Everybody's America: Thomas Pynchon, race, and the cultures of postmodernism

This dissertation examines the influence of white anxieties about racial identity on the development of the techniques and sensibility of American literary postmodernism. It focuses on the early career of Thomas Pynchon, from the late fifties through the publication of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. Pynchon's techniques are often identified with the poststructuralist turn toward linguistic play and the subversion of traditional narrative forms. This dissertation relates the development of Pynchon's techniques---specifically parody, direct address to individual and collective readers, and historiographic metafiction---to a number of cultural contexts. These include: the Beat movement and the figure of the "white Negro"; bebop and later movements in jazz, especially the music of Ornette Coleman; the imperialism of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War; the effect of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement on Northern white liberals; critiques of white culture in African American literature; anti-colonial movements in the Third World; the "Black Power" movement in the U.S.; and the growth of the mass media. It also closely examines Pynchon's texts in relation to some of their key intertextual sources, including writings by Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Marshall McLuhan. By these comparisons, it demonstrates that Pynchon deploys techniques associated with the decentering of the linguistic sign and the fragmentation of narrative in order to work through the anxieties of white male subjects in their encounter with racial otherness. It also charts Pynchon's growing self-consciousness about race, showing that, beginning in the mid-sixties, his work manifests a concerted effort to examine white privilege from the standpoint of black culture and to engage the ethical demands of racial equality. Finally, it explains how Pynchon's critique of whiteness works. Pynchon's representations of white masculinity suggest a sensibility characterized by an inability to move beyond anxiety, powerlessness, and even self-loathing toward a successful model of cross-cultural understanding. However, because Pynchon's techniques overtly mark social identities as social constructions, they can be used to prompt readers to recognize how their own precepts, beliefs, or knowledge hinder them from responding to the demands of other groups in society.