Thomas Pynchon’s novels analyzed in this article – V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow – bring in the limelight preoccupations typical for the postmodern American novel: the anomie of history, the maladive reality, sterile imagination, with direct consequences on the construction of identity. The approach to these concerns is interdisciplinary, the postmodern concepts of relativism, arbitrary meaning, subjectivity, constructed reality, (his)story and interchangeable interpretations being identified and delineated both in philosophy and literary theory. Perceived from the perspective of quantum physics, historicism in Pynchon is entirely subjective; the organizing structures of history are only products of one’s imagination, therefore the anomie and the accidental indubitably govern it. The general impression is that of a paranoid state of mind that evolves from a personal (Herbert Stencil and Oedipa Maas) to a cosmic level (Tyrone Slothrop).
[*] This paper was written in the framework of the project “Reţea transnaţională de management integrat al cercetării postdoctorale în domeniul Comunicarea ştiinţei. Construcţie instituţională (şcoală postdoctorală) şi program de burse (CommScie)” (Transnational integrated management network of postdoctoral research in the field of Communication of Science, Institutional Construction [postdoctoral school] and scholarship programme [CommScie]) – POSDRU/89/1.5/S/63663, financially supported by the Sectorial Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013.
