The transcendent postmodern: Noise and free agency in the novels of Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs

"The Transcendent Postmodern: Noise and Free Agency in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs" is both an exercise in recent literary/cultural history and an examination of philosophies of transcendence peculiar to some American postmodern fiction. Part I draws on post-structural theory, American popular culture and the information sciences to argue that aleatory structures in recent fiction and critical theory are products of and responses to the post-World War II development of an information culture hostile to individual free agency. The information sciences provide both literature and theory with an underground narrative of social, linguistic and technological control of the individual as well as a means to locate and revamp modernist ideas of alienation in mass culture. But recent uses of theory to territorialize the postmodern provide yet another underground narrative, that of American popular culture held hostage by intellectually hostile forces. Drawing on Jameson's emendation of Lyotard's Postmodern Condition--that the master narratives have not disappeared but continue to operate underground--as well as Emerson's Americanization of Continental Idealism and Wittgenstein's treatment, in the Tractatus and later writings, of the ethical and metaphysical spheres as outside the nonsensical propositions of logic, I argue that American postmodernity differs from the common conception of postmodernity in that it offers a non-linguistic means for transcending the sphere of informational control/linguistic mediation of experience which is the burden of most theories of the postmodern. While useful for articulating the means of American postmodernity, the work of Lyotard, Derrida, Barthes and other theorists, grounded in positivism, Nietzschean rejection of metaphysics, and existentialism, is inadequate to its ends: the reinstitution of free agency outside the limits imposed by language/information systems. These ends are achieved both within the action of the novels and in the novels' relation to their communities of readers.;Part II examines individual, violent acts of postmodern transcendence in and around Pynchon's V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland and Burroughs' Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket that Exploded and concludes with the suggestion that American postmodernity cannot be viewed as separate from a singular culture which has produced both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Porky Pig cartoons.