Inherent grace : Thomas Pynchon, American Gothic, and postsecular hope

Abstract

This thesis explores Thomas Pynchon’s fiction in relation to American Gothic fiction, in order to elucidate its diverse expressions of religious and political hope amidst the dark becoming of the modern world. In Chapter One, I provide a historical overview of Gothic fiction which explains how American literature inherits and transforms British Gothic, aims to show how the latter develops in relation to Reformation historiography and eighteenth-century Whig politics, and introduces how Pynchon engages with these traditions. In Chapter Two, I then read Pynchon’s early short stories and first novel, V., as a kind of American ‘Sea Gothic’. This helps to reveal how Pynchon parodies Puritan theology and envisions modernity as a despairing, ‘sinking ship’ that is heading towards an apocalyptic Flood, whilst at the same time broaching an insecure openness to hopeful possibilities. Following this are two chapters (Three and Four) which read The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, and Inherent Vice as California Gothic. I show how each of these novels depicts California as a subjunctive space of possibility that, like the USA, is ever threatened and destroyed by its own gothically ‘doubled’ nature. I also trace the ambivalent ways in which these texts depict Calvinism and Gnosticism, which are linked by their desire for transcendence of materiality and even the planet itself, and which in Pynchon’s work find a further sinister corollary in modern technological developments. In the conclusion, I show how Pynchon’s work may be construed as balancing a sense of ‘inherent vice’—all that is seemingly inevitable about humanity and our Creation-ruining systems, and moves us to despair—with a corresponding sense of ‘inherent grace’, that which encourages responsible attentiveness to the Creation, together with childlike openness to continually learn and dream of the impossible that might yet become possible.