SOURCE: McHale, Brian. “Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow.” Poetics Today 1, no. 1-2 (autumn 1979): 85-110.

Welcome Mister Slothrop Welcome To Our Structure We Hope You Will Enjoy Your Visit Here.¹

Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973) opens, apparently, in medias res:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theater. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

(GR [Gravity's Rainbow]: 3)

This opening passage abounds in the sort of provocatively matter-of-fact references which one is familiar with from other fictional beginnings. The reader's need to know is immediately aroused: who is this “he” whom the narrative does not find it necessary to identify? where and when is this Evacuation taking place? what screams across the sky? The reader's queries are directed toward reconstructing, among other patterns, the fictive world in which the events of the novel unfold. No doubt he takes it for granted that this opening passage gives him access to that world.² Hence the disorientation when the reader learns that he has begun not “in the midst of things,” as he had assumed, but in the midst of dream: on the next page “Pirate” Prentice awakens from his nightmare of Evacuation to the real (that is, fictive) morning of wartime London. With this reversal begins the reader's re-education—or, to borrow a metaphor from the Pavlovian discourse which this novel sometimes affects, his de-conditioning. For this passage is a paradigm of problematic passages throughout Gravity's Rainbow: the reader, invited to reconstruct a “real” scene or action in the novel's fictive world, is forced in retrospect—sometimes in long retrospect—to “cancel” the reconstruction he has made, and to relocate it within a character's dream, hallucination, or fantasy.

After such an embarrassment, the reader, in order to reassert his mastery over the text, may evoke the model of a genre or period which will “explain” what has happened to him. In this case, he may evoke the model of so-called “Post-Modern” fiction. In doing so he will presumably have in mind certain contemporary (post-war) fictional texts which are strongly self-conscious, self-reflective, self-critical; which, by laying bare their own devices, continually raise the problem of the relation between the game-like artifices of fiction and the imitation of reality; which actively resist and subvert the reader's efforts to make sense of them in the familiar novelistic ways; the sort of texts which the French would be apt to call texts of the “practice of writing.” But such a model, particularly when used in this defensive or naturalizing way, is apt to draw less on the full range of phenomena it ought to capture than on certain extreme cases: Robbe-Grillet at his most choisiste, Borges at his most labyrinthine, Beckett at his most minimal. The example of such limit-texts is not, however, very helpful in dealing with the intractabilities of Gravity's Rainbow, which falls somewhat short of these limits. Gravity's Rainbow, Barthes might say, still casts a “shadow”: it still contains “a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject” (1975: 32). It has, at least at the outset, characters who can actually be “‘found’ […] in the conventional sense of ‘positively identified and detained'” (GR: 712). It has plot, or rather a proliferation of plots, to the point that “plot” here acquires the punning sense of “conspiracy” as well as “intelligible sequence of actions.” And it has an openness to real-world facts—historical, socio-economic, linguistic, scientific, esoteric—an openness perhaps unequalled even by the great nineteenth-century Realists and Naturalists.

Is there, then, any sense in which evoking Post-Modernism is more than merely a defensive gesture, a fending-off of the embarrassments of intractable fiction by relating it to certain extreme examples of intractability? Is there any way in which this period- and genre-label can be made to do useful descriptive work? There is, if one takes the label sufficiently literally: “Post-Modern,” coming after the Modernist movement in literature and the other arts. To take the label literally is to orient oneself toward the relation between Pynchon's text and Modernist textual models. Thus, in this paper I propose to inquire into the Modernism of Pynchon's Post-Modernism in Gravity's Rainbow.

There is perhaps a mandate for this sort of inquiry in Pynchon's obvious debt to Modernist theory and practice in his earlier fiction. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is in many ways a classic example of the Jamesian novel with a single consistent point-of-view and restrained narratorial intervention—it might plausibly be retitled What Mrs. Maas Knew.³ What disqualifies Lot 49 [The Crying of Lot 49] as a proper Jamesian novel is the fact that the “central consciousness” or “reflector” is not well-developed, not very interesting, indeed not the point at all (Cf., Mendelson 1978a: 2-5). The novel V. (1963) incorporates elaborate parodies, or at least self-conscious exploitation, of characteristic Modernist techniques. It includes a Conrad-like unreliable narration at two removes, bearing on events in German Southwest Africa which recall Marlow's and Kurtz's Belgian Congo; a Proustian first-person “confession” displaying the successive personalities of the character-narrator (Patteson, 1974: 37-38; Cf., Siegel, 1976: 41); a baring of the characteristic Modernist device of style indirect libre through a character who practices “forcible dislocation of personality” by referring to himself exclusively in the third person;⁴ and above all, a tour-de-force use of eight distinct points of view to render an espionage melodrama, climaxing in a rare instance of Norman Friedman's limit-case, the “camera eye.”⁵

Thus, the Modernism—even if it is only mock-Modernism—of Pynchon's earlier fiction gives one a priori some reason to think that the investigation of Modernist aspects of Gravity's Rainbow should be fruitful. But how are we to formulate the Modernist model of fiction so as to bring into sharpest focus the relation between this model and our so-called Post-Modern text? This relation emerges most clearly, I would maintain, when we concentrate not on formal textual organization as such, but on text-processing, the pattern-making and pattern-interpreting behavior which the text's formal organization elicits from the reader. Concentration on text-processing is particularly appropriate where Modernist fiction is concerned, for one of Modernism's fundamental characteristics is the relatively expanded function of the reader; or, shall we say, the apparently new and expanded repertoire of operations which the reader is expected to undertake. For we can conceive of period-models in literary history as specific sets or repertoires of pattern-making and pattern-interpreting operations which readers must undertake in order to render texts intelligible.⁶ It would be impossible to attempt a full inventory of the Modernist repertoire here. Let it suffice to observe that the Modernist repertoire certainly includes operations through which readers reconstruct the chronology of the fabula from the sometimes drastically displaced order of the syuzhet; impart intelligible motivation to sequence and transitions; motivate large-scale parallelisms, doublings, and analogies (Perry, 1968; Sternberg, 1970); discover narrators, and evaluate their knowledgeability and reliability; reconstruct psychological processes, and the external reality which they mediate, from such conventions as interior monologue and style indirect libre; etc. Clearly, none of these operations is strictly “new” in the Modernist repertoire; what is new, however, is their frequency, sophistication, and prominence.

Our present purposes will best be served if we restrict ourselves to consideration of two groups of operations from the Modernist repertoire. First, we shall consider the process of reconstructing elements of external (fictive) reality from the evidence of a character's mediating consciousness—an aspect of paradigmatic processing, or of narrative statics. Secondly, we shall consider a characteristic Modernist process of motivating transitions between characters' minds in a sequence—an aspect of syntagmatic processing, or of narrative dynamics.

II.

Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.

(GR: 583)

Criticism of Modernist fiction has tended, quite properly, to dwell on the unreliability of characters' visions or accounts of the external world, compared to the quasi-divine reliability of the narrators and implied authors of earlier fiction. This is undoubtedly a crucial factor when the narrative has been entrusted, totally or in part, to the mediating consciousness or mediating language of a fictional character. But equally crucial in this sort of narrative is the somewhat neglected broad zone of reliability. In texts like Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, or The Sound and the Fury, the reader has no choice but to rely for much of the material from which he reconstructs a fictive world on the mediating consciousness of fictional characters; that he can do so with considerable confidence is a measure of the reliability of the “reflectors.” Unreliability and reliability can coexist in this way because they are found at different levels. A character's unreliability normally manifests itself in his interpretations or evaluations of the fictive world; unreliability can also be epistemological, involving the character's knowledge or ignorance of his world; but it is seldom ontological. What the character definitely knows to be there normally is there in the fictive world, and the reader can confidently incorporate it in his reconstruction; as indeed he must, if he is to reconstruct at all.

