system through strategies of invisibility, to, finally, the ultimate, obscene challenge posed by the inanimate to humanity as it takes the shape of what is known as the “new technologies.” The margins between the two is a space of slippage and also, paradoxically, the locus of a discourse of technological power for both “Preterite” and “Elect,” and Pynchon’s treatment of these issues in the 1960s and 1970s is relevant at the beginning of the twenty-first century when the Cartesian model is complicated by a digital culture poised to replace reality with the simulacra of cyberspace; this prospect is initially met by a resistance of invisibility inhabiting the dark margins, not only of textual discourse, but also of society as it takes shape in the practices of everyday life. The invisibility of the Preterite is not only a reaction to the obscenity of the Elect but is also, as it reaches an interpretative extreme, another form of technological obscenity not less powerful than that of the Elect. Pynchon’s three texts show that Preterite and Elect are never clear-cut positions but rather exhibit, in dialectical fashion, a slippage from one to the other.