Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History

Because Pynchon is a self-proclaimed Luddite, we should recall that the followers of King Ludd were textile craftsmen who opposed the introduction of the industrial looms that concentrated wealth in the hands of the factory owners and oppressed the working class. Pynchon's historical fictions give the lie to Fredric Jameson's assertion in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism that postmodernism "emerged as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way" (21).