[In the following essay, Black discusses the ways in which Gravity's Rainbow revivifies the Romantic conception of the relationship between the physical force of gravity and the ethical problems of humanity's Fall and sinful nature.]

How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with augur and plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to see what progress our reformer has made—not an inch has he pierced—you still find him with new words in the old place, floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust. The new book says, “I will give you the key to nature,” and we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre. But the thunder is a surface phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the sage. The wedge turns out to be a rocket.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson “The Method of Nature” (1841)

Surely there is a vein for the silver,
and a place for gold where they fine it.
Iron is taken out of the earth,
and brass is molten out of the stone.
He setteth an end to darkness,
and searcheth out all perfection:
the stones of darkness, and the shadow of death …
He putteth forth his hand upon the rock,
he overturneth the mountains by the roots.
He cutteth out rivers among the rocks;
and his eye seeth every precious thing.
He bindeth the floods from overflowing;
and the thing that is hid bringeth he forth to light.
But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?

—Job, 28:1-3; 28:9-12

It appears from the many attempts to review or analyze Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow, in the seven years since its publication in 1973, that most readers have been diverted by the work's singular monstrosity, and that most of the work's commentators—while acknowledging Pynchon's immediate and rather obvious literary precursors¹—have paid only scant attention to the significant intellectual traditions out of which this novel has emerged and which it has in turn demonically transformed. I would like to suggest that one strand of the work's complex lineage can be traced back to a dissenting scientific strain in Anglo-American and German Romanticism. Moreover, an appreciation of this radical strain may not only enhance our understanding of Gravity's Rainbow, but also inversely, Pynchon's novel may provide twentieth-century cultural historians living in a technological, post-Romantic age with an awareness of the deep intellectual disturbances which the seventeenth-century “scientific revolution” set off in the Romantic world.

It has been widely acknowledged that many Romantics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reacted immediately to the abstract, scientific discourse ushered in by Newton's mathematical formulations in the seventeenth century.² Poets, mystics, and scientists such as Blake in England, Goethe in Germany, and Diderot, Mesmer, and Lamarck in France, objected in various ways to what they felt to be the growing preoccupation of established science with inanimate rather than vitalistic phenomena. The impact of modern scientific analysis on epistemology and technology was already perceived in Newton's study of optics by some of these thinkers; as George Steiner observes: “The prismatic decomposition of the rainbow in Newton's optics, and the effacement of this same rainbow behind factory steam are, as Blake saw, rigorously connected. In both, the truth is tyrannical.”³ A yet deeper source of dissatisfaction with Newtonian “truths,” however, arose in the field of mechanics over the issue of gravitation. Newton's emphasis on quantity of matter, or mass, as a decisive factor in the attraction of physical bodies abruptly discredited a longstanding belief that all attraction was the result of secret sympathies or affinities inherent in the particular quality of matter itself. Furthermore, if quantity of matter was constant, then matter could not be transformed into some other state; matter could never become a mental or spiritual substance, for example. In short, Newtonianism claimed that all matter possessed a measurable weight which was a sign of its susceptibility to gravity and of its non-transformability. For Blake and other radical Romantics, Newton's emphasis on quantity of matter and his use of a gravitational principle to account for the motion of falling bodies, implied that all terrestrial matter was irredeemably “fallen” in a physical sense, and that this apparent fallenness of matter was in turn the result of man's “fallibility,” which had also occasioned man's spiritual Fall and the subsequent fall and limitation of his senses. According to this interpretation, which has its roots in Gnostic and Neoplatonic tradition, the force of gravity in the Earth was a sinister, repressive agency which prevented the World's spiritual regeneration. My principal objective in this paper, then, will be to suggest some ways in which Pynchon's novel, besides revealing the ironic implications of the spectral rainbow of both Noah and Newton, succeeds in rediscovering the Romantics' awareness of the profound relationship between the physical force of gravity and the ethical problems of the Fall and of human transgression in general.

Historically, Pynchon's novel expands conceptions of gravity which have been developed by post-Romantic philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who responded to the Romantic radicals' traumatic recognition of gravitation as a demonic force. For example, in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1st ed. 1819; see esp. secs. 26 and 27). Arthur Schopenhauer identified gravity as the most basic physical objectification of a metaphysical Will. Gravity was a primal, occult, force slumbering in physical nature, waiting to reclaim the individual organism as soon as its high level of organization and differentiation should, for some reason, break down. Indeed, so long as the individual was involved in an organic Bildungsprozess⁴ in which he was free to deviate and differentiate himself from other individuals according to his own will, he would remain relatively immune to such a primal, degrading force as gravitation; he would be a discrete individual, developing in what would appear from his own progressive perspective to be part of an organically unfolding, self-directed World-process.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, many cultural philosophers called the Romantic ideal of a Bildungsprozess into question as the result of their sense that a general historical depersonalization of the individual seemed to be well under way. Thus Friedrich Nietzsche, in Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1874), observed that historical and technological conditions in late nineteenth-century European civilization ultimately favored uniform organization over eccentric individuality, mechanical inorganicism over organic vitality. As a result of contemporary developments in applied science and due to the proliferation of the efficient algorithms and circuits of modern technology, the individual was ultimately capable of re-forming himself on the entirely new corporate level of History. That is to say, the eighteenth-century cultural ideal of a Bildungsprozess in which the hero was the individual was reformulated in the nineteenth century as the cultural ideal of History in which the subject was the corporate structure as suggested by Hegel's concept of a “universal individual” (“das allgemeine Individuum”) and its objective form, the State. In short, Nietzsche recognized that as soon as the individual ceased to be the subject of his own natural Bildungsprozess and became integrated as a member of the corporate State, he would automatically forfeit all his characteristic tendencies and his defiant willfulness, becoming instead a uniform and un-formed being.

This depressing cultural situation corresponds to the moment described by Schopenhauer in which the primal force of gravity—with its peculiar quality that though it is the weakest of all physical forces, it affects matter over the greatest distances—would suddenly reveal its long-latent power, and complete the individual's reduction and disorder. Thus Emerson, for example, in “The Method of Nature” (1841), bewails the rupture between man and nature to which the Romantics were always so sensitive, and he observes that the human will is no longer equal to a cosmic Schopenhauerian Will, objectified in the impressive and repressive force of gravity:

… we no longer hold [Nature] by the hand; we have lost our miraculous power; our arm is no more as strong as the frost, nor our will equivalent to gravity and the elective attractions. Yet we can use nature as a convenient standard, and the meter of our rise and fall. It has this advantage as a witness, it cannot be debauched.⁵

Emerson—a post-Romantic thinker living in an age when the uniform, mechanized individual was increasingly caught up in the corporate organizational systems of historical process—elegiacally expresses his fear that the individual has somehow lost his own dynamic will, and hence has lost the sense of his own organically unfolding, natural Bildungsprozess. Emerson suggests, however, that although humanity has failed to “humanize” the physical sciences, it may at least still be possible for Nature to “naturalize” man and awaken him to the disgrace of his own dehumanized condition. That is to say, it would always be within man's ability to reorient himself to an inviolable, self-sufficient Nature, thereby gauging the extent of his own fall from natural grace.

