Master of the Paranoid Art

An Illustration of Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge"

Thomas Pynchon writes his new novel to give a novel interpretation of the "war on terror," a war that commenced with the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

I'll let Jonathan Lethem's evocative review of the book do the telling of what Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is about and how it's remarkably about what it's about.

Bleeding Edge is a masterpiece of Paranoid Art, which accomplishes what according to Lethem, Complacent Art chooses to avoid:

Paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. Paranoid art traffics in interpretation, and beckons interpretation from its audience; it distrusts even itself, and so becomes the urgent opposite of complacent art.

 Pynchon offers no monstrously simple answer to the question of the attacks on America. An answer to "Why it happened?" is looped back into "Modernity.":

In Pynchon’s view, modernity’s systems of liberation and enlightenment — railway and post, the Internet, etc. — perpetually collapse into capitalism’s Black Iron Prison of enclosure, monopoly and surveillance. The rolling frontier (or bleeding edge) of this collapse is where we persistently and helplessly live. His characters take sustenance on what scraps of freedom fall from the conveyor belt of this ruthless conversion machine, like the house cat at home in the butcher’s shop. In Joyce’s formulation, history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. For Pynchon, history is a nightmare within which we must become lucid dreamers.

 Another review of the novel can be found here.