The Quest for the Mechanical Muse: Thomas Pynchon and Science

[Werner Presber]

ABSTRACT

SCHETZINA, CATHY ANNE.  The Quest for the Mechanical Muse: Thomas  
Pynchon
and Science.  (Under the direction of Nick Halpern).

This thesis explores Thomas Pynchon's philosophy of science as  
evidenced by the
thematic and literary role of science in Gravity's Rainbow and Mason  
& Dixon.   His
treatment of science in these novels amounts to a call for  
intellectual revolution on a
grand scale, as Pynchon takes aim at the Western world's all- 
pervasive faith in the
scientific enterprise, made dominant during the Enlightenment, which  
he associates with
a blind reliance on binary oppositions, belief in cause-and-effect  
and faith in reason.
Pynchon associates this cultural construction, which I refer to  
throughout the thesis as
Science,  with a range of abstract systems that, when imposed upon  
humanity, prove to be
both oppressive and destructive.  In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon  
depicts the destruction
that has resulted from the use of science, creates a symbolic order  
that challenges the
dominance of Science and urges traversal of the boundaries it  
dictates and subversion of
the binary oppositions that characterize it.  Mason & Dixon neatly  
enriches the symbolic
order created in Gravity's Rainbow, having at its center an iconic  
representation of the
Enlightenment enterprise and that of Science.  Taken together, the  
novels provide both a
critique and an apologia of the trajectory of science in the  
twentieth century, along with a
symbolically articulated plea for revolution.

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