Nevertheless, Emerson's designation of Nature as “the meter of our rise and fall” leaves itself open to the insidious interpretation of his succeeding American cultural critics of the twentieth century who do not fail to point out that when humanity can no longer hold its own with Nature, then all that the individual can do is to measure his own unnatural rate of growth. Thus in his Education (1907), Henry Adams confesses that his task as a historian is finally to be “a mere instrument of measure”;⁶ and in his “Dynamic Theory of History,” he “takes for granted that the forces of nature capture man.”⁷ Almost seventy years later, Adams's careful student Thomas Pynchon draws the further conclusion that non-human Nature itself has been debased through its persistent use as a quantitative meter of human progress, rather than as a qualitative indicator of human integrity or lack thereof. Such manipulation of Nature in the modern age is precisely what Pynchon documents in his fiction; he describes a Nature which has been ruthlessly violated, quantified, and technologically transformed by the irreversible, exhaustive processes of History. It would seem, then, that Pynchon effectively dashes Emerson's last resort—his plea to use Nature as a means for re-qualifying man.

Pynchon does more, however, than merely document the modern transposition from the individual's Bildungsprozess of organic vitality to a historical dialectic of mechanistic technology. He also lays bare a regressive, disorganizing movement present in all romantically-inspired, allegedly progressive and formative Bildungs-systems. This negative movement arises from what might be described as a paleontological impulse of man which involves his introspective regression towards his prehistorical and proto-biological origins.

Strictly speaking, paleontology is only a relatively recent interest, involving as it does a concept of archaism which is peculiar to the last two-hundred years. It is essential to note, along with Owen Barfield, the significance for human thought of the emergence of paleontology at the precise historical moment of the early nineteenth century:

If the impulse to construe as process the record of the rocks and the vestiges of creation apparent in the natural order had come either a little earlier, before participation had faded, or a little later, when the iconoclasm implicit in physical analysis—and in the [reflective thinking] to which it can give rise—had really begun to work, man might have read there the story of the coming into being, pari passu, of his world and his own consciousness. As it was, all that paleontology could take over from the experimental sciences, such as astronomy and physics, was the idols which these latter had so far succeeded in creating.⁸

That is to say, it was very nearly the case that Emerson's hope was realized, that Nature should indeed have functioned as man's familial witness, the meter of his rise and fall which would have indicated to him the evolution of his own consciousness vis-à-vis the phenomenal world. However, instead of becoming a genuine hermeneutic activity which could have recovered man's original organic nature, paleontology claimed scientific validity for itself by taking literally the fossilized records it studied—i.e., as an array of autonomous objects detached from consciousness. The rocks and fossils studied by the paleontologist were taken as mute testimony of an evolution of the world which was completely independent from an evolution of consciousness and collective representations—an evolution which for the phenomenologist is the only constitutive reality. In crudely simple terms, the scientific discipline of paleontology came to regard the Earth as a graveyard of extinct species and petrified shells of life.

There is evidence, moreover, that the modern geological concept of the Earth as an inanimate globe, or as a stratified collection of inorganic fossils, radically distorts the Earth's actual pre-history. If paleontology is a study of death and dead fossils, it is so only because man was not able to sustain the overwhelming, living force of pre-historic nature. Pynchon is unambiguous on this point:

This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death.⁹

The “human” science of paleontology, spawned in the literal-minded nineteenth century as an inventory of fossils and dead bones, obscures the awful splendor of preternatural vitalism. (Similarly, the deliberately non-interpretive stance of Pynchon's narrator avoids both the pitfalls of historicism in the reconstruction of the last days of World War II, and the conventional omniscience of the nineteenth-century novel.) Nevertheless, intuitions of the force of pre-historic nature, analogous to the appearance of the world to Barfield's participating consciousness, seem to have been widely accessible to earlier thinkers. Such intuitions figure prominently, for instance, in alchemical traditions, according to which the Earth was envisioned not as a graveyard of expired life, but rather as an organic womb or “matrix” in which all matter underwent a physiological process of development (cf. AM [The Architecture of Matter], 138-9). Educated in Aristotelian theories of development, many alchemists accepted the idea that even minerals were participating in a slow, organic evolution under respective planetary influences. Far from considering petrification as a deathly process of decay, the alchemists believed it to be part of an embryological process (AM, 171).

Traces of this conception of an animate Earth in which all matter participates in an ongoing process of gestation occur with great frequency in the philosophy and literature of the Romantic period. In the passage cited as an epigraph to this paper, Emerson represents the Earth as a living “mindbody”¹⁰ in his comparison of the “crystal sphere of thought” with the “concentric strata” of the globe. In an even more striking way, Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807) is informed by a paleontological metaphor according to which organic Geist repeatedly sinks into its objective form as repressed, inorganic and petrified Nature:

Science lays before us the morphogenetic process of this cultural development in all its detailed fullness and necessity, and at the same time shows it to be something that has already sunk into the mind as a moment of its being [was schon zum Momente und Eigentum des Geistes herabgesunken ist] and become a possession of mind.¹¹

Through the act of bringing the repressed and disordered past to consciousness, the individual is able to reconstitute that past as an ordered and living subject: “… culture or development of mind (Bildung,) regarded from the side of the individual, consists in his acquiring what lies at his hand ready for him, in making its inorganic nature organic to himself, and taking possession of it for himself [seine unorganische Natur in sich zehre und für sich in Besitz nehme].”¹²

Hegel's dialectical procedure by which the mind is capable of exhuming the repressed, inorganic wastes of its own history into a new organic life is indicative of what may be called a “naïve” paleontology. This involves a spiritual redemption of Nature, as, for instance, in Schelling's Naturphilosophie or in Novalis' magischer Idealismus whereby the poet-scientist performs a specific psycho-spiritual act, such as the Orphic utterance of a poetic formula, which will succeed in bringing inorganic Nature or the dead past back to life after ages of stony sleep. In a more literal use of the metaphor, Schopenhauer describes the sudden release of dynamic physical forces from their protracted slumber in the Earth's womb: “For thousands of years chemical forces slumber in matter, till contact with the reagents sets them free; then they appear …”¹³

This popular paleontological metaphor, employed briefly by poets and philosophers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflects a pervasive interest at this time in the distant geological past. Five years before the appearance of Hegel's Phänomenologie, the French naturalist, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, published his Hydrogéologie which disclosed, among other theories, the doctrine that all sedimentary rocks have an organic origin.¹⁴ The countless fossils of monstrous, pre-historic forms of life which were unearthed during the Romantic period were perceived as the dried-up, discarded traces of Nature's ingenious efforts to create man.¹⁵ Anticipating Lamarck's theory of sedimentary rocks, Novalis jotted down that “the science of rock-formation is nothing other than the science of fossil-formation,”¹⁶ and towards the end of his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799-1800), he notes, “Here in the gray stones, jagged rifts, the eerie towering shapes one looked into innumerable ages and saw all history drawn together into shining little minutes.”¹⁷ By unlocking the buried secrets of the Earth, a general reconstruction—possibly even a reactivation—of the Earth's primitive History became theoretically possible.

