Thomas Pynchon

Looking back at the early 1970s socio-cultural upheavals, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) generates a discursive construct of Los Angeles that captures the transition from a Fordist culture to a Post-Fordist one. This essay holds that around this watershed moment, literary heterotopias specific to Southern California are being made. Michel Foucault defines heterotopias as realized utopias, emplacements that simultaneously represent, contest, and invert the normal space. This study reads Inherent Vice , using Foucault’s archaeological method of analysis to develop literary heterotopology. A discursive analysis of Pynchon’s novel reveals heterotopias’ discontinuous nature, which this study proposes as the seventh principle for heterotopology. Furthermore, Pynchon uses a new vehicle, Decompression Heterotopias, to reshape globalization in his retro-production of Los Angeles. Ultimately, the essay shows how the Fordist and Post-Fordist waves of globalization aspire to affect Angeleno’s lives by compressing the time-space spectrum. Pynchon’s decompression heterotopias, however, resist the status quo and propose reconfiguring globalization’s compression forces.

Having its roots in science, “chaos theory” provides a new strategy to examine the disordered world of postmodern novels to find the hidden order underlying the apparent chaos. This study tries to clarify the ambiguous relation between Oedipa Maas, the “Tristero system” and the “Maxwell’s Demon” in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa Maas, the main character of the novel is regarded as an “everyman” type character who tries desperately to make sense of the signs and mysteries proliferating around her, but she can never fulfill her quest because she is trapped in a chaotic world where there are no stable values, friends or meanings. She feels separated from the world around her and longs to regain the stability she used to have before she started her task as the “executrix” of her former lover’s vast estate. She does not manage to find “order” in the surrounding chaos, but applying the major tenets of chaos theory and examining concepts such as “the butterfly effect”, “bifurcations”, “strange attractors”, “recursive symmetry” and “entropy” , we can come to a better understanding of the order underlying the disordered world of the novel.