Terminal Edges: Thomas Pynchon’s Endings

Thomas Pynchon’s novels are exercises in literary transgression, pushing relentlessly towards boundaries, obsessively studying, retracing and rewriting these demarcations and separations, and then propelling themselves beyond into uncharted, unstructured, and unmapped spaces, into transcendences of the cultural, the social, the linguistic, the epistemological, the ontological, the ethical. This boundary-crossing, this drive towards the transcendent not-place and no-time within which borders cannot be is arguably the goal of much of Pynchon’s fiction. It can be, and has been, interpreted in many ways, but one of the most satisfactory of these, and one that seems clearer with each new addition to the canon, is the simple acknowledgment of love as the only means to, and the true expression of, a momentary overcoming of the fallen world-as-it-is.

There is one place in particular at which all books inevitably face an impermeable boundary, an edge that can be neither avoided or ignored: their endings, the terminal wounds that confront every work of fiction with the void of non-being. In this paper, I argue that it is precisely at this ultimate edge, and along it, that Pynchon’s novels most clearly and insistently articulate their transcendences of love. This textual node of resistance occurs repeatedly in Pynchon’s novels, from the imperilled need to “touch the person next to you” at the conclusion of Gravity’s Rainbow, to Doc Sportello’s fogbound “temporary commune” at the end of Inherent Vice, to, most recently and (as Michael Chabon has argued, perhaps most pathetically) Maxine Tarnow’s reluctant release of her children into the unknown and unknowable menaces of the world in Bleeding Edge. By turning our attention to these terminal edges, and the ways Pynchon faces them, we can gain a clearer understanding of one of his main themes as it operates in relation to an inexorable formal boundary.