The Romantics' paleontological interest, moreover, was closely allied with an interest in mineralogy and mining technology. Such notable figures among the German Romantics as Steffans, von Humboldt, Baader, Schubert, and Novalis all studied at the Mining School of Freiberg;¹⁸ and in the case of Novalis, this familiarity with mining was put to poetic use, as in the cryptic observation of the subterranean hermit in Heinrich von Ofterdingen:

“You miners are almost astrologers in reverse,” said the hermit. “Whereas they gaze incessantly at the heavens and stray through those immeasurable spaces, you turn your gaze into the earth and explore its structure. They study the powers and influence of the constellations, and you investigate the powers of rocks and mountains and the manifold effects of the strata of earth and rock. To them the sky is the book of the future, while to you the earth reveals monuments of the primeval world.”¹⁹

Indeed, the notion that an examination of the earth's bowels could provide oracular knowledge of the earth's past seems to have had wide currency at this time. For Novalis, as a scholar of German natural science observes, “mining, like all other attempts of man to penetrate into the mysteries of the earth and of nature in general, must be thought of as attempts to free the spirit of nature from its bonds.”²⁰

This sanguine paleontological endeavor undergoes a parodistic literalization in post-Romantic thought. The eighteenth-century belief in Nature's guaranteed economy gave way in the nineteenth century to a recognition of History's vast, irredeemable waste. Already, in Hegel's reference to “versteinerte” stratified social castes,²¹ in Clemens Brentano's Das steinerne Bild der Mutter (the alternate title of his novel Godwi [1801], or in Eichendorff's novella Das Marmorbild (1819), we detect an awareness of the inorganic waste produced by social and cultural history, a corollary of the fossilized waste which provided essential evidence of the Earth's age for natural historians of the early nineteenth century. As the century wore on, the Earth was regarded less and less as an organic and rational entity, informed by Geist and fundamentally akin to the individual as his own frozen history. And the individual was increasingly unable to regard himself as a growing organism whose dynamic life-activities were capable of spiritually regenerating the Earth by thawing its icy history. Rather, as recent cultural historians have made us aware, the Earth came to be experienced by modern man in a Gnostic sense,²² i.e., as an intrinsically alien and hostile substance. Such a demonically vital Earth had to be materially converted by men, “God's spoilers,” into a new form in order to assure their own spiritual salvation. Emerson's suggestion that Nature could serve as an undebauched witness to man's own debauchery may ultimately have become a threat in a technological age when what many men desired most was proof of historical progress and a denial of human fallibility. Hoping to leave no mute witness of the debauchery and fall brought upon himself through his inability to withstand a primeval chthonic vitalism, the guilt-ridden “latecomer”²³ of our century may have tried to synthesize Nature anew; he may have tried to re-create natural processes not only as the rational History of Hegel, but as a rationalized, fictive “history” which would agree with his desired self-image.

This new paleontology of the twentieth century receives a poignant, literal expression in Pynchon's vision of present-day technological enterprises to excavate fossilized inorganic material which has been buried for ages in the Earth. Now, however, this material is not exhumed to satisfy the geologist's or naturalist's curiosity about the Earth's ancient natural history, or to support eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century notions of the fixity of the species and of Nature's economy; rather, such inorganic material is itself regarded by the modern industrial entrepreneur only as evidence of wholesale extinction and waste. Such natural waste can only be useful for the entrepreneur when it is reconstituted as available energy, fossil fuels for the purpose of enabling rockets to escape the Earth's most primitive force, thus allowing man to deny the Earth's most primitive history and to avoid his own extinction. In a way Emerson had not foreseen, “The wedge turns out to be a rocket.”

We have, then, on the one hand, the early Romantics' “naïve” paleontology which recognizes the necessary affinity between the phenomenal representations of the world and consciousness and which regards the earth as an organic matrix whose low-grade natural substances can be redeemed because they share a fundamental rational or spiritual affinity with an ideal human agent. Over against this naïve paleontology we find a “demonic” paleontology emerging in the twentieth century, practiced by an alliance of the visionary technologist who pursues the reorganization of a radically alien nature, and of the industrial technocrat who is bent upon the reorganization of social systems through the deliberate manipulation of human nature. In the cultural critique offered by Pynchon, the visionary technologist rashly extracts the Earth's buried wastes and recombines its sleeping elements to produce such synthetic gravity-defying structures as the rocket which have never before appeared in the World, and which are immediately co-opted by the technocrats for their destructive policies. But Pynchon's fiction is by no means a mere historical critique of the modern technocracy. Rather, Pynchon transmutes the genealogy of that technocracy into a myth of tragic magnitude in which the solitary technologist's drive towards transcendence is unfailingly subverted by the corporate technocrat's mania for control.

The aggressive acts against the Earth which are presented in Gravity's Rainbow receive an irresistable and irreversible dynamic as the demonic historical conspiracy of the elusive pre-war German conglomerate, IG Farben. In a notable passage, one of the company's minor American employees, Lyle Bland, appears to have succeeded occasionally in piercing the corporate veil, and to have had mystical visions of an “astral IG” whose technocrat-priests are the initiates into the secrets of the Earth's “holy center.”

To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody … having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coaltar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics—“Forget them, they are no better than the Qlippoth, the shells of the dead, you must not waste your time with them. …”

The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psisynthetic taken from the Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here—kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken … plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert … but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition … to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp silver of truth in so much replication, so much waste. …

(GR [Gravity's Rainbow], 590; Pynchon's ellipses.)

Pynchon imaginatively works out his ironic paleontological vision in which Gravity represents the compacting and densitizing force that constitutes the brute substance of History. If Nature for the late Romantic poet Emerson could be a “meter of our rise and fall,” the post-Romantic encyclopaedist Pynchon describes Gravity as a natural, charismatic force which man is desperately trying “to detect and measure”—in short, to control. Again, as Emerson writes elsewhere in “The Method of Nature,” if Nature is a “memory of the mind”²⁴ which could presumably be “recollected” by the individual, History as described by Pynchon is the cumulative deposit of all the material waste of ages past, buried stratigraphically, layer upon increasingly dense and archaic layer in the Earth's occult, unified “mindbody” (cf. Hegel's Geist in the sense of a “Universal Mind” which internalizes its own past as “memory”—Er-innerung). In Pynchon's vision, the single individual is no longer directly in touch with the Earth's in-drawn divinity; therefore he can hardly hope to “recall” the Earth's repressed, compacted origins, but can only kick among the plastic trivia of cultural history, seeking “ordinary,” “secular” molecules which might dimly reveal something about the secrets of natural history. Ironically, the only individuals for whom the Earth is still a divine mystery and who are still capable of a psycho-spiritual act which can retrieve the Earth's “Deeper Significance” and redeem its History are those technologists who have re-formed themselves in the interests of a highly-organized corporate technocracy; the Earth's secret history is “taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side.”

