Chapter 7 - Africa and Latin America

Summary

It is sometimes said that American writers are insular, and write only, or at least primarily, about America. While this may be true in some cases, it is hardly true of Thomas Pynchon. George Saunders has said that Pynchon tries to cram the whole world into his fiction, and Saunders finds a hint of Buddhism in Pynchon’s impulse to absorb the world, especially evident in his longer novels. Of the many international locales Pynchon takes his readers to, Africa and Latin America occupy a prominent place. Rather than show how small our world is becoming, Pynchon seems intent on preserving the largeness of the world – in terms of its cultural diversity – in the face of the reductionist onslaughts of colonialism, Western cultural domination, and technological advances that overshadow traditional ways of knowing and seeing. Much of Pynchon’s fiction represents his charting through several centuries of history the precarious survival of cultures, such as those in Africa and Latin America, which represent alternative ways of life, full of vitality that Europe and North America lack. Thus, if Saunders is accurate about Pynchon’s desire to include the whole world in his work, then Africa and Latin America represent vital parts of that world.