SOURCE: Muste, John M. “The Mandala in Gravity's Rainbow.” Boundary 2 9, no. 2 (winter 1981): 163-79.

[In the following essay, Muste examines the symbolic implications of the mandala in Gravity's Rainbow, illuminating the novel's thematic structure that reflects both the unity and division of the mandala's four segments.]

Gravity's Rainbow contains dozens of symbols, many of which announce themselves as having special importance, and of course most of them have. It would be foolhardy to suggest that any one of them is the key to the novel, or even that it has more final significance than some of the others, but despite some interesting recent attempts to find all-embracing explanations for the novel or identifications of its central theme¹ none of these to my knowledge has yet investigated satisfactorily the recurrent symbol of the mandala which is associated with the Hereros and with the Schwarzkommando whose insignia it has become. This device does, I think, shed considerable light on the structure of the novel and, by symbolic extension, on the kinds of forces Pynchon has placed in contention with one another.

Andreas's Orukambe explains to Tyrone Slothrop that the symbol itself is drawn from an old Herero mandala which represented the shape of the tribe's villages. The two northern quadrants, belonging to the women, represented fertilization and birth, on the one hand, and breath or spirit on the other; the two southern quadrants contained the male signs of “the activities, fire and preparation or building. And in the center, here, Hauptstufe. It is the pen where we kept the sacred cattle. The souls of the ancestors. All the same here. Birth, soul, fire, building. Male and female, together.” Andreas goes on to explain that, transplanted to Germany and put to work with rockets, the Herero recognized the same shape in the rocket seen from above: “Opposites together. You can see how we might feel it speak to us, even if we didn't set one up on its fins and worship it. But it was waiting for us when we came to Germany so long ago … even confused and uprooted as we were then, we knew that our destiny was tied up with its own.”² It is also tied up with Slothrop's destiny.

Given the central part played by the rocket in all of the novel's tangled strands of action, we need to pay special attention when its significance is brought up, and even if we were to ignore everything else in Andreas's speech we ought to catch the wider application of “confused and uprooted,” a phrase which could and does apply to all of the novel's characters. It would be a tedious task but a simple one to demonstrate the extent to which each of Gravity's Rainbow's dozens of characters share with one another confusion and uprootedness.

It is also possible to show that the separation of male and female suggested by the Herero mandala is central to at least some of the novel's major impulses. Scientific discovery is referred to as something “won from the feminine darkness” (GR [Gravity's Rainbow], p. 324), an essentially masculine activity in which women can be involved only peripherally (e.g. Jessica's ignorance of what Roger knows and does, Katje's lack of understanding of both Blicero and Enzian, even poor Maudie Chilkes). The rocket itself is manifestly a phallic symbol of masculine domination and the wish to penetrate the unknown. Further, throughout the novel, both sexes use the other, with very rare exceptions, with the result that the center, the pen where the Herero kept the sacred cattle, remains inviolate, a closed circle none of the characters can enter, except under extraordinary circumstances. The essential point at this stage, however, is that while the mandala taken as a whole represents a potential for unity (the four sections are contained within an outer circle) revolving around a commonly held center, it is also a symbol of separation, for each of the segments represents a different force, and the forces contend with and oppose one another. As Andreas explains to Slothrop, the different vanes of the rocket's tail counteract one another to keep the rocket on course, and they can do so only because they are opposed.

This rather paradoxical symbol seems, as I have already suggested, to carry great weight in the novel, and I would like to argue that the notion of four contending forces is one which can be used to understand better the world view projected by Gravity's Rainbow. The core of my argument (its Hauptstufe, if you will) is that the novel presents us with four contending ways of dealing with the world, that it shows us the virtues and limitations of each, and that it makes no choices among them, suggesting that it may be the reader's task (or the great world's) to find a way of joining them into an integral unit.³ The necessity (or apparent necessity) for developing a strategy for dealing with the world results, of course, from the increasing strength of “Them,” the controllers of the world and increasingly of all the activities of every individual in it. “They” use wars for the restructuring of obsolete technologies, “They” destroy human beings and other creatures (including the dodo bird) for no reason at all except the need for technologies to be put into practice, “They” employ Ned Pointsman and his Pavlovian behaviorist psychology to strive for total predictability and, consequently, for total control over all behavior. All of the characters in Gravity's Rainbow who make any kind of claim on our sympathies eventually find that they must find a way of keeping “Them” out of at least some areas of individual life, and these struggles fall into four categories, the segments of the mandala.

