At the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is a singular act of imitation, in which Klara, a synthetic human, is asked to take the place of her owner, the sick child Josie.

This essay addresses this moment, in order to ask how far the novel form is able to perform this kind of ventriloquism, to undertake acts of imitation that might replace or supersede those that they imitate.

In order to respond to this question, the essay suggests, we need to put Klara and the Sun in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, which is itself in conversation with the longer history of the novel form. From Artist of the Floating World to The Unconsoled to Klara, Ishiguro has been concerned with the capacity of art to become the reality it imitates, and particularly with the capacity of the novel voice to pass through the boundary between original and copy. Klara might suggest that contemporary technologies have made this boundary newly porous; but the essay argues that the novel form has always sat at the difficult junction between voice and its replications. When he makes an artificial being speak in the voice of its owner, Ishiguro does not depart from the protocols of narrative voice, but rather gains access to its interior mechanisms, in a way that is illuminating for the critical power of fiction under contemporary biopolitical conditions.

The sixth chapter focuses on a decisive common dimension in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, namely, their treatment of anthropocenic and planetary concerns. These related concepts have featured prominently in recent literary studies, but studies of Pynchon’s relation to the Anthropocene are still largely absent. Moreover, recent discussions in literary criticism of anthropocenic and planetary concerns are primarily centered on works published in the twenty-first century, but the chapter shows that the concerns are extensively prefigured in the early novels of Pynchon’s global trilogy. The notion of planetarity is often seen as incompatible with the idea of globalization, but the chapter shows that the anthropocenic and planetary themes in Pynchon’s novels grow naturally out of the global and world-historical issues discussed in Chapters 1–4. At the same time, it demonstrates that Pynchon’s ideas of humanity’s harmful exploitation of the planet draw on a long tradition in American literature and on the ecological ideas of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Pynchon depicts language as a significant force in the Anthropocene, and with a discussion of the trilogy’s recurring portrayal of giants as ancient planetary avatars poised to reclaim the Earth.

Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene has three interrelated agendas: (1) It establishes Thomas Pynchon’s three longest novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day – as an ambitious, world-historical trilogy about the emergence and global spread of European modernity and thus presents a groundbreaking new understanding of one of the most important contemporary novelists. (2) On the basis of the analysis of the trilogy’s profound engagement with global history, it presents an elaborate discussion of Pynchon’s historical methods, which refines our understanding of Pynchon as an author of historical fiction and challenges prevalent notions of his relation to literary postmodernism. (3) It charts Pynchon’s early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including their close connection to modernity’s and globalization’s demand for constant growth. In so doing, it constitutes an important corrective to other recent studies of literature and the Anthropocene, showing how literary fiction is not merely a belated reflection of scientific debates about the Anthropocene, but has taken an early and active part in establishing the contours of the current discussions.

Taking off from an analysis of Mason & Dixon, Chapter 2 analyzes Pynchon’s depiction of how the basic impulses of modernity (the colonialist export of European capitalism and technological and scientific rationalism to the rest of the world) were established in earnest during the Enlightenment. Most critics primarily read Mason & Dixon as a story about America, but through analyses of, for instance, the prevalent theme of westering and the character Bonk, the chapter discusses the novel’s considerable attention to a global space. Furthermore, the chapter discusses Pynchon’s varied historical methods. His historiographical reflections are particularly evident in Mason & Dixon, and drawing on historical theories by Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, and Niall Ferguson, the chapter discusses how Pynchon in this and the two other global novels balances between immersive and distanced historical perspectives, and how he combines spatial and temporal forms of history writing.

Chapter 4 proceeds to the first published, but chronologically last, installment of the trilogy, Gravity’s Rainbow, and begins with an analysis of the multiple temporalities of that novel, which are discussed in dialogue with the historiographical theories of Reinhart Kosseleck. It then examines Pynchon’s both bleak and desperately funny depiction of how modernity reached its dark apogee in World War II, where humanity’s romantic affair with technology was finally fully consummated. In particular, this theme is traced through a meticulous analysis of the theme of immachination, which runs through all three novels but reaches its natural (or unnatural) culmination in Gravity’s Rainbow. In dialogue with important critical work by Ali Chetwynd as well as Luc Herman and Steven Weisenburger, the chapter concludes by revisiting the pervasive metaphor of the crossroads and the related theme of complicity in order to discuss whether the novel – and the global trilogy in general – is as relentlessly negative as they argue or whether it poses possible alternatives to the status quo.

