earticle

영어

Thomas Pynchon(1937- )’s novels contain a number of critiques of contemporary technocratic culture, which has brought about no less negative side-effects than benefits and advantages. Most relevant to this paper is the writer’s critique of simulacral culture, the kind of culture that the French postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929- ) finds prevalent in postmodern society. Drawing a connection between Baudrillard and Pynchon, this paper examines how nature, natural materials, and human nature become stripped of naturalness in the culture of artificiality and virtuality. Pynchon’s novels present various scenes in which the natural turns into the virtual or the artificial is recreated as a meticulously designed artificial environment; the dominance of car culture causes the degradation of nature to a mere backdrop for drivers; natural materials are replaced by synthetic polymers; human nature gets objectified, mechanized, and reified. All these phenomena can be interpreted as a warning against the possible loss of the natural as a result of the so-called postmodern “loss of the real” in contemporary technocratic and simulacral culture.