From the evidence of a character's mediating consciousness, the reader will often be able to reconstruct, first, the immediate “reality”—objects and persons in the character's field of perception, his actions and those of others, etc.; secondly, absent “reality”—objects, persons and events present in the character's memory or, more dubiously, in his speculative projections or imaginings; and thirdly, by extrapolation, the general material culture, mores and norms, etc. These reconstructions are not, of course, relevant only for visualizing the scene directly at hand. They may function as the basis for further reconstructions, whether of another such scene or of the fictive world in general; or they may participate in other types of patterning, formal or thematic.

The reliability of evidence obtained from a character's consciousness may be guaranteed in several ways. The narrative may shuttle back and forth between the character's consciousness and external reality directly presented by the narrator, thereby confirming the character's perceptions. This is the strategy used, for instance, with Bloom and Stephen in Ulysses (1922), where continual microscopic shifts between interior monologue and narratorial segments produce a composite picture, part contributed by the perceiving characters, part directly presented. But the same strategy is not employed in Molly's interior monologue, from which all narratorial segments have been excluded. Nevertheless, we confidently undertake to reconstruct large sectors of fictive reality from Molly's monologue: her immediate experience (train-whistles and church-bells, the unexpected onset of her period, her noisy recourse to the chamber-pot), her recent past (what the cards foretold that morning, her sexual interlude with Boylan that afternoon, Bloom's order of eggs), her more distant past (her first lover “under the Moorish wall, Bloom's courtship and proposal, successive jobs, successive homes), and a fairly thick slice of Dublin life at the beginning of the century.

Thus, reliability may be guaranteed by other means than direct narratorial intervention. Principally, of course, reconstructions based on the content of characters' consciousness are tested against the reader's extra-textual knowledge, the models of physical phenomena, norms of verisimilar behavior, and real-world information which he brings to bear on the text. But reconstructions may also be confirmed internally at a distance, so to speak, rather than immediately as in Bloom's and Stephen's interior monologues. This is classically the case with The Sound and the Fury (1931). Here, increasingly intelligible mediators—Jason, and the completely authoritative voice of the Dilsey section—retroactively substantiate the reconstructions which the reader has made on the basis of less intelligible mediators—the suicidally disturbed Quentin, and, most radically, the idiot Benjy.

When ontological doubt, uncertainty about what is (fictively) real and what fantastic, insinuates itself into a Modernist text, we might well prefer to consider this the leading edge of a new mode of fiction, an anticipation of Post-Modernism. For the ontological stability of external reality seems basic to Modernist fiction. Even where, as in the “Circe” section of Ulysses, we are unsure of the exact boundary between the real and the hallucinatory, we can nevertheless be fairly confident of the underlying reality upon which the hallucinations rest. The underlying reality of Nighttown reasserts itself, for instance, in certain “real” conversations between the whores and their clients, in Stephen's frenzy in the whore-house parlor, in the fist-fight with the soldiers, in Corny Kelleher's intervention, etc. Only in such cases as the joint imaginative projection of the Sutpen story by Quentin and Shreve in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) must the reader fully relinquish ontological certainty.

But if the reader seeks a stable reality among the minds of Gravity's Rainbow—and the novel anticipates that he will—he will be checked and frustrated. Reconstructing a fictive world is a hazardous undertaking here, as several critics have observed; “it is not always clear,” writes Tony Tanner, “whether we are in a bombed-out building or a bombed-out mind” (Tanner, 1974: 51; Cf., Wolfley, 1977: 885). While the minds of James's child and Faulkner's idiot give us reliable access to the worlds of their novels—although not without some interpretative effort on our parts—the minds of Gravity's Rainbow give us access only to provisional “realities” which are always liable to be contradicted and cancelled out. For most of Pynchon's central characters are either paranoiacs “who may possibly be suffering systematized delusions and projecting hostile forces” (Siegel, 1976: 50), or are otherwise hallucination-prone. Tyrone Slothrop, the “hero” insofar as this novel has one, is described as “psychopathically deviant, obsessive, a latent paranoiac” given to “falsification, distorted thought processes” (GR: 90). Pirate Prentice's “talent” for “getting inside the fantasies of others” (GR: 12), Franz Pökler's cinema-oriented dreaminess, Mr. Pointsman's burgeoning megalomania, Tchitcherine's and Enzian's predilections for powerful drugs—all these belong to the same general tendency. Motivation here is reciprocal: hallucination-prone characters motivate the presence of hallucinatory structure and content, while hallucinatory structure and content motivate the presence of hallucination-prone characters.

The shape of the reader's experience in Gravity's Rainbow is repeatedly that of his opening encounter with the Evacuation dream.⁷ Having reconstructed a partial picture of the novel's fictive world, the reader learns that the episode on which he based his reconstruction never “really” occurred after all. The episode must now be re-motivated as “dream, psychic flash, omen, cryptography, drug-epistemology,” and the supposed realia must be edited out of the reconstructed picture. These unreal realia are now available for integration into other patterns: characterological patterns, thematic patterns, or perhaps the psychic reality “beyond the Zero” which is a feature of this novel's “world” (see part III below)—but in any case not the reconstructed external reality.

There are three variants of this recurrent concretization-deconcretization structure, depending upon the nature and location of the indicators of unreality. In the least problematic variant, the reader is given advance warning that what follows does not belong to the reconstructed “real” world, that it is only a hashish hallucination (GR: 367-368) or a “Leunahalluziationen” (produced by “Leunagasolin,” [GR: 523-524]). In another variant, the most common one, the marker is not prospective but retrospective. Prentice's nightmare is a good example; so is an episode from the history of Franz Pökler's relationship with his supposed daughter Ilse. Pökler is beginning to suspect that the girl who is allowed to visit him once annually may not be his long-lost daughter but a surrogate supplied by the Nazi brass to keep him pacified in his job at Peenemünde, and that through her “They” might also be catering to certain unspoken desires:

“Papi,” gravely unlacing, “may I sleep next to you tonight?” One of her hands had come lightly to rest on the beginning of his bare calf. Their eyes met for a half second. A number of uncertainties shifted then for Pökler and locked into sense. To his shame, his first feeling was pride. He hadn't known he was so vital to the program. Even in this initial moment, he was seeing it from Their side—every quirk goes in the dossier, gambler, foot-fetishist or soccer fan, it's all important, it can all be used. Right now we have to keep them happy, or at least neutralize the foci of their unhappiness. You may not understand what their work really is, not at the level of the data, but you're an administrator after all, a leader, your job is to get results … Pökler, now, has mentioned a “daughter.” Yes, yes we know it's disgusting, one never can tell what they have locked up in there with those equations, but we must all put off our judgments for now, there'll be time after the war to get back to the Pöklers and their dirty little secrets. …

He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible blow. That took care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak, he had dragged her up on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands already at the buttons of his trousers, her white frock already pulled above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath, nothing all day … how I've warned you, she whispered as paternal plow found its way into filial furrow … and after hours of amazing incest they dressed in silence, and crept out into the leading edge of faintest flesh dawn, everything they would ever need packed inside her flowered bag, past sleeping children doomed to the end of summer, past monitors and railway guards, down at last to the water and the fishing boats, to a fatherly old sea-dog in a braided captain's hat, who welcomed them aboard and stashed them below decks, where she snuggled down in the bunk as they got under way and sucked him for hours while the engine pounded, till the Captain called, “Come on up, and take a look at your new home!” Gray and green, through the mist, it was Denmark. “Yes, they're a free people here. Good luck to both of you!” The three of them, there on deck, stood hugging. …

No. What Pökler did was choose to believe she wanted comfort that night, wanted not to be alone. Despite Their game, Their palpable evil, though he had no more reason to trust “Ilse” than he trusted Them, by an act not of faith, not of courage but of conservatism, he chose to believe that.

