Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

Thomas Pynchon is frequently read as an American author who writes American novels about American reality, but this chapter argues that he can fruitfully be considered one of our leading novelists of globalization, and it establishes the considerable benefits – and perhaps even the necessity – of considering his largest novels, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, one coherent world-historical trilogy about the gestation and global progression of modernity. After positioning this argument in discussions of world literature as well as in the larger field of Pynchon studies, the chapter identifies a number of parallels between the three novels in the trilogy, and it argues that in order to reveal the coherent nature and full scope of Pynchon’s historical project, his three global novels are best read not in their sequence of publication, but in an order that reflects the historical periods they depict. Reading Pynchon’s novels in this order has precedents in the critical work of Samuel Thomas, Sascha Pöhlmann, and Dale Carter, and it paves the ground for the book’s elaborate analysis of the progressive historical narrative in Pynchon’s trilogy.