American writers saw two great developments in their own country in the postwar era. On the one hand, the United States took the international leadership in terms of global strategy and economic development for the West. On the other hand, the U. S. gradually entered  a postindustrial social structure.

But American writers were extremelyskittish about political labels. Even those who tackled political and social issues seldom announced their political affiliations or accepted political classification. Most writers treated politics as taboo. However, one of the main themes of literature in this period was just to show the interrelatedness of American politics and the new social mores. Many novels written during the 1950s eulogized World War II as a glorious war, but during the 1960s there emerged novels which mocked this war and recent American history to the point of reducing it to an absurd farce. V(1963) by Thomas Pynchon(1937-) , Mother Night (1961) and Slaughterhouse Five (1968) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Painted Bird (1965) by Jerzy Kosinski(1933-) , and Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth are all such examples.

In the 1960s and 1970s American writers were doubting the very reality of the political events they were witnessing: the blunders of the Johnson administration, the lies of the Nixon administration, the Vietnam War, the Watergate debacle, the proliferation of the nuclear weapons, etc. All the official versions were being mistrusted. The blurring of fact and fiction brought about a new mode of writing which filled the linguistic gap created by the disarticulation of the official discourse. American fiction began to question, mock, parody the official discourse. Thus the line between the real and the imaginary was erased, meaning collapsed, and absurdity permeated on all levels of social life. For instance, Joseph Heller (1923-) provided an excellent example in Catch-22 (1961), which explodes the absurdity of World War II and protests against the absurdity of modern America. The narrative became fragmented, discontinuous, ironic, and full of black humor.

Black humor refers to the use of themorbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes. It carries the tone of anger and bitterness in the grotesque situations of suffering, anxiety and death. It makes readers laugh at the blackness of modern life. The black humorists feel amused at their characters’ vain attempt to create order in their absurd world.

2. Emergence

In literature, postmodernism has its origins in the rejection of traditional mimetic fiction in favor of a heightened sense of artifice, a delight in games and verbal pyrotechnics, a suspicion of absolute truth and a resulting inclination to stress the fictionality of fiction. All these traits are already present in the publications of Lolita(1955) by Nabokov, The Recognitions(1955) by William Gaddis (1922-) , and Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs (1914-) . They ushered in the postmodern fiction in America.

Although postmodern fiction is often identified as peculiarly American and Larry MaCaffery has identified November 22,1963- the day Kennedy was shot- as the beginning of postmodernism, it owed much of the founding influence of Nabokov, Samuel Beckett(1906-1989), and Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) who were born outside America. These writers denied the feasibility of any literary art to represent or bring order to reality because they believed that reality was multiple, elusive and uncertain. They tried to upset all tradition and create confusion so that readers would come to terms with the absurd reality. Hence, they brought home the sense of pervasive skepticism, of sharpened absurdity and narcissistic self-awareness to American fiction. Postmodern fiction did not form a unified movement with a coherent theory. It was characterized by a multiplicity of individual voices. They did share a common sense that a crisis was at hand for society and for literature and that all forms of dogma, convention, ideology needed to be reexamined and replaced if necessary by fresher systems more suitable to the times.

3. Major Concepts

3.1. As Burroughs states in Naked Lunch, “The world cannot be expressed, it can perhaps be indicated by  mosaics  of juxtaposition, like objects abandoned in a hotel room, defined by negatives and absence.” Postmodern writers brooded over what they perceived to be absence of answers and continuity by emphasizing randomness, discontinuity, and by blurring the distinction between author and fictional character. They insisted on drawing the reader into the confidence that the text was the   only reality.

3.2.As postmodern writers rejected the traditional referential of art, they produced self-reflexive works. The self-reflexive text explicitly concerns itself with the process of narration, with writing, and with composition. It is characteristic ofgimmicks, playfulness, and narcissism through parody and burlesque. It is a kind of grotesque comedy treated as a cosmic joke. Postmodern fiction sought to show the form rather than the content of American reality. It tried to render concrete and even visual in its language, in its syntax, in its typography and topology, the disorder, the chaos, the violence, the incongruity, but also the energy and vitality, of American reality.

3.3. It seems that the fundamental rule of the postmodern fiction is the absurd and the arbitrary. Postmodern fiction seems to turn in a void, but not without clinging irony and black humor. At the end of the postmodern fiction there is no real message, no order, no easy resolution, no false moral statement, only a text that offers itself as a kind of nonsense delirium that, to a great extent, reflects the nonsense of historical events and the delirium, of the language recounting these events. It is no longer a question of representing or explaining or even justifying American reality, but a question of denouncing the very vehicle that expressed and represented that reality: discursive language and the traditional form of fiction. In other words, postmodern writers confronted their own writing, placed themselves in front of or inside their own texts in order to question the very act of using language and of writing fiction, even at the risk of alienating the reader.