(GR: 420-421)

The problem here is not that Pökler's incestuous fantasy is not identified as such almost immediately, but rather that, in the face of such concretely, not to say shockingly, realized actions, the retraction is apt to go overlooked. This appears to be what one of Pynchon's critics has done, when he writes: “Pökler's incestuous reunions with [Ilse] are a profound act of imagination, and the writing of these incidents is itself an impressive achievement” (Lippman, 1977: 33). True enough; except that the incest never “actually” occurs. Having been called upon to concretize an arresting and no doubt disturbing scene, the reader is all the more unwilling to deconcretize it again, perhaps even misreading in order to avoid having to do so.⁸

Often, however, the unreality of an episode is not indicated by any explicit marker, prospective or retrospective, but only by some internal contradiction, or incompatibility with the frame of “reality” within which the episode has been placed, or by some gross violation of extra-textual norms of verisimilitude. Tchitcherine, describing the peculiar hallucinogenic effect of the drug Oneirine, calls this the “radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality” (GR: 703-704). In a Modernist text like, e.g., Conrad's Under Western Eyes (1911), such a criterion for determining what is “real,” what fantastic, might be adequate. When Razumov strides through the supine body of Haldin on the snowy pavement of St. Petersburg, we have no difficulty in bracketing this apparition, however “solid, distinct, real” (Conrad, 1971: 38), as hallucinatory. But identifying a “radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality” in Gravity's Rainbow is a rather more daunting task, as Tchitcherine himself discovers when trying to determine whether Nikolai Ripov of the Commissariat for Intelligence Activities is really, threateningly there, or only an Oneirine hallucination (GR: 703-705). However, there are passages in which unmistakable “radical-though-plausible-violations-of-reality” reliably indicate unreality. Several of Slothrop's many fantasies and dreams fall under this category (GR: 251, 255-256, 266, 293). So does the following passage, in which Seaman Bodine and Roger Mexico experience a joint fantasy or imaginative projection of what is about to happen to them at a banquet given by their direst enemies:

At the edge of the pit, with Justus about to light the taper, as Gretchen daintily laces the fuel with GI xylene from down in the dockyards, Seaman Bodine observes Roger's head, being held by four or six hands upside down, the lips being torn away from the teeth and the high gums already draining white as a skull, while one of the maids, a classic satin-and-lace, impish, torturable young maid, brushes the teeth with American toothpaste, carefully scrubbing away the nicotine stains and tartar. Roger's eyes are so hurt and pleading. … All around, guests are whispering. “How quaint, Stefan's even thought of head cheese!” “Oh, no, it's another part I'm waiting to get my teeth in …” giggles, heaving breathing, and what's that pair of very blue peg pants all ripped … and what's this staining the jacket, and what, up on the spit, reddening to a fat-glazed crust, is turning, whose face is about to come rotating around, why it's—

“No ketchup, no ketchup,” the hirsute bluejacket searching agitatedly among the cruets and salvers, “seems to be no … what th'fuck kind of a place is this, Rog,” yelling down slant-wise across seven enemy faces, “hey, buddih you find any ketchup down there?”

Ketchup's a code word, okay—

“Odd,” replies Roger, who clearly has seen exactly the same thing down at the pit, “I was just about to ask you the same question!”

(GR: 714)

What signals unreality here is the incompatibility between the framed passage, in which Roger and Bodine are already prepared and spitted, and the framing “reality”, in which they are still intact.

If the reader experiences disorientation even when markers of unreality come before, within, or immediately after an episode, the disorientation only increases when there is a lag between concretization and deconcretization. Recall that in, e.g., The Sound and the Fury, reality as it appears in later, more intelligible sections only confirms and substantiates, never repudiates, the reality which was reflected in Benjy's mind at the beginning. In Gravity's Rainbow, the reverse is apt to be true: reconstructed realities are liable to be undermined by passages appearing literally hundreds of pages later in the book. This is particularly demoralizing when the elements involved participate in crucial patterns in the text. Slothrop's sexual conquests in London are crucial to the plot of Gravity's Rainbow, since they provide the first evidence of that affinity for the V-2 blitz which will determine Slothrop's subsequent career in the novel. So it is with some dismay that we later learn from Slothrop himself that at least some of these conquests were simply erotic fantasies, not real girls (GR: 302).⁹ Mr. Pointsman, who is vitally interested in Slothrop's sexual activity, can console himself with the thought that Freud's hysterics, too, reported sexual experiences which “might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth clinically” (GR: 272). This sort of consolation may do for Mr. Pointsman, but it will hardly do for the reader, who, unlike Pointsman, has “witnessed” some of the scenes which are now in jeopardy of disappearing into Slothrop's fantasy-life. In particular, the reader's reconstructed picture incorporates the scene in which Slothrop returns with a girl named Darlene to her East End flat, where her landlady, Mrs. Quoad, subjects him to the “Disgusting English Candy Drill” (GR: 114-120). Mrs. Quoad is minutely particularized: she is a widow, suffers from “a series of antiquated diseases”—currently scurvy—and dreams of her meeting with a royal pretender in the gardens of Bournemouth. But when Poinstman's agents, Speed and Perdoo, seek to verify this episode from Slothrop's erotic history, they find no Darlene at all, and as for Mrs. Quoad, the woman they find by that name is a “flashy divorcée,” not a widow with scurvy, living at “a rather pedicured Mayfair address,” not in the East End (GR: 271). Mrs. Quoad, with all her minute particulars, evidently must be edited out of our reconstructed world, and along with her the “Disgusting English Candy Drill” itself, a memorable slapstick scene. As with Pökler's “amazing incest,” the reader is reluctant to surrender the reality of Mrs. Quoad and the Candy Drill; and we have as evidence a critic's instructive misreading, whereby the “new” Mrs. Quoad is assimilated to the Mrs. Quoad of the Candy Drill (Kaufman, 1976: 204).

But there are additional dimensions of uncertainty in the case of Mrs. Quoad. For the interview with the contradictory Mayfair divorcée is conducted in a context of hallucination. Speed and Perdoo themselves seem to be given to joint fantasies (GR: 270-271), and we approach the Speed-Perdoo episode by way of the consciousness of Mr. Pointsman, who is “feeling a bit megalo these days” (GR: 269), and who shortly thereafter will suffer hallucinations. Is this “new” Mrs. Quoad another of Speed's and Perdoo's joint fantasies, or do all three, Speed, Perdoo, and Quoad, perhaps belong to Mr. Pointman's hallucination? Is Slothrop's version, then, the “real” Mrs. Quoad after all? There is simply no way to decide, so that we are left not with a “real” Mrs. Quoad, but not quite with a figment of Slothrop's imagination, either; rather, we are left with elements whose ontological status is unstable, flickering, indeterminable.