Among critics, the most persuasive argument so far has been that Pynchon was much influenced, in writing Gravity's Rainbow, by Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, and that the way out of a world that is too controlled is through a return to Brown's favorite Freudian concept, “polymorphous perverse sexuality.”⁴ There is a good deal of evidence in the book to support this argument. It is clear that the prose of the novel is often warmly lyrical and sometimes nearly fervid when describing sexual activity of almost any kind as long as it is not merely exploitative or cruel. The most conventionally “romantic” relationship detailed in Gravity's Rainbow is that involving Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake. They begin with banter but there is an overpowering sexual attraction between them, so powerful in fact that Jessica has her first orgasm from the touch of Roger's hand on her wrist (GR, p. 120). Significantly, for the scientific Roger, Jessica means a release from the past, in other words from conditioning and conventional expectation: “He'd seen himself a point in a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history—a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable … new life” (GR p. 126). When they are truly together, Roger and Jessica approach a condition of perfect love, and it is in sex that they are truly together.

There are other heterosexual relationships that underscore the value of erotic contact: that between Slothrop and Katje Borgesius, for example, while part of a plot to manipulate Tyrone, is itself frolicsome and liberating, and even when Katje prepares to leave him, as Pointsman's plan dictates she must, she has come to sufficient humanity to warn Slothrop that he is being used—and this warning is not part of her conditioning. Geli Tripping is able to preserve Tchitcherine and rescue him from the effects of his life-long hatred of his half-brother Enzian through a magic that is made potent by her love for him. And, of course, Slothrop has a final chance to escape his own conditioning when he reaches a sexual apogee with the pubescent Bianca, for once transcending the separation between his sexuality and the rest of his personality. Because he is Slothrop he fails to recognize the opportunity opened for him by the experience, and he leaves Bianca to be murdered, but the experience was real (GR, pp. 468-70).

But the phrase “polymorphously perverse” suggests sexuality beyond the conventional, and there is a great deal of that in Gravity's Rainbow. The paean to honest homosexuality which concludes book 3 is significant: “In the trenches of the First World War, English men came to love one another decently, without shame or make-believe, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find in the faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poor hope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying pieces of human meat …” (GR, p. 616). That this honest emotion has decayed to the “idle and bitchy faggotry” of Sir Marcus Scammony (GR, p. 616) does not negate its own honesty.

There are, too, the still wilder shores of love. The infatuation of the pig for Slothrop in his Plechazunga costume is mostly a joke, of course, but it cannot be called dishonest, and the pig does lead Slothrop to Pökler. One of the few happy endings to a love affair in the entire novel involves Ludwig and his wandering lemming, Ursula, who are finally reunited. Probably the trickiest area of sexuality involves sado-masochism, but because it is probably the most common variety in the novel it must be confronted. Most readers, I would guess, recoil at the amount and variety of sadism and masochism in the novel, and take it as a manifestation of the sickness of the modern world. No doubt the revulsion of some of its members caused the Pulitzer committee to reject Gravity's Rainbow's nomination when confronted by the famous scene involving Katje and Brigadier Pudding, or even the initial encounter between Slothrop and Great Erdmann, not to mention the accounts of Weissmann's indulgences with Katje and Gottfried, and many readers feel the same revulsion and arrive at the same conclusion: sadistic and masochistic practices are evil, and those who engage in them are sick.

