Julie Orlemanski
English Major
Class of 2004
Abstract
This paper sets Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in dialogue with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Part of a larger investigation into the system of binary relations that the novel both creates and disintegrates, this examination compares interiority and exteriority in relation to secularism and religion, being guided more broadly by themes of control and power. The approach of the novel via Dialectic of Enlightenment represents just one precipitate from a larger project of speculative, synthetic readings, which an encyclopedic narrative like Gravity’s Rainbow seems to invite. This essay questions the systematic elimination of the beyond found in both Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of enlightenment and in the secularizing bureaucracy of Pynchon’s novel, a change that reduces metaphysics to physics and that posits the institutions of man and the laws of nature as the supreme organizing forces. A counter-point to the self-preserving, self-producing fervor of the enlightenment appears in the death drive, and it is this opposite, negative force—inextricable from enlightenment, secularization, and control—that ensures that the change remains illusionary. Finally, the essay broadly notes the intrinsic hope of the novel in its very performance and style. While only representing a component of a larger investigation into Gravity’s Rainbow, this paper performs the style of synthesis and creative criticism I believe best suits such a work of literature and explores in microcosm many of the most essential themes of the work.