engleski

Good Mourning, America: Genealogies of Loss in Against the Day

The article offers a reading of Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day (2006) and situates it in the 9/11 archive. Read in that context, Pynchon's displacement of the contemporary anti-American terrorism to its turn of the twentieth century anti-capitalist counterpart represents an implicit critique of mediatic terrorist spectacle that took place on 9/11. Moreover, the assumption implied in Pynchon's historical transposition is that the event itself, the media-induced "percepticide" that followed, as well as the government policies after 9/11 worked to overshadow systemic contradictions and power relations implicated in "anti-American" terrorism. By working through allegory and allusion, and simultaneously uncovering and reimagining the historical co-emergence of corporate power and suppression of organized labor struggles, Pynchon's Against the Day turns the readers' gaze from the blinding power of the violence of 9/11 towards events and problems that are either forgotten or marginalized in the national debates about the post-9/11 moment, such as issues of class struggle, social justice, and the formidable entanglement of corporate interests and state power in the United States.

Pynchon, terrorism, capitalism, history, 9/11

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