Mrs. Quoad, Darlene, and Slothrop's other girls are victims of a process of retroactive deconcretization. The opposite possibility is also exemplified in Gravity's Rainbow: retroactive concretization of what was originally presented as not real. Again, this effect is especially pronounced when it bears upon crucial patterns in the text. The Schwartzkommando, displaced Black Africans who man German V-2 installations, play an increasingly major role at all levels of the text in the latter part of the novel. They first appear as a fiction devised by an Allied psychological-warfare unit (GR: 74-75, 112-113), so that the discovery of real black rocket troops in Germany is understandably traumatic for all concerned, not least of all the reader (GR: 275-276). Certain “experts” theorize that the Schwartzkommando were actually called into being by Operation Black Wing's phoney evidence of their existence.¹⁰

This and similar instances of the concretization of fantasy, of the “return of the repressed” (Wolfley, 1977: 879-880), lack the impact that the flickering reality-unreality of Mrs. Quoad has, for they are narrated summarily rather than presented to the reader through fully particularized scenes.¹¹ More concrete, and therefore more disorienting, is the problematical reality of Tchitcherine's rumored interviews with Wimpe, the head salesman for an IG Farben subsidiary. These scenes are said to be at best highly improbable, for political reasons: “If it were literally true, Tchitcherine wouldn't be here—there's no possible way his life could have been spared [. …]” (GR: 344). Nevertheless, the narrator presents a sample or composite conversation between Wimpe and Tchitcherine, hedging it round with conditionals: “Certainly he could have known Wimpe” (GR: 344); “Tchitcherine would have stayed” (GR: 344); “Surprising they could have got this far, if indeed they did” (GR: 345).¹² Occasionally the narrator will sharply remind us of the doubtfulness of the whole episode: “Was Tchitcherine there at all?” (GR: 345); “But these are rumors. Their chronology can't be trusted. Contradictions creep in” (GR: 349). The reality of the scene is further undermined by the interpolation of an unrelated opium hallucination of one Chu Piang, an associate of Tchitcherine's, and by our knowledge that Tchitcherine is himself a habitual drug-user. All of this raises the suspicion that the interviews with Wimpe might be no more than drug-induced hallucinations of Tchitcherine's.

But the doubts so deliberately fostered throughout this episode are completely dispelled by a reprise that comes some three hundred and fifty pages later (GR: 701-702). Tchitcherine's memories of one of his conversations with Wimpe are here presented in a context free from grammatical hedging and the possibility of hallucination (despite the presence of the ubiquitous Oneirine). Thus, the reality of Tchitcherine's interviews with Wimpe is retroactively confirmed.

We can get some insight into the interpretative operations which are responsible for the ontological instability of Gravity's Rainbow if we consider the case of Pirate Prentice and his “strange talent.” Prentice is a “fantasist-surrogate” (GR: 12): he “liv[es] the fantasies of others” (GR: 620), he is able “to take over the burden of managing them […]” (GR: 12). Early in the novel we observe Prentice in the act of managing a monstrous Adenoid which is absorbing London, the fantasy of a certain Lord Osmo of the Foreign Office (GR: 14-16). Another early episode, Frans van der Groov's extermination of the dodoes of Mauritius (GR: 107-111), is only revealed many hundreds of pages later to have been a fantasy in Prentice's management, one he had taken over from Katje Borgesius (GR: 545, 620-621). And this is precisely the unsettling thing about Prentice's talent, so far as our reconstruction of the novel's world is concerned: any passage whatsoever may be a candidate for the internal world of Prentice's managed fantasies. The reader has no real right to be surprised—although he always is—when an episode is retroactively revealed to have been lifted from Prentice's mind, for that possibility is always open. Presumably, to qualify as one of Prentice's second-hand fantasies a passage should display some “radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality,” and should stand in some relation, even if only of textual continguity, to Prentice himself, but it is not clear that these conditions must invariably be met. In short, Pynchon's invention of the man who manages other people's fantasies places in our hands an immensely powerful naturalization, a ready-made strategy for accounting for anomalous passages. Critics of Gravity's Rainbow have not been slow to appreciate the uses to which such an all-purpose naturalization could be put. For instance, one of them has suggested that we should attempt to read the dream-passage which opens the novel as somebody else's nightmare, taken over by Prentice. Perhaps, suggests this critic, it is none other than Thomas Pynchon's own personal nightmare! (Siegel, 1976:52).

Now this is certainly whimsical, but it does at least hint at the potential comprehensiveness of this naturalization, and the quality of the intelligibility it produces. Like any powerful naturalization of a more general type—e.g., psychoanalytic, archetypal—this one is also powerfully reductive. Ultimately, it is capable of the reductio ad absurdum of locating the whole of the novel within the capacious mind of Pirate Prentice, converting Gravity's Rainbow into a peculiar psychological novel: A Portrait of the Artist as a Fantasist-Surrogate.¹³ However, Prentice's is not the only mind capacious enough and pliant enough to absorb otherwise unmotivated material. He is not even the only fantasist-surrogate; much later, a minor character named Miklos Thanatz also shows signs of possessing Prentice's talent (GR: 672). But with so many hallucination- and fantasy-prone characters to choose from—Slothrop, Pökler, Tchitcherine, Enzian, Pointsman, and others—there is no reason to center exclusively on Prentice the naturalizing operation that might equally well be centered on any of them.

The temptation to apply this type of naturalization on a large scale is especially strong when we reach the later parts of the novel, where fragmentation, discontinuity, lack of motivation, and unintelligibility increase drastically. The textual evidence which might justify our naturalizing these fragments as characters' dreams or fantasies is there for us to discover, if we choose. For instance, the “disquieting structure” in which Prentice and others inexplicably find themselves (GR: 537-548), and which a cryptic epigraph suggests might be Hell, seems eminently suitable for naturalization as Pirate's fantasy, perhaps a joint fantasy shared with Katje Borgesius. The clue is there: at one point, it passes through Pirate's mind that “This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else's” (GR: 543). The even more bizarre story of Byron, the sentient and immortal light-bulb (GR: 647-655), is explicitly connected with dream-dialogues which Franz Pökler once held with a light-bulb in the underground rocket factory at Nordhausen (GR: 647; Cf., GR: 426-427): an unmistakable invitation to naturalize.¹⁴ The comic-book-style adventures of the Floundering Four (GR: 674-681, 688-690) and of Takeshi and Ichizo, the “Komical Kamikazes” (GR: 690-692, 697-699), might be read as emanating from Slothrop's mind. Here the textual evidence is more plentiful than in the case of Prentice's “disquieting structure” or Pökler's sentient bulb, but less straightforward.¹⁵ The contents of these fragments are of a kind with which we already know Slothrop's mind to be stocked; moreover, they are all more or less contiguous with plausibly “real” episodes involving Slothrop. That is, Slothrop is “on the scene,” available should one require a likely mind to which to attribute an unattached fantasy. Accordingly, more than one critic has attached these fantasies to Slothrop (Mendelson, 1976: 183-184; Sanders, 1975: 143).

