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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2021
This article argues that in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon moves from an oppositional schema in which the world is divided into “elect” and “preterite” populations towards one that is concerned with implication and complicity. The article uses Michael Rothberg's The Implicated Subject (2019) as the basis for analysis, and notably his argument that to be implicated in wrongdoing often involves a kind of structural blindness towards suffering elsewhere. In the case of Bleeding Edge, the protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, is implicated in the violence committed in order to secure the hegemony of neoliberalism. The article describes Maxine's gradual recognition of her own blindness, and hence of her implication in the harms perpetrated in the name of neoliberalism. It begins by noting that her experience of neoliberalism is one of process and of immaterial exchange. The second part of the article argues that the introduction of Nicholas Windust shows how neoliberalism may be an experience of rupture or trauma for those outside the developed world. Finally, with the 9/11 attacks on New York, the same violence rebounds against its source; the attacks therefore act as the final stage in Maxine's increasing awareness of her own implication.
The authors would like to thank Professor Stephen Shapiro for his feedback on an early version of this essay, and the editors at JAS and anonymous readers for their detailed feedback and encouragement.
1 Pynchon, Thomas, Bleeding Edge (London: Vintage, 2014)Google Scholar. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.
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28 Interestingly, one of the leading advocates of neoliberalism anticipated what we might expect to be a critique of it: as Quinn Slodobian notes, “Hayek began to realize in the 1930s that the dispersal of knowledge throughout an entire market economy was so complete that no individual could ever gain a functional overview of it. The shock of the 1930s brought with it the realization that the world economy was basically unknowable.” Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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40 This allusion to the “other 9/11” – the events of which are powerfully portrayed in Ken Loach's contribution to 11′09″01 (2002), a collection of short films produced by Alain Brigand – is also part of the novel's project of de-exceptionalizing 9/11, or as Joseph Darlington has noted, challenging paradigmatic narratives where 9/11 is “severed ideologically from both its causes and its effects.” Darlington, Joseph, “Capitalist Mysticism and the Historicizing of 9/11 in Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57, 3 (May 2016), 242–53, 242Google Scholar.
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54 Ibid., 25.
55 See Jeffrey Severs, “‘Homer Is My Role Model’: Father-Schlemiels, Sentimental Families, and Pynchon's Affinities with the Simpsons,” in Chetwynd, Freer and Maragos, Thomas Pynchon, Sex and Gender, 194–208.
