Abstract

Pynchon’s fictions have always proved a direct challenge to the Marxist tradition. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon appears openly hostile to the discourse, calling Marx ‘that sly old racist […] trying to make believe it’s nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets’. Indeed, Pynchon’s writing has helped to ‘problematize […] the entire notion of historical knowledge’ through vast and complex fictional meditations on the philosophy of history . As critics such as Elias and Berressem have noted, Pynchon seemingly reads teleological and determinist readings of history as a movement towards standardization, a position that ultimately allows ‘History [to be] hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base.’ . This paper introduces the theoretical discourse of post-Marxism to Pynchon studies. While Marxism has been largely unable to accommodate the polyphonic nature of Pynchon’s historical novels – his interest in pursuing an ethical imperative that seeks to move beyond the framing logic of teleology – I want to claim that post-Marxism, with its attendance to radical social justice through contingency, pluralism, scepticism and difference, offers a more productive framework for reading Pynchon’s work. The paper is split into two sections. The first offers a brief historical account of post-Marxism that maps its social, political and cultural context alongside Pynchon’s Against the Day and Bleeding Edge . Using Laclau & Mouffe’s famous Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , the paper seeks to raise a number of conceptual questions: how can Pynchon be regarded as post-Marxist, how should we specify the criteria for post-Marxism, and how do we delineate a seemingly contradictory theoretical position? To this end, I propose Pynchon allows a new understanding of post-Marxism that can productively be applied to cultural studies