If we concur in this, we will have succeeded in imposing a high degree of order on a violently disorderly section of the text. This may be a satisfying outcome, but our satisfaction will have been purchased at the price of too much of the text's interest. The text is more intelligible now, true, but less interestingly so than if we had allowed ourselves to entertain less total naturalizations, to build, if only provisionally, other possible worlds, to give full play to sheerly formal patterning, to dwell on the very tension between modes of intelligibility and the apparently unintelligible. The naturalization we have been tracing, which absorbs otherwise unmotivated passages into the minds of characters, is too powerful: it drastically curtails the process of reconstructing a world, ultimately leaving too little unresolved.

III.

“[…] not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping onto different coordinate systems, I don't know …” […]

But he said: “Try to design anything that way and have it work.”

(GR: 159)

If one long-recognized trademark of Modernist fiction is the interposing of a character's mind between the reader and the external (fictive) world, with all that that implies for the reader's reconstruction of reality, then another is certainly the use of more than one mediating consciousness. The presentation of multiple minds is likely to entail the use of some device for effecting transitions from one mind to another, some device, that is, for motivating the sequence of minds. Where, as in earlier fiction, a narrator is present who is able to enter any character's mind more or less at will, mind-to-mind transitions pose relatively little difficulty.¹⁶ But where, as typically in Modernist fiction, the narrator voluntarily renounces some of his powers or even absents himself entirely, some device must be developed for motivating mind-to-mind transitions. This new device—new at least in its frequency and prominence, if not an absolute innovation—involves the use of coordinates in the “real” world external to all the minds in question. The transition from the third to the fourth chapters of the final section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) makes use of external coordinates in this way:

Down there among the little boats which floated, some with their sails furled, some slowly, for it was very calm, moving away, there was one rather apart from the others. The sail was even now being hoisted. She decided that there in that very distant and entirely silent little boat Mr. Ramsay was sitting with Cam and James. Now they had got the sail up; now after a little flagging and hesitation the sails filled and, shrouded in profound silence, she watched the boat take its way with deliberation past the other boats out to sea.

4

The sails flapped over their heads. The water chuckled and slapped the sides of the boat, which drowsed motionless in the sun. Now and then the sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but the ripple ran over them and ceased. The boat made no motion at all. Mr. Ramsay sat in the middle of the boat. He would be impatient in a moment, James thought, and Cam thought, looking at their father, who sat in the middle of the boat between them (James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow) with his legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about.

(Woolf, 1974: 184)

The narrative moves from the mind of Lily Briscoe, watching from the shore, to the minds of those in the boat—James's, Cam's, and, at one remove, Mr. Ramsay's—by way of the sail. The sequence is evidently to be motivated in terms of some notion of “triangulation”: two perceivers having focused on the same object of perception, the sail in this case, a channel is opened through which we pass from one perceiver to the other. Examples include not only the various transitions back and forth between shore and boat in the final section of To the Lighthouse, but also the intriguing motor-car and the skywriting airplane which motivate transitions among whole series of minds in Mrs. Dalloway (1925; cf., Sternberg 1970). But Mrs. Dalloway also features several less spectacular, more routine, but equally functional transitions of this kind: between Peter Walsh and Rezia, once by way of the little girl in Regent's Park and once by way of the vagrant woman who sings opposite the tube station; between Rezia and Hugh Whitbread, by way of the clock on Harley Street; between Elizabeth and Septimus, by way of the alternating shadow and light of an afternoon in the Strand; between various minds gathered at Clarissa Dalloway's party, first by way of the billowing yellow curtains, then later by way of the Prime Minister, who functions here much as the royal motor-car did earlier; and finally, pervasively, by way of the chimes of Big Ben. There are other good Modernist examples of transition by triangulation in, for instance, the “Wandering Rocks” section of Ulysses.

As with all types of sequence in fiction, the temporal dimension of the sequence of minds is crucial. What is the relation between the order of the formal sequence mind-object-mind and the temporality of the reconstructed fictive episode? Evidentally there are two possibilities. Either the order at the formal level represents, by its own sequentiality, consecutiveness at the reconstructed level—one person perceives an object, then another person does, as is predominantly the case with the motor-car and skywriter of Mrs. Dalloway; or sequential order at the formal level represents simultaneity at the reconstructed level, as is the case with the transition from Lily Briscoe to those in the boat or, even more markedly, with the following transition from Mrs. Dalloway's mind to Miss Kilman's. (The preceding paragraphs had been devoted to Mrs. Dalloway's interior monologue.)

[…] but here the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all very well with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just, but she must remember all sorts of little things besides—Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices—all sorts of little things came flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke which lay flat like a bar of gold on the sea. Mrs. Marsham, Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices. She must telephone now at once.

Volubly, troublously, the late clock sounded, coming in on the wake of Big Ben, with its lap full of trifles. Beaten up, broken up by the assault of carriages, the brutality of vans, the eager advance of myriads of angular men, of flaunting women, the domes and spires of offices and hospitals, the last relics of this lap full of odds and ends seemed to break, like the spray of an exhausted wave, upon the body of Miss Kilman standing still in the street for a moment to mutter, ‘It is the flesh.’

(Woolf, 1971: 141-2)

In the “real” world, Clarissa's and Miss Kilman's experiences are simultaneous, in parallel, as the presence of the late clock's chimes in both their fields of perception emphasizes. But narrative, by its very nature incapable of representing simultaneity except by sequence, must deploy this moment of parallel experience as a transition from one perceiving mind to another by way of a mutually-perceived sound.

Is the real-world temporal order ever reversed in this kind of sequence? Do we ever pass from a mind in the present to a mind in the past by way of external coordinates? Evidently not, unless we extend our description of this device to cover certain related phenomena: the use of external objects to effect a transition between different moments of consciousness of a single individual, or between present experience and memorial experience. The locus classicus is of course Proust (the madeleine, the uneven paving-stones, etc.), although in A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927) such transitions, instead of being left to the reader to motivate, are explicitly motivated by the narrator's elaborate discurses on the mechanism of “involuntary memory.” However, motivation is left to the reader to supply in the idiot's monologue of The Sound and the Fury—of necessity, since Benjy lacks Marcel's powers of introspection and articulation. Not only do objects or phenomena in Benjy's immediate field of perception (snagging himself on a nail, wading in the branch, the carriage, the gate, the fire) give him access to past moments of consciousness, allowing him to relive them, but certain remembered objects or phenomena (cold weather, the smell of Versh's house, a phrase uttered by Roskus, rounding a corner) allow him to pass from one past experience to another within his memory.

Several crucial transitions in Gravity's Rainbow similarly reverse real-world temporal order; yet these are not transitions among moments of consciousness of a single self, as in Proust and Faulkner, but genuine transitions among separate minds. In order to motivate these mind-to-mind transitions, one must shift one's sights from coordinates in the characters' “real” phenomenal world to coordinates in the Other World, the world “beyond the Zero.”

