Part II - Culture, Politics, and Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 May 2019
Summary
During the family reunion in Vineland (1990) that resolves the novel’s action, protagonist daughter Prairie Wheeler notes she is “[f]eeling totally familied out” (VL 374). After finishing Pynchon’s novels, especially those after Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), readers, too, could feel totally familied out. The adventures of a variety of families and family-like groups are important in each novel. However, this significance has been overlooked by scholarly readers – understandably, with so much else of academic interest to puzzle out in the books. Pynchon’s “decentered subjectivity,” well described by McHale, has caused readers to attend to unusual, “postmodern” aspects of Pynchon’s fiction at the expense of traditional aspects such as families. Yet the early novels feature children and neglectful parents, and in the novels after Gravity’s Rainbow, families become increasingly central and noticeable. The action from Vineland on often illustrates troubled families remedying their troubles. Families or family-like groups (such as cults) appear in all Pynchon’s main plots, even when family members are conspicuous by various forms of absence. Ongoing thematic concerns of Pynchon’s like alienation, the attraction to death, the perils of science, the power of history, and the limits of knowledge are expressed through parents and children. The following reviews the secondary literature on families in Pynchon, surveys specific instances of families, considers the significance of Pynchon’s families for his vision of American culture, and examines families in relation to pedagogy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thomas Pynchon in Context , pp. 113 - 270Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019