Postmodern novel as a genre is mainly intertextual because it often goes beyond the paradigm of literature and borrows its material from different fields of study like science, geography, history, astronomy and so on to make a collage of different theories and citations for shaping a literary text in a new dimension. Thomas Pynchon was a student of Engineering Physics at Cornell University. It is therefore not surprising that he uses science as a background for the interpretation of literature. His main aim is to interpret the postmodern condition where life has taken a new dimension in the midst of enormous influence of science and technology. Man is so much guided by technologies that it too some extent ruins the natural flow of life. Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow makes the uses of science to such a large amount that novel becomes very complicated to be decoded by the readers. In The Crying of Lot 49 he uses the branches of science like new physics, fractal geometry, thermodynamics, and chaos theory to give a metaphysical shape to the novel and also to question the validity to the claim of scientific objectivity and absolute truth as science itself fails to give a an ultimate objective truth as it is seen in the case of Oedipa Mass in the novel. In this way, the novelist does a unique job to combine science with philosophy to grasp the complex situation of the novel. This paper aims to show how science is used as a metaphor in this novel to give a new interpretation to this work.
Traditional discourse of science generally talks about the world of order, poise and rationality whereas the basic premises of the postmodern novel are disorder, confusion and chaos. Then the question arises how Pynchon combines the genre of postmod...
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...he lenses of camera while going to the lake of Inverarity.
The experiment of doctor Hilarious of LSD on house wives exposes the cruel aspect of science which is not bothered about humane sense and can go to any extent to achieve success in any experiments.
In this way, the novel can be read with the help of scientific metaphors which implies that in the age of cybernetics literature can no longer be isolated from science and science can provide a background for studying postmodern novels.
Works Cited
Auria, Carmen Perez Llantada. On Fractal Geometry and Meaning, Dissemination: Rethinking Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Atlantis, vol. 17, November 19. Web. 16,December, 2013.
Howard, T , Rifkin, J. Entropy: A New world View. 1980. New York: Bantam Books. Print.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. J.B. Lippincott Company New York: Philadhelphia 1965. Print.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, London. 1981.
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