A passage early in the novel establishes the paradigm for all subsequent occurrences of this “mediumistic” transition. Carroll Eventyr has been serving as the principal “reflector” of life at a wartime psychic-research unit in Kent. Although the narrative shifts fairly freely from his mind to other, contiguous minds, or to the narrator's perspective, Eventyr's consciousness is nevertheless the touchstone throughout the passage (GR: 145-154). Now, Carroll Eventyr is a spiritualist medium. His “control,” the spirit who speaks through him, and through whom he contacts others in the spirit-world, is one Peter Sachsa, himself once a successful medium in Weimar Germany. Thus, it is by way of Sachsa that a transition is made between Eventyr in Kent, 1945, and the Weimar Republic sometime in the late Twenties:

On his side, Eventyr [the medium] tends to feel wholly victimized, even a bit resentful. Peter Sachsa [the control], on his, falls amazingly out of character and into nostalgia for life, the old peace, the Weimar decadence that kept him fed and moving. Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon during a street action in Neukölln, he recalls now, sentimentally, evenings of rubbed darkwood, cigar smoke, ladies in chiseled jade, panne, attar of damask roses, the latest angular pastel paintings on the walls, the latest drugs inside the many little table drawers. More than any mere “Kreis,” on most nights full mandalas come to bloom: all degrees of society all quarters of the capital, palms down on that famous blood veneer, touching only at little fingers. Sachsa's table was like a deep pool in the forest. Beneath the surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to rise. … Walter Asch (“Taurus”) was visited one night by something so unusual it took three “Hieropons” (250 mg.) to bring him back, and even so he seemed reluctant to sleep. They all stood watching him, in ragged rows resembling athletic formations, Wimpe the IG-man who happened to be holding the Hieropon keying on Sargner, a civilian attached to General Staff, flanked by Lieutenant Weissman, recently back from South-West Africa, and the Herero aide he'd brought with him, staring, staring at them all, at everything … while behind them ladies moved in a sibilant weave, sequins and high-albedo stockings aflash, black-and-white make-up in daintily nasal alarm, eyes wide going oh. … Each face that watched Walter Asch was a puppet stage: each a separate routine.

… shows good hands yes droop and wrists as far up as muscle relaxant respiratory depression …

… same … same … my own face white in mirror three threethirty four march of the Hours clock ticking room no can't go in no not enough light not enough no aaahhh—

… theatre nothing but Walter really look at head phony angle wants to catch light good fill-light throw a yellow gel …

(A pneumatic toy frog jumps up onto a lily pad trembling: beneath the surface lies a terror … a late captivity … but he floats now over the head of what would take him back … his eyes cannot be read. …)

… mba rar m'eroto ondyoze … mbe mu munine m'oruroto ayo u n'omuinyo … (further back than this is a twisting of yarns or cordage, a giant web, a wrenching of hide, of muscles in the hard grip of something that comes to wrestle when the night is deep … and a sense, too, of visitation by the dead, afterward a sick feeling that they are not as friendly as they seemed to be … he has wakened, cried, sought explanation, but noone ever told him anything he could believe. The dead have talked with him, come and sat, shared his milk, told stories of ancestors, or of spirits from other parts of the veld—for time and space on their side have no meaning, all is together).

(152-153)

Having accomplished the passage from present to past, from Eventyr's world to Sachsa's, the narrative is now able to circulate among the minds of Sachsa's circle as it had among those of Eventyr's. We are plunged successively into the streams-of-consciousness of the spectators of Walter Asch's memorable séance, although we can only identify a few of them specifically (the Herero aide, Wimpe, perhaps Sachsa himself). The structural parallelism between this mode of transition and Modernist transition by triangulation is striking. However, where the Modernist device involves the use of coordinates in the “real” visible, audible, tangible, etc. world shared by the characters, Pynchon's device involves the invisible, extra-sensory world, accessible only to the likes of Eventyr. Where the Modernist sequence represents either simultaneity or consecutiveness at the level of the reconstructed world, Pynchon's sequence carries the narrative by mind-to-mind transition backwards into the past.

The mode of transition worked out in little in this passage is almost immediately afterwards applied on a much larger scale (GR: 154-167). Once again the narrative moves from Eventyr the medium, through Sachsa, his control, to Sachsa's Weimar milieu; but this time it lingers within the various minds it finds there—that of Sachsa's lover Leni, that of her husband Franz—rather than hurrying on from one to the next as in the earlier passage. Note that Sachsa's mind is not in any sense embedded in Carroll Eventyr's, as one narrator may be embedded within another's narration in, e.g., Conrad or Faulkner. Nor is Leni's consciousness embedded in Sachsa's; and certainly Franz's is not. Mediumistic contact only allows us to motivate, in terms of norms of verisimilitude presupposed by this novel (mediums, controls, a spirit-world, etc.), transitions on the formal level; it does not authorize our reconstructing a “real” situation in which the contents of one mind are accessible to another.

When the narrative next makes the transition from Eventyr's world to Sachsa's by way of the “Other Side,” a new element will be introduced, one which also recalls typical Modernist structures, but again with a difference. Eventyr has been given to understand, by oblique and sinister hints, that he is in some sense Peter Sachsa's double. He speculates that the parallelism might extend to his lover, Nora Dodson-Truck: “If there are analogies here, if Eventyr does, somehow, map on to Peter Sachsa, then does Nora Dodson-Truck become the woman Sachsa loved, Leni Pökler?” (GR: 218) The passage which immediately follows serves to answer this question in the affirmative, for here we pass imperceptibly—ambiguous pronoun references help—from Eventyr's relationship with Nora, to Sachsa's with Leni (GR: 218-220). Clearly this transition is motivated at least in part by the mediumistic contact which we already know to exist between Eventyr and Sachsa. But just as clearly it also relates to the characteristically Modernist structure of analogical integration. As Meir Sternberg has demonstrated with respect to Faulkner's Light in August, the Modernist novel often resists attempts to unify it according to mimetic models, forcing the reader to discover non-mimetic unifying patterns: analogies between events, strands of action, characters, themes (Sternberg, 1970; Cf., Perry, 1968). Pynchon's metaphor of “mapping” is a good one for this process; nevertheless, the transition in this passage is significantly unlike Modernist analogical integration. In novels like Light in August, analogical integration cannot be related to norms of verisimilitude; it is expressly anti-mimetic. That is, analogical patterns lie at a level above that of the fictive world in which the characters move. By contrast, in Gravity's Rainbow “mapping” is mimetically motivated. The correspondence between Eventyr and Nora on the one hand, and Sachsa and Leni on the other, is, in the terms of the model of reality presupposed by this novel, “real”—psychic, but “real.”

This transition by “mapping”, if dependent upon bizarre norms of verisimilitude, is, at least, readily intelligible in one respect: the analogical pattern upon which it is based is known in advance. Indeed, Eventyr's troubled ruminations have no other function than to inform the reader that Eventyr maps onto Sachsa, Nora onto Leni, thereby explicitly motivating the transition from Eventyr, 1945, to Sachsa, 1930, which follows. The text is less attentive to the reader's comfort in other instances of transition by “mapping”. Consider the bizarre transition between Slothrop's sado-masochistic episode with Margerita Erdmann and Franz Pökler's memories of the begetting of his daughter Ilse (GR: 395-398). In a derelict film studio, 1945, Slothrop and Greta recreate a scene of bondage and copulation from a film in which Greta once played, Slothrop doubling as Greta's one-time co-star, Max Schlepzig, whose passport he happens by an absurd coincidence to be carrying. Sometime in the Thirties, Franz Pökler, aroused by this same film, had come home to father a child on his wife Leni. This daughter, Ilse, is thus the double on this side of the cinema-screen, so to speak, of the daughter that Greta conceived during the filming of the scene. A whole system of analogies among characters and events arises from these episodes: both Slothrop and Franz Pökler map onto Max Schlepzig; Leni maps onto Greta, Ilse onto Greta's daughter Bianca, and Greta onto her own earlier self. But one could not say that this paradigm of doublings allows us to motivate the transition from Slothrop's consciousness to Pökler's. If anything, the reverse is true: it is the sequence which allows us to reconstruct the analogical pattern.

