Countercultural Chronotopes of Thomas Pynchon

The 1950s in the United States, marked by the post-World War II economic boom, were characterized by pressures to conform, Cold War fears, and increasing government surveillance. By the 1960s, the United States was primed for a revolution in thought and expression. As conservative values crumbled, Beat writers like William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, along with younger followers like Thomas Pynchon, stepped into the breach. Intercepting the postwar psyche, Pynchon’s debut novel, V. (1963), mirrored deep-seated anxieties held by the American public, foreshadowing the rise of postmodern fiction and the downfall of the 1960s–’70s’ counterculture.

While the Beats sought liberation and meaning through a rebellious embrace of the here and now, Pynchon’s narrative suggests a more cynical view: without a profound understanding of history, any attempt to forge a new cultural identity is doomed to fail. Pynchon dismantles the idealistic premises of the counterculture, presenting an alternative vision of nonconformity rooted in historical awareness rather than introspection. As V. intertwines the past with the present, it stands as both a product of its time and a prescient critique of the countercultural movement’s ultimate shortcomings.

The antiestablishment literary movement of the postwar period coincided with various forms of contemporary societal commentary, changing the trajectory of American literature through what the Pynchon scholar Joanna Freer (University of Exeter) describes as a figurative “road to anti-structure.” The forefront of this movement was primarily shaped by the Beat poets, whose “irreverent approach to accepted standards in both life and literature” served as a catalyst for the emerging counterculture of the 1960s. Kerouac’s iconic and largely autobiographical On the Road (1957), for instance, valorizes the Bohemian lifestyle of seeking life’s meaning through sex, jazz, travel, chance encounters, and liberal use of mind-altering substances. As much as Pynchon recognized the validity of the countercultural claim that postwar literature needed to be restructured for a new generation, the reclusive writer decided to take a step in a different direction. While the Beats took up the role of a guiding cultural force in shaping the future of literature by rejecting the past, Pynchon emphasized the past guiding the present. To dismantle history, one must understand it and its narrative conditions.

In his response to Kerouac’s novel, Pynchon attempts to navigate the complexities of modernity. Unlike Sal Paradise—the main protagonist of On the Road—who romanticizes introspection and community found on the open road, Pynchon’s antithetical character Benny Profane embodies mechanical individualism and detachment. Through this ironic construction, Pynchon brings forth an idea of nonconformity in contrast to Kerouac’s communalist unity. Benny can’t participate in anything. He doesn’t even want to get off the subway. Freer points out that even Profane’s name positions him as “a kind of anti-Sal Paradise,” drawing attention to Kerouac’s characters’ frequent use of Benzedrine, the first widely available amphetamine. Dean Moriarty (inspired by Neal Cassady) tells Sal Paradise, “[W]e know time—how to slow it up and walk and dig and just old-fashioned spade kicks […] We know.” Aptly nicknamed “speed,” this drug epitomizes the Beat ethos of living in the moment but in constant motion, squeezing every drop out of life.

This distinction between the two visions of the American future can be made more visible through an application of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, developed in the 1930s. Borrowing the idea from Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bakhtin uses chronotopes as a forceful reminder that time and space are intimately entwined. By combining specific times with specific spaces, chronotopes make it possible to represent events in the narrative. Tracing major chronotopes that emerged throughout the long history of the Western novel, Bakhtin stresses the importance of the “road chronotope.” The road is a particularly fruitful location for encounters, where “the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people […] intersect at one spatial and temporal point,” allowing for chance meetings between “people who are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance.” Kerouac’s appropriately titled novel relies almost entirely on this single chronotope for its reacquaintance with the “the sociohistorical heterogeneity”—to use Bakhtin’s phrase—of the postwar United States.

In an analogous way, Profane’s numerous encounters on the New York subway—a variation of the road—moves him closer to a junction between the past and present. Near the end of the first chapter, Profane “decide[s] on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa.” The road here acts like a treadmill, never ending but permanently retracing the same ground that nevertheless introduces new encounters because of the temporal movement. Around his 13th time around the transit loop, Profane is awakened by three Puerto Rican kids who offer him a job to shoot alligators in the sewers of Spanish Harlem. Profane isn’t looking for anything to come his way, yet it does. Much like the chronotope itself, the subway concretizes the passage of time in the novel.

In other words, the liberal drug use by these writers is a fallacy that promotes a belief that introspection means something special. As if they’re the only ones with an internal monologue.

Yet the freedom of the road proposed by Kerouac and other Beat writers fails to bring Profane any sense of purpose. As Freer notes, his manner of subway riding reflects a dulled anguish and a pessimistic refusal to struggle; he merely endures whatever comes his way. Unlike Kerouac’s On the Road, where Sal Paradise’s journey across America drives the narrative, the presence of Benny Profane doesn’t advance the plot. Pynchon deliberately inverts Kerouac’s soul-searching narrator into a character who lacks a sense of yearning or a thirst for self-discovery and criticizes the essence of Beat Generation writers by suggesting that postwar literature should be, in fact, anti-introspective. In other words, the liberal drug use by these writers is a fallacy that promotes a belief that introspection means something special. As if they’re the only ones with an internal monologue.

Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes reveals how Pynchon inverts countercultural literary innovations to oppose the Beat Generation’s central tenets. Thus, V. stands as counter-counterculture. This difference in literary approaches gives Pynchon the upper hand in predicting how counterculture would function in the coming decade and ultimately fizzle out through its attempt to merely substitute introspection for retrospection. The Beats unintentionally became a product of hedonistic simplicity. Rather than channeling their cultural awareness into changing history, they focused on temporary resolutions. In contrast, Pynchon’s emphasis on retrospection critiques a culture lacking historical awareness. The future doesn’t always hold the answers that we seek. It can betray us with the prophecy of a better tomorrow.

Pynchon’s ambition to craft the next great American novel is achieved not through adherence to a specific postwar cultural stance but through a radical departure from established norms. Through Benny Profane, Pynchon navigates away from literary conventions, rejecting the self-transformation proposed by the Beat Generation and embodying anti-introspective fiction. This dismantling of the traditional hero’s journey, coupled with the narrative’s portrayal of the failure to achieve existential gain, serves as a powerful foreshadowing of the impending disintegration of idealistic counterculture in the 1970s. V. stands as a testament to Pynchon’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of narrative innovation while challenging prevailing cultural standards, initiating a fissure in American literature.