Thus, Pynchon's paleontology is actually an interpretive effort involving two related activities. The first paragraph of the preceding passage describes the “messianic” program of an elite group of technologists and technocrats associated with the IG. The “coal-tar Kabbalists,” as the technologists are called, extract buried deposits of inorganic matter, the raw materials of History, from the Earth's mind (or bowels); then they proceed to select and interpret their finds Kabbalistically according to the “alphabetic … nature of molecules” (GR, 355), into new permutations of molecular structure. In this way, the scientific Illuminati claim to be promoting a new synthetic world in which man will presumably possess the energy needed to transcend his fallen, natural condition. Actually, however, their inevitable dependence on technocratic systems of control only accelerates the spread of History's plastic contagion and “the persistence … of structures favoring death” (GR, 167).²⁵

Such first-degree interpretation is succeeded by a second-degree interpretation which is described in the second paragraph of the preceding passage. This involves the quotidian labors of the non-elect individual (“The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment …”) to assign an order and a significance to the welter of synthetic, historical waste (plastic saxophone reeds, shampoo bottles, etc.) which has been produced from ageless reserves of natural waste (e.g., coal tars) by the secret scientific elite. And the fate of non-election falls the hardest in Gravity's Rainbow on the work's principal protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop.²⁶ Slothrop clearly does not know what is going on in the course of the novel, and his paranoia stems from his ignorance of what the corporate IG is up to—what the extent of its control over his own personal history and over History in general actually is. Thus, Slothrop's interpretive adventure becomes a quest for information which will illuminate his ignorance regarding his own formation and that of the age in which he lives.

Moreover, Slothrop's hermeneutics—the blind groping of the bricoleur, the preterite—is itself rooted in a long-standing tradition. In another age, his Puritan ancestors were elect interpretants, stationed at the vanguard of their own corporate-messianic enterprise; and it is this genetic inheritance which impels Slothrop in the twentieth century to seek out connections and systems of order, to find evidence of God's handiwork in the natural phenomena of the world.²⁷ This is what Pynchon describes as the “puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia, filtering in” (GR, 188). In Slothrop's preterite natural theology, it is not God who reveals Himself in Nature, but rather the demon who motivates an insidious historical logic which informs and perverts even Nature itself. In short, Slothrop perceives modern secular history to be a demonic parody of the seventeenth-century Puritan salvation-history to which his ancestors subscribed. And as a result of his genetically-inherited ordering impulse, Slothrop suffers a paranoid reaction when he is confronted by the possibility of his own selection in a demonic, twentieth-century historical system; indeed, this is a worse fate than being passed over in an orthodox seventeenth-century salvation-scheme.

Throughout Pynchon's novel, a paranoiac “We-They” categorization is constructed around the reciprocal interpretive paleontologies of demons and their victims, the chosen and the passed-over, the priestly elect and the profane preterite. At the core of the novel is the blundering, “naïve” individual Slothrop, who is caught between the demonic dream of transcendence of the German rocket-commander Blicero, and the deadly systems of control imposed by the British Pavlovian behaviorist, Edward Pointsman. Yet for all Blicero's apparent mastery over gravity, and for all Pointsman's apparent control over programs of human stimulus-response, both men inevitably fail in their respective endeavors. Blicero's rocket is finally betrayed to gravity, and Pointsman ultimately loses Slothrop to a mysterious Counterforce which eludes the bureaucratic maneuvers of both the “We” and the “They” factions. And in precisely the same way, for all the apparent control of the narrating persona over the narrative itself, the sheer volume of the material which he presumes to order will at some point exhaust his energy. Indeed, it is axiomatic in Pynchon's fiction that the rational processes of History (natural and human history as well as Pynchon's fictional histories themselves) are running at an ever-increasing energy-deficit; that History will ultimately burn itself out like the projected A-4 rocket's Brennschluss; and that in its final exhausted state, hyper-organized History will give itself up to the primal, pre-rational counterforce of Gravity. As Pynchon's narrating persona himself suggests, the view of History as a cyclical, reversible process—an ongoing thermostatic activity—has been betrayed to a one-way, irreversible system of thermodynamic decay:

The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide …

(GR, 412)

No one can be said to possess “control” in such a mad Death-Process—neither the persona over his fictional history, nor the corporate technocrats over world-historical processes. The latter can only assume a limited control of History through their unseen “switching-system” which, while wasting the rest of Creation for some end of ultra-organization, is doomed to exhaust itself. Unlike the ancient alchemical symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth, the new System of the technocrats is a self-consuming monster which yields no “feed-back”; it knows neither self-regulation nor self-regeneration, but only indulges in a voracious orgy until both it and its food supply have been converted into impacted waste.

The technocratic elite in Gravity's Rainbow which demonically profits from energy at such a loss and which “saves” the World by steering it headlong into extinction is preceded by a vanguard, we have seen, of select “coal-tar Kabbalists” who view the rest of the Creation as the Qlippoth, the passed-over shells of the dead. In a curious way, the coal-tar Kabbalists pursue neither more nor less than the original objectives of the medieval alchemists, though in a more systematic way. The alchemists combed through all the available natural minerals for a low-grade substance susceptible to short-term, artificial transformation into gold (or at least into the color gold.) Similarly, in 1856, William Perkin became the first industrial technologist by producing the first coal-tar dye, mauve. With this discovery, as the historians of science Toulmin and Goodfield observe (AM, 297), “the synthetic dye-stuffs industry became the first large-scale example of scientific technology, in which theoretical understanding was exploited for technological purposes.” Pynchon himself characterizes the synthesis of the dye mauve much as Schopenhauer had described the sudden appearance of exotic physical forces and chemical reactions after having slept for eons in the Earth. And Pynchon suggests that a demonic succession may be traced from medieval alchemy with its preference for substances resembling gold, to Liebig's application of the principles of chemistry to physiology, to Kekulé “looking among the molecules of his time” (GR, 412) until he “selected” the shape of the aromatic ring, through Perkin's dye-technology and its selection of synthetic mauve, to its culmination almost ninety years later in the diabolical proliferation of the German dye-industry, IG Farben, with its shimmering rainbow of colors, chemicals, companies, and conspiracies.²⁸ And still the processes of selection and rejection continue. At a séance, the spirit of Walther Rathenau, the assassinated German foreign minister and industrialist, explains the production of steel from coal-tars in these terms to an IG director:

“We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth's light from its grave miles and aeons below. There is the other meaning … the succession … I can't see that far yet. …”

(GR, 166; Pynchon's ellipses.)

