Pynchon's “Hysterical Sublime”

Donoghue, William F.

doi:10.1080/00111610903567438

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

2011

DOI: 10.1080/00111610903567438

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Pynchon's “Hysterical Sublime”

William F. Donoghue

Abstract: This article looks at the work of Thomas Pynchon as an example of the "hysterical sublime." Pynchon's fiction displays some key attributes of the Kantian sublime, such as blockage and excess, which, taken together, thwart the understanding. The result is a body of fiction whose register is better defined by hysteria than paranoia.

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2014

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Art, Society and Ethics: Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Aesthetic Theory and Pynchon

Eve

2014

Pynchon and Philosophy

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Abstract‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ proclaims the introduction to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (xvii). This chiastic statement lies at the core of this work’s account of a fundamental incompatibility between enlightenment’s goals of ‘liberating human beings from fear’ (the freedom that Adorno and Horkheimer believe is inseparable from enlightenment thinking) and the simultaneous state of ‘the wholly enlightened earth’ as ‘radiant with triumphant calamity’ (DoE, 1). The key to grasping this interrelation of enlightenment and myth lies in the depiction of nature, to which one subsection will here be dedicated. Nature, for the longest period, was deemed to hold a degree of enchantment; it was intrinsically meaningful. The abstracted tales that correlate to such a foundationalist stance are myths. Conversely, at the dawn of the Age of Reason there began a progressive disenchantment of nature: ‘[f]rom now on, matter was to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties’ (DoE, 3). The world and all aspects therein were available to be used and understood; there was no longer any intrinsic meaning: ‘[o]n their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning’ (3). This disenchantment of nature is termed enlightenment.

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Art, Society and Ethics: Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Aesthetic Theory and Pynchon

Eve

2014

Pynchon and Philosophy

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Pynchon's “Hysterical Sublime”

Cited by 1 publication

References 11 publications

Art, Society and Ethics: Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Aesthetic Theory and Pynchon

Art, Society and Ethics: Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Aesthetic Theory and Pynchon

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