September 11 and the Question of Innocence in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Bleeding Edge

Thomas Pynchon's politics have frequently been minimized in the criticism of his work, in large part because his novels' profusion of voices makes a stable position difficult to pin down. I argue that Against the Day's (2007) various reflections on what it means to be innocentpolitically, artistically, ethicallyare central to an understanding of how Pynchon historicizes September 11 and terrorist violence. Shifting from the historical, allegorical mode of Against the Day to a relatively realistic representation of 9/11 and its aftermath in Bleeding Edge (2013), Pynchon searches for points of resistance in the flattened network of twenty-first-century global capital. In his rejection of both the techno-utopian faith in the Internet as an instrument of liberation and the possibilities of withdrawal in an age of pervasive surveillance, Pynchon instead turns to the next generation, finding perhaps the only hope for the future of progressive politics in the children themselves.