Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene by Tore Rye Andersen (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene by Tore Rye Andersen
• Patrick Whitmarsh

ANDERSEN, TORE RYE. Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 228 pp. $110.00 hardcover.

Those of us in the niche subfield of Pynchon studies—Pynheads, if you please—have long debated the inner order or logic that governs the author's inimitable corpus. In Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene, Tore Rye Andersen deals a massive hand to this critical gambit, structured around extensive readings and contextual analyses of Pynchon's three most substantial works: Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006). Treating these works as "one coherent megatext" (20), Andersen argues for Pynchon as a writer of what we might call the global process of modernity—a protracted history from the rise of capitalism to World War II. Hardly a history of incremental progress, Pynchon's vision channels the "dark side of the growth scenarios of modernity" (11), the subtractions, negations, and depletions that make possible an ideology of Euro-American supremacy. Erecting a conceptual bridge from the colonial and imperial discourses that inform modern global capitalism to the critical environmentalisms that make up the growing field of Anthropocene studies, Andersen delivers an ambitiously conceived and deeply rewarding analysis of one the most important American novelists of the post−World War II era.

In a broad sense, Planetary Pynchon pushes through and beyond foundational postmodernist and historiographic readings of the author by such critics as David Cowart, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian McHale, yet does so in a way that builds on this earlier work. Reading Pynchon at the planetary scale, Andersen underscores the way the author's global novels highlight and even formally embody the contingency of historical development: "in historical nodal points like those depicted in Pynchon's world-historical novels, we are rather faced with a multiplexity of possible paths, none of which seem to lead to any safety" (48). Paired with an Anthropocene environmentalism, Andersen's emphasis finds rejuvenated meaning. The unnumbered and ever-dividing potentialities that perpetually regenerate across human history mirror the complex array of biophysical feedback loops that unspool over planetary time. As Andersen's argument goes, Pynchon's global trilogy clarifies the correlation between these scales: the "world-historical depiction of the forceful spread of modernity across the globe is also the story of the growth of the Anthropocene" (161).

Andersen develops his argument by moving through Pynchon's novels not in order of publication but in the chronological order of the periods in which they are set: eighteenth century (Mason & Dixon), the turn of the twentieth century (Against the Day), and mid-twentieth century (Gravity's Rainbow). Despite this organization, the chapters [End Page 323] do not maintain an exclusive focus on the governing text but keep all three novels in conversation. This is to the book's credit; Andersen's dialogic structure enables readers to apprehend more easily the substantive connections between the novels. Perhaps more importantly, the structure illuminates the extent to which the three global novels are part of a decades-long project on Pynchon's part. Readers could be forgiven for suspicion toward this claim considering the unlikelihood that Pynchon grasped the full scope of his megatext already with the publication of Gravity's Rainbow, if not earlier. Also to the book's credit, Andersen responds to this suspicion in his fourth chapter, which offers an "alternative history" (129) of the novels that acknowledges the evolution of their author's style and his treatment of such political matters as gender and race (the latter of which is of supreme importance to a project so critically focused on the history of colonialism). Perhaps most insightful in this chapter is Andersen's admission that, even in his great global novels, Pynchon succumbs to the weight of expectation: "In Mason & Dixon and Against the Day we get brilliant prose by a master in full control of his medium; in Gravity's Rainbow we get a strange hybrid that transgresses boundaries and twists language into new constellations" (147). It is an irony worth repeating that the apogee of early Pynchon established a template for...