Or, finally, consider the even more bizarre transition from Geli Tripping, the witch, to Gottfried, Captain Blicero's catamite, very late in the novel (GR: 720-721). One critic (Wolfley, 1977: 883-884) has rightly observed that there is no justification for this transition in terms of plot or chronology: Geli and Gottfried have never had even indirect dealings, and Geli's moment of consciousness is located in spring 1946, Gottfried's the year before. This critic is equally correct in finding the motivation for this conjunction at the level of thematic analogy: Geli meditates upon man's role as promoter of death in Creation, while Gottfried is harangued by Blicero on the “American Death” about to be visited on Europe. But there are, in addition, other analogies which make this another example of the mediumistic “mapping” transition. Blicero reminds Gottfried of a time when “you used to whisper me to sleep with stories of us one day living on the Moon” (GR: 723). Now, we have heard of such stories before, but in connection with Franz Pökler's daughter Ilse (GR: 410, 420), never in connection with Gottfried. So Gottfried, it seems, maps onto Ilse; and Ilse, as we know, maps onto Greta Erdmann's daughter Bianca. Geli Tripping, in turn, is a sort of Bianca-surrogate, both having been Slothrop's lovers at one time or another. This might seem an extraordinarily devious way to establish an analogy between Geli and Gottfried, but it should be borne in mind, first, that by this point in the novel all the young female characters have begun to merge in Slothrop's mind, but more so in the reader's, so that to equate Gottfried with any one of them is tantamount to equating him with the whole series; and, secondly, that the deviousness and implausibility of the connection may very well be the point. This transition may have been introduced, among other reasons, to focus sharply for us our growing suspicion that almost any character in this novel can be analogically related to almost any other character—to raise for us the demoralizing prospect of free and all but unmanageable analogical patterning.

Last but not least, it should be recalled that Geli Tripping, as a practicing witch, is qualified to effect “mediumistic” transitions from mind to mind by way of the “Other Side” in the same way that the spiritualist medium Carroll Eventyr was. Viewed in one light, then, the transition from Geli to Gottfried, just as the earlier transition from Slothrop to Franz Pökler, appears as an instance of Pynchon's outrageous and subversive manipulation of analogies. But it is also strictly mimetic in a world in which, as we already know, occult “mappings” are possible.

IV.

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

(GR: 434)

Pynchon's reader has every right to feel conned, bullied, betrayed. Indeed, these responses are the essence of the aesthetic effect of Gravity's Rainbow. The reader has been invited to undertake the kinds of pattern-making and pattern-interpreting operations which, in the Modernist texts with which he is familiar, would produce intelligible meaning; here, they produce almost a parody of intelligibility. He has been confronted with representations of mental processes of the kind which, in Modernist texts, he could have relied upon in reconstructing external (fictive) reality. In Gravity's Rainbow, such representations are always liable to be retroactively qualified as dream, fantasy, or hallucination, while the reconstructions based upon them are always subject to contradiction or cancellation. The ultimate effect is radically to destabilize novelistic ontology. Similarly, the reader has been invited to motivate transitions among sequences of minds in a way which obviously relates to the Modernist device of transition by “triangulation”, only to find himself led into increasingly bizarre and increasingly unstable “occult” transitions. Elusive modes of intelligibility and, if that weren't enough, unacceptable or distressing types of content—pornography, broad slap-stick comedy, technical scientific material, etc.—one might well wonder, along with the Pulitzer committee that rejected Gravity's Rainbow, what to make of it all.

Or perhaps the question should be not so much what to make of it, as what it makes of one. For the effect of this troublesome novel is, finally, the salutary one of disrupting the conditioned responses of the Modernist reader (and we are all, still, Modernist readers), of de-conditioning the reader. It is the same effect, no doubt, as Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury had on their first readers.

Pynchon at one point quotes Pavlov's remarks about the extinction of a conditioned reflex “beyond the point of reducing a reflex to zero,” “a silent extinction beyond the zero” (84-85). The readerly equivalent of this de-conditioning “beyond the zero” is that state in which “nothing is connected to anything” which Pynchon calls anti-paranoia. It is an instructive, perhaps even hygenic, state to be in for a time, even though it is, as Pynchon goes on to say, “a condition not many of us can bear for long” (GR: 434). My use of the metaphors of paranoia and anti-paranoia for our habits of reading and the damage which Gravity's Rainbow does them may seem extravagant, but it is not wholly unadvised. As one of Pynchon's critics has penetratingly remarked, the frame of mind in which one is required to read Modernist fiction, the mind-set of tout se tient, might aptly be characterized as paranoiac. Paranoia, it seems,

is the condition under which most of modern literature comes to life: the author relies on the reader to find correspondences between names, colors, or the physical attributes of characters and other invisible qualities of those characters, places, and actions, while to do so in “real life” would clearly be an indication of paranoid behavior.

(Siegel 1976: 50)

Pynchon's text sets itself against this Modernist mind-set, chiefly by luring the paranoid reader—the Modernist reader—into interpretative dark alleys, cul-de-sacs, impossible situations, and requiring him to find his way out by some other path than the one he came in.

We could make a different approach to the effect of Gravity's Rainbow by way of Reuven Tsur's illuminating distinction between certitude and “negative capability” in literary interpretation (Tsur, 1975). Tsur's distinction derives, of course, from the famous and much-debated remark in John Keats's letter to his brothers (Dec. 21/27, 1817): “I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [. …]” (quoted in Tsur, 1975: 776). It is certainly the case, as Tsur observes, that too much literary criticism is characterized by a “reaching after fact & reason” and an incapability of “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts;” and scarcely any criticism has been more “irritable” in its “reaching” than the criticism written on Gravity's Rainbow. As certain of Pynchon's more sympathetic—and more negatively capable—critics have remarked, Pynchon criticism has tended to translate the disturbing experience of reading Gravity's Rainbow directly into tractable, coherent statements of theme (Poirier, 1973: 167; Poirier, 1975: 19; Levine, 1976: 113; Levine & Leverenz, 1976a: 11; Rosenbaum, 1976: 67-68). Needless to say, nearly everything is lost in the translation. From first to last, the reader's experience proves that Gravity's Rainbow will not boil down quite so readily to intelligible patterns of theme, or indeed to any of the patterns which we have learned to expect from Modernist texts. Reading Gravity's Rainbow is good training in negative capability.

I would, finally, like to venture some hypotheses about the general relation between Post-Modern writing and the literary tradition. These are not in the nature of considered conclusions, but strictly of hypotheses to be verified only by further empirical study.

The received verdict on Post-Modern fiction has been that it constitutes an affront to the whole prior history of literature, that it is directed against narration and the principles of narrativity in general. This view of the universal subversiveness of the Post-Modern can be traced, I suspect, to the French criticism of the 1950's which sprang up around the Nouveau Roman, on both sides, pro and con of the question (see, e.g., Barthes 1964: 29-40, 63-70, 101-105, 198-205). I would like to suggest that this view is an effect of the perspective of these particular critics and apologists at their particular historical moment. The Post-Modern, I would like to suggest, is less an indiscriminate shotgun-blast than a kind of sharpshooting directed at specific targets.

