Mettānoia in Thomas Pynchon’s Buddhist Trilogy
Religion & Literature December 29, 2021 Michael J. Sanders
Buddhism is central to Thomas Pynchon's fiction, specifically in three novels with female protagonists: The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Bleeding Edge. Each novel features a motherly protagonist whose name contains a Buddhist reference. Beneath surface-level Judeo-Christian, psychological, scientific, and political references, Pynchon has embedded a program for changing one's mind grounded in Buddhist belief and practice. This program is a Buddhist quest for "mettānoia," the author's term for a corrective to paranoia: a change of mind that is inclusive of Christian metanoia but centered on Buddhist mettā, the moment after meditation when the subject attains heightened compassionate care. Mettānoia limits acts of compassion to retain Buddhist detachment from worldly outcomes. The article proposes that mettānoid reading might counter paranoid reading, contributing to discourses of postcritique and the postsecular.