3.4. Postmodern writers held that the reality of modern life was too elusive and uncertain for people to rationalize and idealize. Any attempt to impose order on a disordered reality was artificial and falsifying. Therefore, they chose the play of irrationality, the free play of language over discursive coherence and formalistic unity. As a result, postmodern text is disintegrated into a form of deliberate unreadability. By rendering language irrational, and even unreadable, postmodern writers neutralized thefiasco of reality and the imposture of history and suggested participation in the chaos and absurdity of the world as the only meaningful way of life. They believed this was the way to come closer to the truth of the world.

3.5. The distrust of traditional mimetic genres, allied to the philosophical climate of structuralism and deconstruction, has encouraged postmodernism to embrace popular forms, such as detective fiction, science fiction, and fairy tale. Equally postmodernistic is the blurring of boundaries between the novel and journalism in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). The postmodern fiction extricated itself from realism and naturalism, and from metaphoric and symbolic representation of reality as modernists had done. By using
pastiche，parody, irony, digression, and playfulness, it created a rupture in order to revive an “exhausted” genre- a genre that could no longer accommodate and express the extravagant notions of time and space of the postindustrial reality. Hence, disorder, deliberate chaos, fragmentation, violation, disruption, dislocation, decentering, contradiction, confrontation, multiplicity, and indetermination comprise and accompany the postmodern text.

4. Reaction against Modernism

Postmodern writers challenged the terms that defined modernist fiction such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, psychological depth, and syncopated syntax. Postmodern fiction undermined the modernist tradition and rejected its mimetic function. While reflecting upon itself, upon its own means and possibilities, postmodern fiction offered itself as a collection of fragments, as a puzzling catalogue of lists, as a montage or collage of disparate elements both in space and time.

Unlike modernism, which suggested a historic period, postmodernism described a sensibility, a feeling for innovation, for experiment with conventional ways of framing experience. Modernists tried to control the fragmented society through the agency of art and give it an art form, but postmodern writers were too nihilistic to trust their own ability to give shape or significance to the absurd world. Whereas modern consciousness developed a number of responses that created a sense of underlying coherence and order, as in the mythological structures in forming ,Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury, postmodern consciousness could no longer find a response adequate to the situation in which it found itself. Whereas modernist literature manipulated ancient myths and stable symbols, postmodern fiction confronted and exploded contemporary myths and clichés. Modernism emphasized the subjective apprehension of experience, but postmodernism found itself unable to structure and ordering ideas of reality and so conceived of reality as itself unreal. Rather than observing the modernist slogan “Make It New,” postmodern writers repeated, parodied, and slowed things down. They appropriated other genres, both high and popular, longing for a both /and situation rather than one of either/or. Perhaps the most typical recent partitioner is Don DeLillo (1936-), who, by returning to the Kennedy assassination in Libra(1989), links postmodernism’s latest phase to what is arguably its first cause.

II. Thomas Pynchon(1937--)

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr was born to Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. and Katherine Frances Bennett Pynchon on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. They moved to East Norwich when Thomas, Jr was just a child. His father became town supervisor of Oyster Bay and later an industrial surveyor. He has two siblings, sister, Judith and brother, John.

Pynchon is an American novelist and short-story writer whose works combine black humour and fantasy to depict human alienation in the chaos of modern society.

After earning his B.A. in English from Cornell University in 1958, Pynchon spent a year in Greenwich Village writing short stories and working on a novel. In 1960 he was hired as a technical writer for Boeing Aircraft Corporation in Seattle, Washington. Two years later he decided to leave the company and write full-time. In 1963 Pynchon won the Faulkner Foundation Award for his first novel, V. (1963), a whimsical, cynically absurd tale of a middle-aged Englishman's search for "V," an elusive, supernatural adventuress appearing in various guises at critical periods in European history. V cannot be understood by reference to convenient fictional signposts. Although it showed an indebtedness to Faulkner and Joyce (an indebtedness shared by most ambitious American novelists), Pynchon’s style-or rather, styles ?was already wholly his own. In writing that was by turns ,labyrinthine, eloquent, and colloquial, Pynchon showed a particular fondness for imitating other styles. But these imitations and parodies instead of disparaging or minimizing their subjects radiated a generous spirit of exuberance which extended to the many characters who people V and whose individual paranoias--Pynchon’s word to  characterize the human attempt to make connections between events ?propel them into unbelievably complicated and absurd plots. The interest of V was largely in the remarkably unending inventiveness with which Pynchon developed those plots, which might involve anything from diplomatic spy stories in nineteenth-century Africa to the bombing of Malta during World War II, to surgical reconstruction of a young woman’s nose, or a hunt foralligators in the sewers of New York City.

The comic talent shown in various New York episodes from V was also evident in The Crying of Lot 49(1966). This short, perfectly controlled novel teases us and itself with questions about the meaning of our American heritage, as embodied in the form of the mysterious legacy left to its heroine, Oedipa Maas. (The joky yet portentous name exemplifies Pynchon’s teasing way of playing at “significance.”) What is the connection between this legacy and the mysterious alternative to the U.S. Postal System on which Oedipa believes she has stumbled? Is there a secret network of alienated citizens carrying on their lives outside the ordinary systems and institutions of American life? Or is it all Oedipa’s delusion, her private paranoia? These questions are considered through a style which continually surprises and unsettles us, though it is less discontinuous than V’s. In Pynchon’s world everything serious has its silly aspects (the Marx Brothers, among countless other comic acts, are in the background), while bits of trivia and foolery are suddenly elevated, through the style, into objects of sublime contemplation-as the novel’s end when Oedipa thinks of “squatters” who

…slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked Plymouths, or even. daring, spent the night up some pole in a lineman’s tent like caterpillars. swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousand of unheard messages.