Technology is here envisioned as an operation of selection/rejection in which elect, shining steel passes over its own black raw materials, the coal tars; and synthetic dyes which have been freed from the gravitational pull of the Earth supersede the natural color spectrum. With the chemical fetishism of Pynchon's technologists, we have moved a long way from Novalis' humble miner: “He is content to know where the metal powers are found and to bring them to the light of day, but their dazzling glamor has no power over his pure heart.”²⁹

The parallel activities of the medieval alchemists and of the modern Hermetic society of industrial technologists betrays a yet more significant analogy in Pynchon's work. For if the alchemists sought to speed up inside their glass flasks the organic processes of mineral gestation which they believed to occur naturally and laboriously in the womb of the Earth, so Pynchon's technologists also propose the artificial acceleration of chemical processes already occurring in Nature—namely, by “creating” History in the combustion chambers of rockets. However, as Pynchon shows with reference to thermodynamic law, the artificial acceleration of historical events which is brought about by the technologists' advanced systems of interpretation and organization causes the relative rate of organic formation in Nature to run down, and the revelation of some immanent natural order in the world to be less and less likely. It was only in a supersonic world, familiar with the transformations of acceleration, that Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle insisted its way into the purest of symbol-systems, mathematics, thereby coercing that discipline to rely increasingly on predictions based on probability—i.e., on chance. Ultimately, however, one wonders with Barfield if a “hypothesis of chance” can really save the appearances of the phenomenal world, or if it can legitimately even be called a “hypothesis”:³⁰

The hypothesis of chance has already crept from the theory of evolution into the theory of the physical foundation of the earth itself; but, more serious perhaps than that, is the rapidly increasing ‘fragmentation of science’ which occasionally attracts the attention of the British Association. There is no ‘science of sciences’; no unity of knowledge. There is only an accelerating increase in that pigeon-holed knowledge by individuals of more and more about less and less, which, if persisted in indefinitely, can only lead mankind to a sort of ‘idiocy’ (in the original sense of the word)—a state of affairs, in which fewer and fewer representations will be collective, and more and more will be private, with the result that there will in the end be no means of communication between one intelligence and another.³¹

The problem of increasing non-communication in an increasingly “organized” civilization was handled by Pynchon in an explicit manner in his brief novel, The Crying of Lot 49. The same problem is implicit in the encyclopaedic, verbal and narrative structure of Gravity's Rainbow where the almost intolerable complexity of discursive organization both establishes and undermines the possibility of Order. The text's own transmissibility is an open issue. Does the work ultimately possess an Order, or can that Order only be guessed at in terms of probability and chance? By enticing the naïve reader into this interpretive quest for Order, Pynchon enmeshes him in a weave of acceleration and probability that is analogous to the Poisson maps and chi-square diagrams developed by the guilt-ridden behaviorists and technologists in the novel. But there remains just enough distance between the technologists' perception of Order in the world and the reader's perception of Order in the text for the reader to make a terrifying discovery. As the evidence of Order in the world becomes increasingly rare and less probable with respect to the technologists' interpretive maneuvers, such Order nevertheless appears to them in increasing abundance. This is because they become progressively more attuned to interpreting whatever rare, improbable burst of Order they perceive as a useful bit of information against a general noisy background of Disorder which they readily discount from their analyses. An hypothesis of chance, once accepted by the scientific Illuminati, allows them quite confidently to perceive and even to regulate a world of seemingly absolute intelligibility and Order—a world to which their technocratic masters are desperately committed, yet which they are unable to understand. Thus, the confident assertion of the technologist-seer Wernher von Braun in the epigraph to the first part of the novel—i.e., that “Nature does not know extinction,” and that everything which is passed over is capable of being transformed in the same way that coal is elevated to steel—is totally incomprehensible to the technocratic manipulator Richard M. Nixon who, in the epigraph to the last part of the book, can only respond, “What?” Both the technologists and the technocrats are finally duped by their respective selection processes—i.e., by their selective perception which leads them both to observe World-History tending towards increasing formation and information when it actually is only plunging ever deeper towards decay.³² As Rathenau's spirit warns the IG Generaldirektor: “You think you'd rather hear about what you call ‘life’: the growing organic Kartell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows” (GR, 167).

In a work which depicts everything in a condition of running down, it is curious to note that Gravity's Rainbow itself is written in a volatile, highly digressive style. This could, of course, be just another illusion: “the more dynamic it seems … the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows.” On closer examination, however, it appears that such erratic stylistics may actually be a defensive maneuver, designed by the author as a means of avoiding a fall into the sway of conventional linear narrative, into the “gravity of plot”—in short, into the death-favoring structures of History. Again and again, the narrating persona “passes over” and momentarily escapes his commitment to straightforward narrative, but he consistently completes his parabolic excursus and returns to the exigencies of plot.

Such parabolic arches away from the gravity of plot receive a demonic concretization in Pynchon's description of the V-2 rockets of World War II which break away from the Earth's gravitational force only to return towards it—with apocalyptic implications. Pynchon reveals the rocket to be the mature form of primitive, petrified matter after it has undergone a prolonged, organic gestation period in the Earth's secret womb. As inorganic waste, this matter is finally wrested from the Earth's bowels by an elite of technologists who then transmute it through their molecular hermeneutics into the fuels and parts needed for the rocket. The blazing arch of the rocket's parabolic trajectory represents the final form of the long evolution of matter in the Earth, and it marks the fruit of the technologists' labors—their doomed attempt to escape gravity and to free themselves and all matter from the curse of the Fall. More generally, the rocket as presented in Pynchon's novel represents a literalization of historical process, a concretization of human History's own inane attempts to digress and break out of the recurring cycles of a closed, self-contained Bildungs-system into the open, irreversible course of the physical universe towards increasing disorder.

One is reminded here of Lord Byron's ironic comment in Don Juan (X.ii) on the redemption of man through Newton's scientific discovery of the laws governing the fall of physical bodies, and consequently governing the Fall (and rise) of man: “Man fell with apples, and with apples rose.” Byron predicts that man will soon reap the technological “fruits” of this discovery: “… full soon / Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon.” Pynchon writes in the 1970's when rockets are in fact able to escape the Earth's gravity and take man to the moon. From this perspective, Pynchon's novel probes that precise historical instant in the '40's when rocket technology was on the point of first overcoming the indrawing force of gravitation—of achieving escape velocity, and hence of breaking out of the fixed cycles of parabolic flight into endless digressions. (Of course, man's act of leaving the Earth's gravitational field only succeeds in plunging him into an endless fall—a perpetual transgression.) By limiting his fiction to the historical moment just prior to man's definitive break with the Earth in order to explore new digressive possibilities, Pynchon imposes a partial control on his own work; and the transgressive movement of digression, the doomed trajectory of Icarian flight, is confined to the finite form of the parabola.

