The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon: Postmodern
Negotiations of Western Modernity

MOSCH, MATTHIAS (2012) The Faust Myth in William Gaddis and Thomas
Pynchon: Postmodern Negotiations of Western Modernity. Doctoral
thesis, Durham University.

Full text not available from this repository.
Author-imposed embargo until 26 November 2016.

Abstract

This thesis examines the Faust myth in post-war American fiction,
giving special consideration to works of William Gaddis and Thomas
Pynchon.

I present these works, which are underrepresented in broader studies
of the literary tradition of the myth, as substantial contributions to
the latter, while demonstrating how their thematic and stylistic
proximity can be explained through their use of the myth itself. I
thereby meet two desiderata: a location of Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s
Faustiana in specific currents of twentieth-century intellectual
history and a qualitative comparison between both authors against the
background of postmodern mythography.

Locating their works in the tradition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and Thomas Mann, I analyse how both authors employ the myth in order
to satirise the underbelly of Western modernity. In turning the myth
against the founding principles of America itself, they suggest that
the vision of a New Eden has been a Faustian wager from the start. In
doing so, they transform the image of the heretical soul-seller into
that of a representative of the dominant forces of their time.
Playfully demonising the reckless individualism, technicism, and
voracious materialism of their contemporaries, they provide an
astonishingly differentiated portrait of human self-aggrandisement
that reverts into mechanisms of dehumanisation, a feat that is
reflected in their manifest use of the works of Oswald Spengler, Max
Weber, Eric Voegelin, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse.

While Gaddis’s and Pynchon’s early novels remain a matter of negative
theology in refraining from providing totalising suggestions as how to
fare with the sold ‘soul’ of the West, I argue that these satirical
disputes, via their use of apophaticism, indirection, and allusive
complexity, convey a distinctly ethical message that speaks against
the alleged nihilism and relativism of postmodern fiction.

http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/5901/

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