Midwest Modern Language Association 2026

July 14, 2026

“In the Shady Margin: The Uncooperative Detective and the Unarchivable in Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket.” To be presented in November, 2026.

Hicks McTaggart, the protagonist in Thomas Pynchon’s latest work Shadow Ticket, is a private investigator who is reputed for having clients “living at the edge of desperation” and is “long flagged by the police at all levels as Uncooperative.” In Milwaukee 1932, with the Great Depression in full swing and the Nazis gaining power, Hicks is reluctantly dispatched to track down the runaway heiress of a cheese enterprise, but accidentally finds himself entangled with a range of institutions including the Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies as well as underground artists, gangsters, and outlaws. Caught in a typical Pynchonian detective detour, Hicks navigates between the archival historical events and its ungovernable remainder.

This paper reads Hicks as a detective who undermines the genre’s archival logic – the faith that truth can be uncovered and order restored – with his case opening outward into chaos rather than closing into solution. In the end, when facing the two fates available to him, returning to America and restoring a “normal” life, or remaining in Europe as those around him are “one by one robbed, beaten, killed, seized and taken away into the nameless, the uncoverable,” Hicks chooses to stay, not as a hero, but as a reluctant witness to what no archive will recover. Exploring the shady margin of the archive, Pynchon’s postmodern noir interrogates the ethics of witnessing the unarchivable, in a historical moment that, Pynchon reminds us, we have not yet finished living through.