#The bleeding edge criticism full#

Maxine handles the paranoia-inducing discoveries she makes about the lengthening tentacles of oligarchical control and an underworld of secretive cyberspace with rather more equanimity than do most of Pynchon’s previous protagonists, who of course inhabit similarly paranoia-soaked worlds. The cyber reality in which Pynchon’s protagonist, Maxine Tarnow (a “fraud investigator”), finds herself enmeshed focuses her attention on the sheer lunacy of the reality we Americans have created for ourselves at the same time it promises to intensify that lunacy. The Internet, particularly in the environs of the Deep Web, is a zone of unreality whose best and worst qualities are that it reinforces the unreality of the “real” world.

And, as we likely suspect, the attack is surrounded by its share of possible shadowy participants, making it even more nefarious and frightening than the official version would have it. It does indeed tell a story set in New York City immediately prior to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and the story does traverse some of the darker regions of the Internet, which in 2001 was a more mysterious, if less enormous, place than it is today. Thus Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge, comes to us so instantly recognizable as a work by Thomas Pynchon that after we have read even the jacket copy (or any of the publicity materials), we might feel we have read this novel already. Even the historical novels are not really concerned with history per se but with the ongoing continuities between past and present, the portents in the past of what in the present has become only more ominous.

Although much of Pynchon’s fiction employs a historical setting, works such as Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and parts of V examine the present circumstances (at the time) of American society. Given the pervasive “connectivity” made possible by the Internet, the mischief such connectivity enables, and the existence of the “Deep Web,” lurking beyond the “surface” web accessible to ordinary searches, it would probably seem odd if Pynchon never did address the development of the web as an all-encompassing presence in American life. Defense department, the “world-wide-web” is in some ways a predictable phenomenon emerging from the corporate-military structure whose power and potential reach are depicted in Gravity’s Rainbow. The same thing could be said about the Internet. Certainly the world evoked by 9/11 conspiracy theories seems very much a Pynchonian kind of world. As it is, those existing theories seem to have been propounded by readers of The Crying of Lot 49 or V, novels whose plots imply endlessly ramifying connections, always complex, if ultimately mystifying, alternatives to simpler explanations, and leave the impression that if no final explanation is really satisfying, that’s because the actions to be explained are so puzzling, the conspiracies so potentially vast. Surely if 9/11 conspiracy theories had not already arisen, like the dust plumes from the Twin Towers, Thomas Pynchon would have invented some.

#The bleeding edge criticism full#

The article makes an endeavor to use metamodern categories as a tool for post-postmodern text studies, in order to analyze and interpret Bleeding Edge through those categories.This review originally appeared in Full Stop. Despite Pynchon being usually considered as postmodern writer, the use of metamodern categories for describing his narrative strategies confirms the idea of the novel’s post-postmodern orientation. They were implemented in the analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge (2013). The basic trends of metamodernism were determined and observed through the prism of literature studies. This article argues that the ideas of metamodernism and its main trends can be successfully used for the study of contemporary literature. One of them is the concept of metamodernism, proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and based on the culture and philosophy changes at the turn of this century. Many different models of co ntemporary novel’s description arose from the search for methods and approaches of post-postmodern texts analysis.