By considering the Pynchon’s global novels out of their sequence of publication, the previous chapters have been able to address the full scope of the author’s coherent historical vision, but this reading order also limits discussion of the stylistic and thematic developments that have unfolded during the four decades during which the novels were published. To describe the relation between these different temporalities, the fifth chapter moves athwart the historical chronology established in the three preceding chapters to trace Pynchon’s development as an author across the global novels, and it discusses the consequences of this development for our understanding of the trilogy. More specifically, the chapter analyzes Pynchon’s stylistic evolution from Gravity’s Rainbow, over Mason & Dixon, and to Against the Day, just as it traces how his micropolitical engagements with characterization and themes such as race, gender, and family have changed in conjunction with surrounding cultural and historical developments.

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.

The third chapter of the book analyzes Pynchon’s portrayal of the complex geopolitical situation around 1900. Against the Day is the longest and most relentlessly globetrotting novel in the global trilogy, and the chapter traces the different literary mapping strategies that Pynchon employs to depict the progress of modernity across the planet and his characters’ restless traverses through this and other worlds. The chapter also analyzes Pynchon’s deft use of various genres from the depicted period, just as it discusses the novel’s curious non-depiction of World War I and Pynchon’s rendering of the defeatist attitude which made the war possible. Finally, through an analysis of the related themes of bilocation and refraction the chapter shows which modes of resistance Pynchon’s longest novel proposes to place against the day, and it undertakes a close reading of the novel’s highly ambiguous epilogue, which leads directly into Gravity’s Rainbow.

Since his death in 1951 and the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations in 1953, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s life and work have been a subject of intense fascination for poets, novelists, and playwrights. Wittgenstein’s signature approach to writing as a mode of discovery – of writing as philosophical investigation – factors into and emerges out of the literary response to his life and work. That response takes many forms, from a quick reference or veiled allusion to parodic imitation to more extended, complex, or subtle forms of inspiration, influence, or acknowledgment. After examining a number of uses of Wittgenstein’s work in texts by mid-twentieth-century authors (Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, David Markson), ones that construe the philosopher as alternately a logical positivist or a silent mystic, the chapter turns to more contemporary, twenty-first-century responses to Wittgenstein by authors including Maggie Nelson, Kathy Acker, Lydia Davis, Ben Lerner, Nicholas Mosley, W. G. Sebald, David Foster Wallace, and Amiri Baraka. These more contemporary literary responses to Wittgenstein are less uniform in their references to the man and his work but more diverse in their use of Wittgenstein’s concepts, arguments, or writings, particularly from the later philosophy.

This chapter investigates how and why the cultural capital of literary fiction increasingly became aligned with liberalism and the Left in the 1970s and 1980s. It introduces a unique historical perspective that moves away from well-trodden narratives about how modern progressive liberalism, the sixties counterculture, or the New Left altered the landscape of literary fiction, and toward a broader political narrative that interrogates the impact of conservatism as an ideological force on American fiction after the 1960s. This shift in conservative literary taste was a historical contingency, a largely unintended byproduct of arguments between three strains of the post-sixties American Right: the triptych of William F. Buckley’s movement conservatism, Irving Kristol’s neoconservatism, and the reactionary populist New Right. To advance its argument, this chapter concentrates primarily on the writings of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, two major postwar novelists who wrote several of the most critically acclaimed works of the era, but who were eventually seen as occupying very different positions in the political literary fields: Bellow’s literary prestige declining as he was aligned with neoconservativism and the American Right, and Pynchon’s literary prestige increasing as he was aligned with various strands of the New Left and the broader counterculture.

This concluding chapter, which focuses on the work of Thomas Pynchon, returns us to the history of credit across the long twentieth century told in the book’s opening chapter. It argues that Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz functions as a recurring trope for the futility of the quest to discover what lies behind the money form in Pynchon’s work. The first section reads Gravity’s Rainbow and argues that it uses Dorothy from Victor Fleming’s 1939 film as a symbol of a compensatory fantasy. She embodies the false hope that one can return home, a hope that is associated in the novel with Tyrone Slothrop’s discovery that home is itself connected to the state’s violent complicity with the privatisation of money. Against the Day reprises this narrative but turns, instead, to the Dorothy of Baum’s 1900 novella as it seeks to uncover the alternative histories that Fleming’s cinematic adaptation obscures. Dorothy reappears as the daughters of the Traverse and Webb families in a complex narrative that allows Pynchon, finally, to critically explore the gendered language of both money and the gift that run throughout this work as a whole.