Pynchon's fascination with the parabolic curve described by the flight of projectiles transgressing against the Earth's primitive power is particularly interesting in view of Martin Heidegger's observation of a primal antagonism between the World and the Earth (“die Streit zwischen Welt und Erde”).³³ Heidegger associates the World with a dis-closing activity which reveals the meaning and ultimate essence of bodies by implicating them in a World-system. Earth, on the other hand, is an occult, unknowable repository of Being which is characterized by the self-enclosing movement of material things away from all worldly, discursive systems which would attribute a useful significance to them. Heidegger interprets this double movement of disclosure and closure as Loswerfen and Versammlung—as a vital parabolic movement of physis: “Earth is that whence the arising of everything that rises, and indeed as such, returns to its security [zurückbirgt]. In the things that arise, earth is present as the securing agent [das Bergende].³⁴

In this metaphysical context, it is necessary to revise our narrow view of the parabolic flight of the rocket as a finite movement. As we are told towards the end of Gravity's Rainbow, the rocket's parabola is

… not, as we might imagine, bounded below by the line of the Earth it “rises from” and the Earth it “strikes” No But Then You Never Really Thought It Was Did You Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only the peak that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of the other silent world.

(GR, 726; Pynchon's ellipses)

Pynchon's portrayal of the merely technological parabolas described by the V-weapons is a grotesque parody and profanation of Romantic intuitions of a secret, generative power in the Earth (as, similarly, in Pynchon's first novel, V. (1963), the bionic heroine's “rise and fall” may be read as a parody of Romantic notions of an organic, self-directed Bildungsprozess). Apart from the transgression inherent in western man's Icarian temptation to digress—i.e., his urge to flee his enforced bondage to the physical force of gravitation and to conspiratorial schedules of historical progress—Pynchon's novel is preoccupied with the transgressive aspect of all interpretive activities which presume to dis-close or profane some inviolable, sacred core of meaning. It was on similar grounds, after all, that many of the radical skeptics of the late eighteenth century attacked Newton's theory of gravity—i.e., for Newton's abstract disclosure in the World of a secret, vital force enclosed deep inside the Earth and within all matter:

… Sir Isaac Newton could disclose
A thing to counterbalance human woes …

(Byron, Don Juan, X.ii.3-5)

The unwarranted dis-closure of a secret principle in the Earth necessarily degrades that principle's value by bringing it into the open discursive space of the World.

Similarly, Pynchon exposes both the individual's paleontology (his reconstruction of his own past as deduced from the uncovering of his most repressed memories) and the paleontology practiced by a corporate elite (the recycling of expired life from the Earth's archaic ages in the form of fossilized waste) as transgressive regressions insofar as they involve a common introspective effort to exhume a hidden meaning from a self-enclosed, inviolable structure. Such transgressive activity is most clearly expressed in Pynchon's recurring descriptions of hybristic attempts to disclose or bring out into the open some pure, transcendent value which could enlighten man with self-knowledge, and thereby redeem the World. Specifically, the alleged sightings of Rilke's poetic symbol of the supernatural Angel in Gravity's Rainbow (as in the description of the Palm Sunday bombing raid over Lübeck, p. 151) are depicted as man's ultimate self-mystification and his supreme transgression. For the Angel who looms across the sky is actually an analogue of Lévi-Strauss' “floating signifier”—that is, a surcharged “Origin of all signifiers,” as Edward Said describes, which is accessible only to pre-literate man living at the “zero-point”—i.e., before all signification and discourse: “Life at the zero point was ruled over by a central ‘floating signifier,’ a kind of spiritual etymon, whose ubiquity and perfect consistency endowed it with the power to act as a pure semantic value.”³⁵ The Angel in this sense is the primal signifier of the World which the literate individual can never hope to signify in the World. As a pure qualitative value, the floating signifier can never be dragged down inside a relative, quantitative system of weights and measures—or, for that matter, of language.

Indeed, it may have been the rational impulse of modern science since the seventeenth century to originate meaning in the World, and to make all things-in-themselves accessible objects of human knowledge and desire, that has resulted in the further withdrawal of a transcendent source of value to an even more remote region of inaccessibility. And it may have been the case that, after a brief period of dissent coinciding with the Romantic period, the ensuing proliferation of “progressive” historical systems and of “regressive” paleontological ventures after some central Origin has succeeded in sinking the formerly floating World-signifier deep into the Earth where this signifier has completely hidden and enclosed itself as the occult, metaphysical force described in our own time by Heidegger and Pynchon. Again, to cite Said: “The Origin is a silent zero point, locked within itself. … There is no center available to the modern thinker, no absolute subject, since the Origin has been curtained off.”³⁶ In short, we may say that the temptation to specify a transcendent floating signifier in the World inevitably betrays the interpreter himself to a demonic, sunken quantifier in the Earth—i.e., the force of Gravity.

As a modern work of literary fiction, Pynchon's novel is itself caught in a related double-bind. Whereas the brief Romantic fragment from Novalis to Rilke offered itself as a surcharged, generative utterance, directly in touch with a presumed, transcendent source of value, Pynchon's encyclopaedic post-Romantic fiction is a huge, groping structure which is unable to posit a transcendent source of value beyond itself. For Gravity's Rainbow is, in effect, a fallen narrative, bound to a sunken valorizing principle somewhere in its own interior which cannot be divulged. The profane novel's “holy center” can never be determined with certainty, but only in terms of probability. In this respect, the novel's center resembles the center of the corporate IG, or the IG's most advanced product, created in its own preposterous image—the elastic polymer, Imipolex G—which features an occult “Region of Uncertainty” below its surface: “terms referring to the Subimpolexity such as ‘Core’ and ‘Center of Internal Energy’ possess, outside the theoretical, no more reality than do terms such as ‘supersonic Region’ or ‘Center of Gravity’ in other areas of science” (GR, 700).

To a greater or lesser extent, much post-Romantic, encyclopaedic fiction may be characterized by its desperate struggle against a compulsory, internal principle of order, an indeterminate valorizing principle. It is as if post-Romantic narrative is possessed by a persistent impulse to deny its own still center by launching itself out in dizzying, expansive digressions against the resistant drag at its core. In the case of Pynchon's narrative, the visionary technologist may finally reconcile his romantic dream of transcendence with the pressures of immanent reality; thus Blicero may discover the insight of his beloved Rilke at the conclusion of the Tenth Elegy—namely, that he who tries to achieve ecstasy in flight may also discover a joy in falling.³⁷ But the preterite reader who cannot escape the gravitational sway of the technocrats' fiction of History, and the narrator who cannot finally escape the gravity of his own fictive plot, do not register joy so much as terror in the return of the repressed, in the recovery of the archaic forms buried in the Earth's mindbody in all their detailed, encyclopaedic grotesquerie. We may expect Pynchon, in the course of further paleontological researches, to continue to uncover the mysterious, preterite forms of our pre-human past. Perhaps he will even show us the Romantic vision of Icarus, the original Angel-Man who was once able to overcome Gravity before, as Francis Bacon wrote, he “digressed and fell.”³⁸ Or perhaps a more attentive study of Pynchon's post-Romantic vision will lead us to find that primordial Man only appeared to have fallen, that like the flightless dodoes (Didus ineptus) on the island of Mauritius (GR, 110), he was himself merely an isolated evolutionary digression, a brief stage of Nature's trial-and-error experiment which was all too soon passed over in Nature's unceasing search for more perfect forms.

