Abstract

Fictions of the recent banking crisis have become essential ways of exploring twenty-first century financial capitalism. However, much of contemporary ‘crunch lit’ fails to register with the financial processes they seek to describe, ‘attempting to impose the venerable traditions of realism, personalization and moralization onto a crisis that was itself unreal, impersonal and amoral’. Contemporary fictions’ failure to embrace the unreality of financial exchange has resulted, in this instance, in the forfeiture of an exploratory critical force, meaning that discernibly other aesthetic, thematic and formal categories are required. As finance demands to be narrated through more challenging literary forms, this essay proposes that for a thoroughgoing assessment of our historical position within Neoliberal capitalism, we must turn to the work of Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s most recent fiction, Bleeding Edge, set in New York City during the final years of the dot.com bubble, offers a powerful registration of the fluctuations of the US economy, the waning of American economic supremacy, and the reassertion of its hegemony within the sphere of global finance. I propose that Pynchon’s fiction reframes many of the key ideological and philosophical dilemmas surrounding capitalist crisis, and concomitantly reconstructs the project of contemporary Marxism to read these dynamics. The essay follows a tri-part structure: firstly, Bleeding Edge is used as a conceptual starting point to address and overturn a long held critical commonplace in Pynchon studies – namely that Pynchon’s polyphonic writing refuses Marxist theorization. As I make clear, such readings have been substantiated on the basis of political propositions that have led to new disciplinary formalisms. Secondly, using fragments of Pynchon’s stylistics, I demonstrate how more accommodating forms of Marxism can be established to construct new theoretical constellations that resonate with our present historical situation. Finally, the essay closes by arguing that a return to Marxism allows Pynchon’s text to offer up potential strategies to combat the computerized world of global finance. Playing a key role in the historicity we must construct to properly resist the intellectual and historiographical appropriation conducted by Neoliberal financial capitalism, Pynchon’s fiction is explored in relation to the radicalisms and revolutionary impulses it harbours