falling away from what is human

The process repeats itself: across five decades and eight novels, Thomas Pynchon repeats variations on a theme. In V. a woman is dispersed across space and time, rendered a cyborg ghost of geopolitical spasms. In The Crying of Lot 49 another woman sees her exlover's face emerge from the floating trash of the city streets and hears the cries of untold millions echoing through the telephone wires overhead. The ostensible protagonist of Gravity's Rainbow is taken over by a system of desire, and made a machine from the inside out. At the birth of modernity, the titular surveyors of Mason & Dixon discover the genesis of that great, hideous machine in the captive dreams of a continent. In Vineland, gods emerge out of the blips of data that represent human life and death, while in Bleeding Edge the ghosts of humanity glitch from the other side into our alternate realities. In each novel we discover variations on the theme of dissolution: people fragmented by mechanisms of control; bodies integrated into nightmarish circuitries; minds melted into flows of desire; and humanity itself incorporated into the vast inhuman machineries with which it has surrounded itself.