Back to Gondwanaland: Deep Time and Planetarity in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

ABSTRACT

In a recent article, Kate Marshall identifies “an emerging body of US fiction located firmly within the strata and sediment of the Anthropocene,” focusing exclusively on twenty-first century literature. A similar chronological focus shapes discussions of the related concept of planetarity, which was first introduced in literary theory in Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003). The tendency to relegate anthropocenic and planetary concerns to this millennium is prevalent, and it is evident in the reception of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (both 2006). However, anthropocenic and planetary concerns have been around much longer in literary fiction, and the two authors have treated them much more elaborately in their most important works, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Blood Meridian (1985). Both novels were written before concepts of the Anthropocene and planetarity became theoretical staples, but I aim to show that their thoughts on humanity and the planet prefigure the recent literary works that critics have centered their discussions of the Anthropocene on. Furthermore, I will show how both novels reflect on language as yet another technology that violates nature’s continuum, and how language is thus presented by Pynchon and McCarthy as a significant force in the Anthropocene.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. More specifically, Marshall analyzes Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, Ken Kalfus’s Equilateral, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.

2. As of January 2020, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has yet to ratify the term.

3. A special issue of the journal C21, “The Literature of the Anthropocene” (6.1, 2018), likewise focuses on literature from this century.

4. Throughout the article, page references to the two novels will appear as (GR xx) and (BM xx).

5. See for instance Edward Mendelson’s seminal article “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” or Tom LeClair’s The Art of Excess for analyses of Pynchon’s maximalist, encyclopedic impulses, and Jeremy Robert Bailey and Daniel King for a discussion of McCarthy’s carefully crafted minimalism.

6. Brian McHale is one of many critics who have characterized Pynchon as quintessentially postmodernist. In his strong reading of Blood Meridian, Dana Phillips laconically states that “[i]t is a difficult text to periodize,” and he situates it beyond both modernism and “the apocalyptic tone and the jaded manner of much postmodern fiction (the novels of Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, for example)” (435). After this somewhat reductive characterization of postmodernism, he proceeds to describe Blood Meridian as “a historical novel” – a term that might just as easily apply to Gravity’s Rainbow.

7. When they are mentioned together, it is often – as in the article by Dana Phillips or in Phillip A. Snyder and Delys W. Snyder’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy (30) – to contrast them with each other.

8. On the basis of such scenes, Dana Phillips quips that McCarthy is not so much a writer “of the ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern eras’ but of the Holocene, with a strong historical interest in the late Pleistocene and even earlier epochs” (452). This playful characterization once again confirms the idea of McCarthy as a writer who stands above the usual literary periodizations.

9. Through a number of such passages, Gravity’s Rainbow and Blood Meridian both prefigure Kate Marshall’s discussion of a “posthuman future archeologist” (525) as a specifically anthropocenic figure.

10. See for instance GR 105, 521, and BM 248–50, 331. The two novels express somewhat different views on the nature of war. For McCarthy, war is an expression of our essential human nature, whereas Pynchon depicts war as being more dictated by political or economical interests.

11. A very similar passage appears earlier in the novel, in a description of the System laying “most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral” waste “when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life” (GR 412).

12. Note that human beings in both novels are described as “creatures” – a term implying that humans are part of nature’s continuum, even while they constantly violate it.

13. Pynchon apparently admires this passage, since he stipulated that his quasi-appearance in the John Laroquette Show be accompanied with the information that his next novel was titled Pandemonium of the Sun.

14. See for instance BM 43, 134, 158, 280 for descriptions of animals and native Americans being shot down from afar.

15. In her “new novels of a newly self-aware geological epoch,” Kate Marshall also identifies a strong anthropocenic interest in how humans leave “traces in sand, snow, or salt” (525), but such an interest is already abundantly present in Gravity’s Rainbow and Blood Meridian.

16. See GR 56 for further reflections on the challenges of historiography.

17. The historical accuracy of these two pre-internet novels (both of which took approximately ten years to write) is meticulously mapped in Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion and John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian.

