Thomas Pynchon’s V. is often criticized for its preoccupation with meaninglessness and the  inability to make sense of ‘who’ or ‘what’ V. is about. The failure to make sense of V. is thematized within the novel particularly during the sacred moments or epiphanies which critics describe as ‘bizarre’, ‘disturbing’ or ‘unsettling’. These sacred moments raise issues that cannot be answered by traditional tools. Yet, critics and readers have responded to the novel with readings that reinscribe conventional modes of making sense and show a resistance to the inadequacy of traditional tools. This dissertation examines how Pynchon undermines modernist notions of the sacred moment as “moments of vision” which yield a higher knowledge or revelation. I argue that the sacred moments in V. allude to George Bataille’s notion of waste within a restricted and general economy. The violence of the sacred moments in V. are examined in relation to waste, sacrifice, the erotic, the inanimate, sovereignty and laughter. I conclude that rather than bringing about death, entropy and apocalyptic endings, the epiphanies’ violence and wasteful expenditure reveal the power structures at work in the literary use of the sacred. Paradoxically, the necessary existence of wasteful expenditure increases sense-making and offers the critic/reader the possibility of confronting waste, “the accursed share”.

Les études présentées dans ce thèse, The Violence of Bearing Witness in Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, portent sur les représentations narratives de l’acte de témoigner dans les textes des écrivains américains Flannery O'Connor et Cormac McCarthy. Plus précisement, j'identifie l'acte de témoigner comme étant une fonction essentielle du prophète et situe ensuite la représentation narrative de cet acte dans la tradition de la jérémiade américaine. Je débute alors mon étude de O’Connor en examinant son interprétation du rôle du prophète aussi bien dans ses textes que dans la société en générale et sa culture en particulier. Je place ensuite son corpus dans le contexte du mouvement des droits civiques des 1950s-60s et retrace l’évolution de ses personnages noirs à travers la progression d’un groupe de récits que je term « The Geranium Variations ». Mon analyse herméneutique de Blood Meridian emploie la typologie de la violence de Slavoj Žižek pour affirmer que, bien que le roman soit rempli de représentations vives de la violence, McCarthy démontre que la violence structurelle est à l’origine des flambées individuelles – c’est-à-dire de guerre, d’expansion territoriale agressive et de génocide sanctionné par l’État. De plus, mes études démontre que les descriptions excessives de violence du roman sont juxtaposées à une pénurie de description narrative dans la mesure où les représentations incessantes de violence tout au long du roman aboutissent à la mort non décrite du protagoniste, the kid. Enfin, je conclus que les allusions aux Écritures au tout début du roman prédit que the kid aura un rôle liminal dans le texte en tant que prophèt maudit qui a pour fonction de témoigner les horreurs indescriptibles de la nuit des temps. / This dissertation, The Violence of Bearing Witness in Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, investigates the narrative expressions of bearing witness in the fiction of two writers of the American South: Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. I identify the act of bearing witness as an essential function of the prophet and locate the narrative representation of this act within the tradition of the American jeremiad. I begin my study of O’Connor’s works by investigating her understanding of the significance of the role of the prophet in her writing as well as in modern society. I then situate O’Connor’s literary art within the context of the civil rights movement and trace the evolution of her treatment of Black characters through the progress of a group of stories I have termed the “Geranium Variations.” My hermeneutic analysis of Blood Meridian employs Slavoj Žižek’s typology of violence to argue that though the novel is replete with vivid portrayals of violence, the true horror with which McCarthy reckons is the structural violence that fosters the individual outbreaks of brutality, i.e. warfare, aggressive territorial expansion, and state-sanctioned genocide. I demonstrate that the novel’s excessive descriptions of violence are juxtaposed with an absence of description insofar as the relentless representations of gratuitous violence throughout the novel culminate in the unnarrated death of the protagonist, the kid. I conclude that the allusions to scripture in the opening sentences of the novel foretells the kid’s liminal role in the text as a cursed prophet whose function is to witness the unspeakable horrors of history.