Pynchon and Relativity: Narrative Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels

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Is
time an illusion? Do past, present, and future co-exist in a timeless
whole, or are our experiences of change and duration the reality of time?
Thomas Pynchon’s writing has always been interested in the interplay of these
two ways of thinking about time, but his recent fiction has also taken on
the task of imaginatively responding to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which
in the early years of the twentieth century renewed this ancient debate. In
this book, Simon deBourcier looks in detail at Pynchon’s 2006 novel Against
the Day, which is set during the period in which Einstein published his
world-changing theory, and 1997’s Mason & Dixon, set in the
eighteenth century when Isaac Newton’s picture of a world governed by absolute
space and time was unchallenged. By comparing these two novels, Pynchon and
Relativity shows that Pynchon’s tales of loss, haunting, and time travel
are informed by a sophisticated awareness of the philosophical implications of
Relativity. The book goes on to examine the consequences of this for our
reading of Pynchon’s other work.

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