18. Dana Phillips also argues that “human beings and the natural world” are ultimately shown by McCarthy to be “parts of the same continuum” (446).

19. Glanton’s relation to nonhumans is not exclusively benevolent, and elsewhere in the novel, he shoots down random animals to test a new gun (BM 82–83), or whips his horse and dog when they refuse to obey his will.

20. Once again, Gravity’s Rainbow seems to anticipate much later ecocritical writings, such as Peter Wohlleben’s popular The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2016).

21. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the cynical scientist Pointsman is also frequently connected with stones and minerals.

22. Similar reflections appear in Pynchon’s Against the Day, where the character Kit has a sudden vision of life as “a connected set” (782).

23. http://www.abc.net.au/science/moon/earthrise.htm. Ironically, the ecological thought that is evident throughout Gravity’s Rainbow is thus partly made possible by later generations of the deadly V2-rockets whose history the novel traces.

24. John Sepich also notes the celestial sphere as an important trope in McCarthy’s novel, and on pp. 163–67 of his Notes on Blood Meridian, he lists its many occurrences in the book.

25. Gravity’s Rainbow is also replete with descriptions of stars and outer space – see e.g. GR 109, 347, 383, 699.

26. Blood Meridian both uses the word “void” to describe space and the desert landscape, so there is a clear homology between the outer dark and the barren emptiness traversed by the scalp hunters.

27. In The Road, the father also tells his hopeful son that humans “couldnt live anyplace else” (205), underlining the universal hopelessness of their situation.

28. Dana Phillips argues that Blood Meridian describes the universe “as a continuum, a more or less even distribution of existence throughout a radically unbounded space” (447). In some parts of the novel, we do indeed find such a description, but in the parts I have just quoted in the main text, the novel specifically singles out Earth as a special case and as the only place where this “existence” is organized as organic life.

29. The word “planetary” even appears three times in Gravity’s Rainbow (GR 521, 604, 639).

30. Se e.g. Schaub, LeClair, McLaughlin, Coffman for rich discussions of Pynchon’s ecological thinking. Especially Schaub and LeClair demonstrate how Gravity’s Rainbow shows clear affinities to the early ecological ideas of James Lovelock and others. Discussions of McCarthy and ecology have tended to focus on The Road, but his ideas of man and nature have remained remarkably consistent throughout his career.

31. Kekulé’s famous dream, where he saw the circular shape of the benzene molecule as a snake with its tail in its mouth, also appears in an important scene in Gravity’s Rainbow (GR 410–11), where it becomes an emblem of humanity’s manipulation of nature, as McLaughlin has pointed out.

32. Much later in the novel, the kid sees “small yellow men with speech like cats” (BM 313) unloading silk and tea in the harbor, once again comparing language from other nations with animalistic noises.

33. In her analysis of The Road, Linda Woodson likewise discusses McCarthy’s portrayal of “knowledge-making language that possibly has led to the destruction of the world” (90–91).

34. Herman and Weisenburger have also written about language as a form of domination in Gravity’s Rainbow (88–89), and Paul Maltby has discussed Pynchon’s ambivalent relation to the political aspects of language.

35. See for instance the first pages of chapter XIV, where the narrator dwells on the mountain scenery and its beautiful flowers.

36. The judge also enjoys wandering around naked, but the nakedness of this pedophile murderer is somewhat more sinister than Slothrop’s.

37. A possible reading of the judge’s repeated claim in the final chapter that “he will never die” (BM 335) is that he is fully aware of his own status as a literary, and hence potentially immortal, being.

38. In contrast, Slothrop ends up at one with Earth, and the kid meets his end in a humble shithouse.

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Tore Rye Andersen

Tore Rye Andersen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University. He is author of the book Den nye amerikanske roman/The New American Novel (Aarhus University Press, 2011), and he has published articles on contemporary American and British fiction in journals such as Narrative, Critique, English Studies and Convergence.