Parody on Western Discourse of Rationality in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
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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 By bringing the intertexual references, historical
references, complicit and critical role of central characters to dominant ideology along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.