Parody on Western Discourse of Rationality in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Abstract

Thomas Pynchon inGravity’s Rainbow presents, nightmare of hyper- technological society, made possible by the discourse of calculation and control, mechanical certainty, along with the development of science and technology that has gone out of human control. The science and technology has been capitalized, individual has became perpetual victim of external observation and manipulation of outer forces; and individual has been reduced to a functional receptacle unit of work process through the interlocking of corporations, and unions. Pynchon at the same time opposes the science and technologyby presenting characters inside and outside the dynamic cultural politics of dominant social discourses.Gravity’s Rainbowis rereading, ironic rethinking and the interpretation of the past in a deconstructive effort to revise or reread the past in paradoxical way that simultaneously affirms and challenges historical representation. It focuses on the differences and ex-centricity, interest on the hybrid, the heterogeneous, and local, and an interrogative and deconstructive mode of analysis. It seeks to assert difference, not to homogeneous ideology. Pynchon declares that the differences are always multiple and provisional. By bringing the intertexual references, historical references, complicit and critical role of central characters to dominant ideology along with their failure, reification of science and it’s limitations and by recontexualizing them in present postmodern context, Pychon has clearly undercut the western mode of all aesthetic, cultural politics and mode of thinking, so called rationality.