11 - Alterity

Summary

Pynchon's engagement with alterity is thematized psychologically through paranoia, schizophrenia, and narcissism; politically through systems of control that attempt to destroy otherness; economically through monopolistic transnational corporations and cartels that supplant national governments; scientifically through determinism and theories of entropy; aesthetically through film and photography, storytelling and the “routinization” of language. Pynchon thematizes these various aspects of culture as the effort to substitute the randomness of nature with a perfectly controlled, and controllable, version of reality: what, in Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Pointsman describes as “a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth.” This chapter considers how Pynchon's work has represented and complicated diverse contested understandings of identity and alterity by variously undermining and legitimizing them. Pynchon's narrative engagement with liberal humanist ideas of essentialized identities gives rise to much of his narratological innovation and complexity, particularly when his exploration of ontological identity categories takes place within the context of European colonialism and its New World legacies.

Alterity names the process by which an “Other” is constructed. It carries the double sense of both the subject position of “Otherness” in which someone is placed and also the adoption of that subject position as the Other's perspective. Alterity is then a double process of placement and perception. In narrative, consequently, alterity affects the construction of character and also the treatment of narrative perspective or focalization, spatiality, temporality, causality, and truth or authenticity.