Conspiracy Theories in 'Gravity’s Rainbow'

The tendency to see conspiracies everywhere characterizes the present day. A novelist, Thomas Pynchon, explored the springs of this trend and its links with paranoia. Keeping up with the news is not easy. Every day, we are bombarded with information evoking wars, injustices, health risks, terrorism, economic crisis, worrying technological and medical developments, international agreements kept secret, natural disasters, sometimes-horrific news items, assassinations, and death of celebrities. And that's not to mention the specter of permanent surveillance, of corruption: the list is endless.

 

One of the effects of this avalanche of information, sometimes delivered without explanation, is the appearance, in recent years, of alternative narrative diagrams, which function as so many explanations for anxiety-provoking events: they are called "conspiracy theories". If they flourish on the Internet and in certain minority or anti-establishment circles, we also find them in the classic media, sometimes in the academic world, in the high spheres of politics, and of course in the world of fiction, in the cinema, in the series, in successful novels. It seems there are conspiracies everywhere!

 

Long before the current wave of conspiracy theories, an American writer had covered the issue. This master of literary suspicion is Thomas Pynchon. Born in 1937 on Long Island, near New York, the author is also known for the incredible mysteries developed in his novels, as for the one he maintains around himself. 

Master of the conspiracy

In fact, almost nothing is known about him. His photographs can be counted on the fingers of one hand; we ignore his movements and places of residence. He intervenes exclusively in writing, through his novels and rare comments in the press, does not give interviews, and does not do any promotion. A secret in perfect harmony with the conspiracies that make the salt of monumental and convoluted V. (1963), Gravity Rainbow (1973) or Vineland (1990).

Pynchon's endless novels have something to drive you crazy: the true mixes with the false, we find innumerable characters with improbable names, incessant digressions on an almost unlimited number of subjects - biology, physics, mechanics, computer science, politics, history, popular culture, philosophy... -, cryptic references and allusions, puzzles whose solutions are impossible to distinguish from false leads, very frequent parodic intrusions, puns and unusual metaphors. But it is precisely this complexity and this tense play with the reader which makes him the key author to approach the psychology of conspiracy, that is to say the tendency to adhere to conspiracy theories or to deem them credible.