Notes

1. Thus, in his book-length study of Pynchon, Joseph Slade announces that he will “ignore” the crowded roster of writers who have been cited as Pynchon's forerunners: “Herman Melville … William Burroughs, Nathanael West, S. J. Perelman, Joseph Heller, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, John Dos Passos, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce …” Thomas Pynchon (New York: Warner Paperback, 1974), p. 15. Almost immediately, however, Slade presents his own host of contenders which includes Henry Adams, Max Weber, Machiavelli, Robert Graves, Rilke, Wagner, and Whitehead (p. 16). More recently, Lawrence C. Wolfley has disproportionately argued the “pervasive indebtedness” of Pynchon to Norman O. Brown in “Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel,” PMLA, 92 (1977) 873-89. I hope to show at the very least that Pynchon is tapping a far deeper and compelling intellectual heritage than that of cultist criticism.

2. A succinct discussion of the radical skepticism engendered by Newton's physics and Dalton's atomic chemistry in the late eighteenth century may be found in Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (London: Hutchinson, 1962; rpt. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 262-68 (hereafter cited as AM). Of particular interest for the relationship of the scientific formulation of gravitational theory to the eighteenth-century consciousness of the Fall is Sigurd Burckhardt's article, “Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity,” English Literary History, 28 (1961), 70-88, in which Burckhardt reveals the impact of Newton's cosmic discovery on Sterne's literary consciousness. Michael Seidel has observed the analogous uses by Sterne and Pynchon of the metaphor of gravitation with respect to the satiric plots of these authors' most important works, in “The Satiric Plots of Gravity's Rainbow,” in Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. E. Mendelson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), pp. 193-212; see esp. pp. 199 f.

3. George Steiner, “Has Truth a Future?” Bronowski Memorial Lecture, BBC 2, January 10, 1978. See also Donald Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974).

4. I will retain the comprehensive term Bildung (“formation,” “education,” “shaping”) in this article, employing it sometimes in German compounds (e.g., Bildungsprozess) and sometimes in bilingual compounds (e.g., Bildungs-system).

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), p. 197.

6. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (1918; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 456.

7. Adams, Education, p. 474.

8. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 63.

9. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 720 (hereafter cited as GR).

10. Emerson, Nature, p. 590.

11. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (1910; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 90. Emphasis and interpolation of the original text in square brackets are mine.

    Hegel's insight that the cultural development of a people ultimately sinks into the Earth's unconscious “mindbody” is not merely to be construed as a metaphoric utterance. For Hegel, all civilizations are physically founded on the remains of past empires and ancient tribal communities; any metropolis is, so to speak, a necropolis. Hegel illustrates this idea later in the Phenomenology through his observations on the issue of interment in Sophocles' Antigone. Hegel argues that the fundamental conflict in this tragedy subsists between the sacred laws of familial kinship represented by Antigone and the spiritual law of the community represented by Creon. “The strength of the former,” Hegel writes, “is effective in the nether realm, not on earth and in the light of day” (p. 494). When Creon refuses to allow the sacred ritual of burial to be performed on Antigone's brother, Polyneices, he offends against the familial law of “the Dei inferi of Hades, the instinctive Powers of feeling, Love and kinship” in The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920) II, 215. The unburied dead who have not been delivered back into the Earth's primeval unconscious, represent a terrible threat to the World of conscious reality:

    The spirit which is manifest to the light of day has the roots of its power in the lower world. … The slain, whose right is injured, knows, therefore, how to find means of vengeance which are equally as real and strong as the power at whose hands it has suffered. These powers are other communities, whose altars the dogs or birds defiled with the corpse of the dead, which is not raised into unconscious universality by being restored, as is its due, to the ultimate individuum, the elemental earth, but instead has remained above ground in the sphere of reality, and has now received, as the force of divine law, a self-conscious actual universality. They rise up in hostility, and destroy the community which has dishonoured and destroyed its own power, the sacred claims, the “piety” of the family.

    (Phenomenology, 495; my ellipsis.)

    Pynchon's novel, with its imminent prospect of the numberless unburied victims of a nuclear holocaust, employs elements of a terrestrial mythology which are markedly similar to those used by Hegel.

12. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 90. The ellipsis, emphasis, and interpolation of the original text in square brackets are mine.

13. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indian Hills, Colorado: Falcon's Wing Press, 1958; rpt. New York: Dover, 1969), I, 136.

14. In fact, Lamarck set forth a general theory of mineral development in which basic chemical compounds were formed as the result of physiological processes intrinsic to matter: “All the compounds making up what are called minerals are, without exception, the material remains sloughed off by organic or living beings, and without these organisms Nature would nowhere present us with chalk, clay, gypsum, sulphur, lead, gold, etc. etc.” (Cited in translation by Toulmin and Goodfield, AM, 361.) Lamarck's theory is suggestive in view of Hegel's general idea that organic nature is continuously sinking into a repressed, inorganic and disorganized state. Such geological motifs are present in the work of Novalis, Brentano, and Eichendorff. In a sense, Pynchon recasts Hegel's concept of Geist or Universal Mind as the Earth's occult “mindbody.” The Earth's petrified strata here are neither the result of natural organic processes nor the “versteinerte Kasten” of pre-historical peoples (see below, n. 21); on the contrary, such dead waste is the product of a general repression brought about by the high degree of organization in contemporary civilization. For Pynchon's use of gravitation as an analogue to human psychological and political repression, see Wolfley, “Repression's Rainbow,” p. 876: “Gravity is the ultimate metaphor in the novel for the human repression that is its theme.”

15. One thinks primarily, in this regard, of the proto-evolutionary theory of the eighteenth-century French philosophe, J. B. Robinet:

    In the prodigiously varied sequence of the animals below man, I see Nature in labor advancing fumblingly towards that excellent being who crowns her work. … All the varieties intermediate between the prototype and man I regard as so many essays of Nature, aiming at the most perfect, yet unable to attain it except through this innumerable sequence of sketches. I think we may call the collection of the preliminary studies the apprenticeship of Nature in learning to make a man.

    De la Nature, V (1768); cited in translation by A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), 280; my ellipsis.

16. Novalis, Schriften, 2nd ed., ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1968), III, 450 (948); my translation.

17. Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1964), p. 159.

18. Cf. H. A. M. Snelders, “Romanticism and Naturphilosophie and the Inorganic Natural Sciences 1797-1840: An Introductory Survey,” Studies in Romanticism, 9 (Summer 1970), 193-215; see p. 194.

19. Novalis, Henry Von Ofterdingen, p. 86.

20. Alexander Gode-von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), p. 173.

21. Hegel, from the Introduction to the Philosophie der Geschichte in Sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1927), XI, 99.

22. Cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd. ed. (1958; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1963). In the epilogue to the second edition (pp. 320-40), Jonas draws some significant parallels between ancient Gnosticism and the modern movements of nihilism and existentialism. (Eric Voegelin has extended this parallel to include Hegelianism, Marxism, and in short, any form of ideological fiction; see Science, Politics and Gnosticism [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968].) Interestingly, Gnostic teaching refers to demons called Archons who exert a tyrannical rule over the world called heimarmene. Jonas notes that “in its physical aspect, this rule is the law of nature,” and that “each Archon bars the passage to the souls that seek to ascend after death” (p. 43). In this respect, the Gnostic concept of heimarmene is analogous to Newton's law of gravitation as it was reacted to by many eighteenth-century skeptics who associated terrestrial gravity with man's fall and earthly bondage (see also pp. 62-65 for descriptions of the Gnostic experiences of “sinking” and “the fall”).

23. Such is Harold Bloom's diagnosis of the Romantic and post-Romantic poet's malaise. See The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 154.

24. Emerson, Nature, p. 197.

25. Pynchon's label for the modern scientific elite—the “coal-tar Kabbalists”—recalls the dream vision of the nineteenth-century chemist, August Kekulé (1829-96), who in 1865 first envisioned the circular structure of the benzene molecule (linked by Pynchon to the alchemical symbol of the serpent with its tail in its mouth), which laid the foundations for aromatic chemistry “and made the IG possible” (GR, p. 410). Pynchon's imaginative description of Kekulé's visionary method alternately depicts the chemist as the paleontologist hunting out the forms passed over by Nature in her trial-and-error experiment of life (cf. Robinet's theory, n. 15), or as the seventeenth-century Kabbalist rummaging among the broken shells of the Qlippoth which have been passed over by canonized salvation-history: “Young ex-architect Kekulé went looking among the molecules of the time for the hidden shapes he knew were there, shapes he did not like to think of as real physical structures, but as ‘rational formulas'” (GR, p. 411 f.). The “rational formulas” Kekulé was seeking are conceived by Pynchon as the scientific equivalents of esoteric Kabbalistic formulas. In fact, Kabbalistic lore may have been related more than one might suspect to actual historical attempts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to deduce the molecular structures of proteins. L. J. Rather discusses possible relationships between theoretical concepts in biochemistry which led to the discovery of the DNA molecule (20 amino acids based on a “triadic” genetic code), and Kabbalistic doctrine according to which 22 consonantal roots, most of them consisting of three consonants themselves, were thought to have been used by God to generate the entire cosmos. “Alchemistry, the Kabbala, the Analogy of the ‘Creative Word’ and the Origins of Molecular Biology,” Episteme, 6 (1972) 83-103. Rather's article, published a year before Gravity's Rainbow, also raises the historical implications of Kekulé's dream, and he suggests that the dream may be indebted in part to alchemical and Kabbalistic concepts which enjoyed a vogue in nineteenth-century European thought. According to Rather, “Neither Kekulé nor Leibig [Justus Leibig, 1803-73, Kekulé's teacher; also referred to in GR] escaped from the pervading influence of the doctrine of the creative word when they attempted to convey their meanings” (p. 101).

26. Ironically, however, the narrating persona of the novel casts himself as well in this category of the non-elect: “The rest of us,” “our preterition.” Elsewhere, the narrating persona finds evidence in Slothrop's tarot, not only for Slothrop's preterition, but for his own as well. With his customary ironic underplay, the persona reports that the cards “point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in his life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too. …) (GR, p. 738). For all the information he appears to possess, Pynchon's narrating persona is the eiron who repeatedly underplays himself. He is the paranoid god who utters the Logos of History while ironically counting himself among those lost souls who are passed over by that History.

27. Here it is worth noting that Slothrop's interpretive endeavor, grounded as it is in the natural theology of seventeenth-century Puritanism, symmetrically balances the esoteric interpretive enterprise of the technologists—the “coal-tar Kabbalists”—which, as is repeatedly observed in the novel, owes much to the supernatural theologies of seventeenth-century Kabbalistic tradition. Indeed, throughout his work, Pynchon specifies the affinity between methods of theological interpretation employed by Kabbalists and Puritans in the seventeenth century, and their reappearance in methods of historical interpretation in the twentieth century. Parallels between Kabbalistic and Puritan tradition are most strikingly evident, as Pynchon reveals, in their similar obsessions with the underdog, the reject—namely in the Kabbalistic concept of the Qlippoth (the shattered shells or broken vessels of the dead which were unable to withstand the tremendous force of the divine Word at the Creation), and the Puritan doctrine of the preterite (the souls which have been passed over by divine destiny).

28. For a discussion of the use of strikingly similar alchemical and Hermetic operations by Romantic and post-Romantic poets, see Stephen Mathias Schicker, “The Rainbow beneath the Ground: A Study of the Descent into Hell Metaphor in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia and Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer,” DA, 31, (1970-71), 369-A.

29. Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, p. 69.

30. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, p. 64.

31. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, p. 145.

32. Interesting in this context is the philosophy of values developed by the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) which is based on thermodynamic concepts in physics. Ostwald envisioned Entropy as a Satanic tendency in the universe which would ultimately destroy all creative activity brought about by divine Energy. See Toulmin and Goodfield, AM, p. 298. Their lucid distinction between thermostatic systems of constant entropy and thermodynamic systems of increasing entropy is also useful (pp. 293-95).

33. Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1950), pp. 7-68; 38.

34. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns, eds., Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (New York: Modern Library, 1964), p. 670. See also Holzwege, p. 31.

    My reference to Heidegger in the course of the analysis of Gravity's Rainbow is not gratuitous; indeed, both Heidegger and Pynchon allude extensively to Rilke's poetry in their respective works. In the essay “Wozu Dichter?” (also in Holzwege), Heidegger exhaustively analyzes several of Rilke's short lyric pieces which are concerned with the force of Gravity and with Rilke's symbol of the hovering Angel. In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon explicitly cites several references to the Angel in Rilke's Elegies, and Pynchon even develops Rilke's symbol as a major image in his novel. Consequently, one suspects that Pynchon may also have had some familiarity with Rilke's poetic concept of Schwerkraft—the metaphysical force exerted by the Earth's occult Center, the “Eigensinn der Erde” in Rilke's fragment, “Weisst du Gewölk …” Sämtliche Werke (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1956), II, 462. This Center does not so much attract corporeal bodies to itself as it constantly extricates itself from those bodies, even from flying bodies which threaten to de-center or dis-close it:

    Mitte, wie du aus allen
    dich ziehst, auch noch aus Fliegenden dich
    wiedergewinnst, Mitte du Stärkste.

    “Schwerkraft,” II, 179, II. 1-3. Rilke's poetic use of gravitation may provide a literary link which joins Pynchon's occult sense of the Earth's gravitational force to the philosophical interpretations of gravity which I have indicated in the writings of Hegel and Schopenhauer.

35. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1975), p. 317.

36. Said, p. 318.

37. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien, X.111-14:

    Und wir, die an steigendes Glück
    denken, empfänden die Rührung,
    die uns beinah bestürtzt,
    wenn ein Glückliches fällt.

38. Francis Bacon, Of the Advancement and Proficiencie of Learning, trans. Gilbert Watts (Oxford: printed by Leon Lichtfield, for R. Young, 1640), VII, iii.