Here his sentences enact the daring freedom he admires, in contrast to the institutions of a technological society.
Pynchon’s longest and most daring and exhaustive effort came with the publication, in 1973, of Gravity’s Rainbow. This encyclopedic fantasy operates through brilliant improvisations, tall tales, obscene parables, and burlesque stage routines, all of which work together into a story of supersonic capabilities and annihilative retributions. A huge cast of characters, each with a crazy name and a plot to unravel, is located all over the map, but mainly in World War II London and in postwar Germany. As the tour, main plot and the countless subsidiary plots take shape, characters--and the reader as well--attempt to “read” the messages flickering, the dumb intent to communicate, in the most casual as well as the most portentous sign. Pynchon’s knowingness and fascination with popular culture is overwhelmingly evident in Gravity’s Rainbow, as is his preoccupation with the lore of theoretical science, of obscure historical tales, or of contemporary comic books. No one denies the formidably encyclopedic nature of this astonishing effort; the question is, as Warner Berthoff has asked it, whether that effort may not also be “encyclopedically monotonous and static.” More readers begin Gravity’s Rainbow than finish it. Since 1973 all has been silence on the Pynchon front, although his early stories have been published as a collection (Slow Learner, 1984). But if there is still no consensus of his stature as an enduring American writer, there is general recognition of the quirky, uncanny exactitude of his imagination. Pynchon’s theatrical spellbindings as a man of metaphor, his feats of association (in Robert Frost’s phrase) are employed on subjects--like the rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow--which were thought to be beyond words. For daring, wit, and exuberance, there is no contemporary writer who excels him.

Thomas Pynchon is concerned with death as a salient feature of the sense of the absurd. His is what has come to be known as the entropic vision. Entropy is a technical term in physics, denoting the tendency of the universe toward uniformity. Modern physics says that the universe forever moves in a leveling or decaying process in which the distribution of energy (or heat) is becoming the same everywhere. When a state of total equilibrium is reached, the death of the universe will come. Pynchon is also fascinated with the quantum theory which holds that all things contain a measure of uncertainty, and that, by extension, man’s knowledge is inaccurate. Pynchon borrows the theories and employs them in his novels as an informing principle. Under the impact of the mechanical civilization, Pynchon feels, man is being dehumanized. He is fast losing his individual distinction to become part of the gray mass of “inanimate automation.” He is deteriorating. A reading of Pynchon’s short story, “Entropy,” reveals the protagonist’s ? and also Pynchon’s ? obsession with keeping his world distinct and separate and immune from the conforming forces of the actual world around him.

Pynchon’s novel, V., brings forth his entropic vision and his sense of the world being uncertain. The search for the true meaning of the letter V serves as a good illustration of our point here. Each of the identities of V. in the novel represents a stage in the entropic evolution of man toward dehumanization and disintegration. Either as Victoria, a young convent dropout, who helps to kill a British spy in Egypt, or as a high-priced prostitute in Florence, or a voluptuous patroness of the theater in Paris, or the cruel Veronica Manganese in Malta, or Vera Meroving in Southwest Africa or in Valletta, V. has advanced in her non-humanity as well as in her years. Denying the humanity of others, she becomes inanimate herself. When she is dead, she is found wearing false hair, with a clock-iris eye, a gold foot, and a gold leg. Her process toward entropy is complete. And it is appalling to know the V. is not the only case of such death and inanimation: death lies at the core of earth’s reality, and all seem to run to their annihilation. The uncertain and multiple nature of reality is best illustrated by the letter V. Its meaning is obscure and protean. It can be names such as Victoria, Vera, and Veronica. It can be places like Valletta of Malta or Venezuela. And it can be a good many other things, the “V” shape of spread thighs, say, or the Virgin Mother. There is an amount of truth in all these suggestions which fall, nonetheless, short of the whole truth. Its obscurity is further increased by the ambiguous way of narrative of the novel. The reader is often placed in a quandary where he is hard put to it to tell fact from fiction. Pynchon is a talented writer, able to see into the nature of contemporary life and to present his vision in an impressive way. In addition to his widely acclaimed V. , his second book , The Crying of Lot-49 should be placed on any reading list of contemporary American literature. It should be noted here that Pynchon is very difficult to read.

Reference Book:
1. Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature Of The United States, Beijing:Cultural Section, Embassy of the  United States of America, 1983.
2. Booz, Elizabeth. A Brief Introduction To Modern American Literature, Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press,1982.
3. 吴定柏编著：《美国文学大纲》，上海外语教育出版社，1998。