For the Post-Modern which those seminal critics defined was a particular Post-Modern—that of the Nouveau Roman—and the literary past which it spurned and subverted was equally specific: not narration in general, not the principles of all narrativity, but the particular historical phenomenon which might be called Balzacian Realism. By the same token, I have been arguing that the variety of Post-Modern writing exemplified by Gravity's Rainbow—the variety of which Pynchon is perhaps the preeminent practitioner¹⁷—is specifically directed against Modernist reading. Other varieties may well be related to other specific historical phenomena; in any case, it is clear that it will not do simply to set Post-Modern fiction in opposition to the whole prior development of narrative. Any respectable description of a Post-Modern text should include some account of the specific repertoire of interpretative operations—whether it be that of Balzacian Realism, that of Modernism, or any other—against which it is directed; the repertoire, in other words, which the text in question “keys on.” This way we will eliminate the “apocalyptic” view of literary history (see, e.g., Barthes 1971: 155-164), whereby serious fiction is supposed to have become at one moment—and across the board—irrevocably and monolithically Post-Modern.

Notes

1. Pynchon, 1973: 194. All subsequent references will be to the 1973 Viking edition of Gravity's Rainbow, and will be noted parenthetically in the text (GR:).

   No reader could hope to grapple with Pynchon unaided. I am indebted to friends who have helped clarify literary and/or scientific aspects of Gravity's Rainbow: John Cartmell, Ron Hankison, Randall Stevenson, Douglas Young.

2. The “realism” of this opening dream-episode—the fact that it cannot be distinguished on internal evidence from “real” episodes—has been remarked by several critics: Siegel (1976:51-52); Seed (1976:79). And surely that “realism” is only enhanced by recollections of another text, an aggressively “realistic” one, which also begins with screaming in the midst of an evacuation, viz., Hemingway's In Our Time (1930): “The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming” (Hemingway, 1958:9).

3. Actually, The Crying of Lot 49 is formally closer to The Ambassadors than to What Maisie Knew. Oedipa Maas, like Strether but unlike Maisie, is articulate to the same degree as the novel's narrator is articulate; the gap between her voice and the narrator's is so small as to be negligible. Indeed, the novel goes out of its way to motivate several of its most important and extravagant metaphors as plausibly emanating from Oedipa: Pynchon (1967: 13, 15; 93, 95-96; 136-137).

4. This baring of the device was already anticipated in Pynchon's short story “Entropy” (1960), in which a character dictates his memoirs in the third person. The Education of Henry Adams was explicitly named as the precedent in this short story; a Post-Modern version is, of course, Mailer's The Armies of the Night.

5. The extreme self-consciousness of this strategy is made all the more apparent when one realizes that this same espionage melodrama had originally been rendered from a unitary, “omniscient” narratorial point of view in an earlier short story, “Under the Rose” (1961); see Cowart (1977).

6. The general perspective underlying my approach is best formulated in the admirable chapter on “Convention and Naturalization” in Culler (1975: 131-160).

7. This experience of the reader's in Gravity's Rainbow is anticipated by Pynchon's earlier novels. The career of V. in the novel of that name is an imaginative projection by one Herbert Stencil on the basis of doubtful and fragmentary information. The information, we are told (Pynchon, 1964: 211), has been “Stencilized”: “Around each seed of a dossier […] had developed a nacreous mass of inference, poetic license, forcible dislocation of personality into a past he didn't remember and had no right in, save the right of imaginative anxiety or historical care [. …] The rest was impersonation and dream” (Pynchon, 1964:50-51). In The Crying of Lot 49, the ontological embarrassments are transferred to the heroine, Oedipa, something of a literary critic herself, whose difficulties in reconstructing the reality of the Tristero System the reader shares.

8. Should one be in doubt about the unreality of this incest, since there is some ambiguity here about how much of this episode did not happen, confirmation is to be found 1) in the fact that Franz and Ilse do not defect to Denmark, and 2) in a later moment when “Pökler got hysterical and did slap her” (GR:430)—the “did” here indicating that the first time he had not actually slapped her after all. If he did not slap her, and if they did not defect, then the intervening events—paternal plow and filial furrow—seem unlikely to have “really” occurred.

9. In fact, this possibility had been anticipated from the beginning, although only in the form of unreliable speculation by a minor character, one Teddy Bloat (GR: 19).

10. The Schwarzkommando themselves are sensitive to the implausibility of their own existence. As Enzian the Nguarorerue, their leader, tells Slothrop: “There are even now powerful factions in Paris who don't believe we exist. And most of the time I'm not so sure myself […] I think we're here, but only in a statistical way. Something like that rock over there is just about 100٪ certain—it knows it's there, so does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now are only a little better than even—the slightest shift in the probabilities and we're gone—schnapp! like that” (GR: 361-362).

11. The theme of concretization of fantasy had already been anticipated in The Crying of Lot 49, where Driblette the theatrical director describes himself as “the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (Pynchon, 1967:56). Oedeipa takes over his metaphor along with his ontology: “Shall I project a world?” (Pynchon, 1967:58-59).

12. Such verbal blurring or hedging of reality is of course a major stylistic device of Faulkner's prose. For these purposes Faulkner favors the conjunction or and conditional adverbs such as possibly, likely, probably, doubtless, maybe, perhaps; see especially Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Pynchon had already used such a device to comic effect in The Crying of Lot 49: “Popov did send out a ship, either the corvette ‘Bogatir’ or the clipper ‘Gaidamak,’ to see what it could see. Off the coast of either what is now Carmel-by-the-Sea, or what is now Pismo Beach, around noon or possibly toward dusk, the two ships sighted each other. One of them may have fired; if it did then the other responded; but both were out of range so neither showed a scar afterward to prove anything” (Pynchon, 1967: 32).

13. This is not as fanciful an outcome as it might seem. After all, what else has Bruce Morrissette done but apply precisely this reductive naturalization to Robbe-Grillet's novels, locating each within the mind of a protagonist whose particular psychopathology manifests itself in the novel's structure; Morrissette (1963); cf., Culler (1975: 200).

14. Other naturalizations are possible, however. Byron's story is said to be dictated to one Eddie Pensiero, who is able to “read” shivers, through the “muscular modulations” of the soldier cranking the generator that supplies Byron with power (GR:640-642, 647). Since Pensiero is also identified as a benzedrine user, perhaps this authorizes us to locate Byron's story within Pensiero's hallucination. A more disorienting possibility is that we are meant to incorporate Byron in the “real” world of Gravity's Rainbow. This may be indicated by the recurrence throughout the novel, in contexts of varying reliability, of other sentient inanimate objects: ball-bearings (GR:583-585), rocks (GR:612-613), even other light-bulbs (GR:464).

15. Certain material in these passages, in fact, resists this naturalization. Some elements of the “Komical Kamikaze” episodes obviously relate to Pirate Prentice's experience, and could not plausibly emanate from Slothrop's mind (GR:698). Other elements (GR:691-692) derive from a hallucination once suffered by a certain Geza Rózsavölgyi (GR:634-635), hence are equally inaccessible to Slothrop; unless, that is, we give credence to Roger Mexico's paranoid fear of merging minds with Rózsavölgyi (GR:634). If with Mexico, why not with Slothrop?

16. For an exemplary analysis of the motivation of transitions in a typical nineteenth-century Realist text, see Hrushovski (1976). My own approach draws upon the general theory of the literary text outlined in Hrushovski's paper.

17. As testimony to his preeminence, we note that Pynchon has already acquired his first epigone in Tom Robbins, whose recent Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) is clearly derivative of Gravity's Rainbow.

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