But like every other kind of easy interpretation of this novel, this one begins to waver when we look at it closely enough. The key, I think, lies in Thanatz's defense of the practice. Thanatz himself, of course, is not one of the book's admirable characters, and we cannot help but find something self-serving in his little speech to Ludwig, where “they have crept away, to a piece of the interface …” (GR, p. 737). But his logic seems too close to the heart of the novel to be dismissed lightly: “But why are we taught to feel reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away” (GR, p. 737).⁵

This is called “sado-anarchism,” but there are other incidents of sadism in the book which are presented in such a way as to make suspect any too-easy revulsion. Some characters, clearly enough, need pain. Greta Erdmann, in her first encounter with Slothrop, demonstrates this clearly, and Gottfried's devotion to Weissmann is not the less real because it stems from his degradation at Weissmann's hands. Again, although the source is suspect, the novel does not permit us to deny the truth of Weissmann's letter to Enzian concerning Katje: “Her masochism … is reassurance for her. That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how terrible that must be. … So, she needs the whip” (GR, p. 662) (first ellipsis mine, second P's). Finally, inevitably, there is the encounter between Katje and Pudding; I will not try here to embroider Paul Fussell's brilliant explication of that scene,⁶ but the point is the same: Pudding's pain and degradation are necessary to him and to his ability to think of himself as still human. What seems to be crucial in the episodes of sado-masochism is that, paradoxical as it may seem, pain must be necessary to the victim.⁷

Unfortunately, of course, this is not always possible or even worth hoping for. Major Marvy's fantasy is closer to the usual motivation for the infliction of pain than Weissmann's madly tender regard for Gottfried and Katje: “She'll do anything he orders, yeah he can hold her head under water till she drowns, he can bend her hand back, yeah, break her fingers like that cunt in Frankfurt the other week. Pistol-whip, bite till blood comes … visions go swarming, violent, less erotic than you might think—more occupied with thrust, impact, penetration and such other military values” (GR, p. 606). And the final truth about sadism, made clear throughout the novel, is that it does indeed humiliate and degrade another human being: that, in fact, it has such degradation as its aim. This being the case, it is as Thanatz has said one of the principal weapons employed by “Them,” and its acceptance is a yielding to “Their” values.

That love or sexual contact in its many forms is not any kind of final answer to the destruction of the world or the increasing control of the “Firm” seems to be clear wherever we look in Gravity's Rainbow. Once the ostensible war is over, Jessica abandons Roger and tries to have a baby with good old Beaver; Slothrop finds Bianca hanging in the dark bowels of the Anubis, and can no more stay with the pig or the printer's daughter than he could with Bianca; Katje's betrayal of Slothrop is as real as her warning to him; Weissmann's care for Gottfried wins the latter a doomed ride in the A-4 rocket. However closely Pynchon may have attended to Norman O. Brown, I would argue that sexuality in any form functions in Gravity's Rainbow as a source of temporary respite but not as any kind of answer to the problem of control. On a psychological level, a return to polymorphous perverse sexuality is a return to childhood, and this kind of return seems to be specifically rejected in the poignant section called “The Occupation of Mingeborough,” which richly details the back way home through empty lots and driveways but concludes “But there is the occupation. They may have already interdicted the kids' shortcuts a long with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get home” (GR, p. 744). Given earlier references to “occupation” as a psychological device for conditioning individuals to accept “bad shit,” the larger implications of this passage seem final.

If love will not serve as a way out of the dilemma, the novel offers other possibilities. One of these, of course, is resistance. As the novel unwinds, we find many examples of resistance to the stratagems and powers of “Them,” including the Argentinians on their submarine, Slothrop in his various disguises, Mexico with his warning to Pointsman that theories of cause and effect are too limited, and Seaman Bodine's machinations. The two most noticeable, however, and most deserving of attention, are the attempt of Katje and Pirate to opt out of the system they have served for so long and the attempt, late in the novel, to create a “counterforce” which will function as a not-entirely-hopeless resistance. Both these attempts are clearly valuable and, to a degree, redemptive, but both are also doomed. It is worth considering them for both reasons.

Katje and Pirate Prentice are quintessentially servants of the system, but both have redeeming qualities. Pirate has been employed by the “Firm,” even before WWII, because of his not entirely common ability “for getting inside the fantasies of others: being able, actually, to take over the burden of managing them,. … It is a gift the Firm has found uncommonly useful. …” (GR, p. 12) (ellipses mine in both cases). Despite his occasional gestures toward independence (the banana farm at the beginning of the novel suggests a certain streak of unconventionality) even his love life with Scorpia Mossmoon has been carefully managed, and the extent of the “Firm's” control over Pirate is indicated by his conditioned sexual response enabling him to decipher Katje's message contained in the V-2: “He never told anyone. Like every young man growing up in England, he was conditioned to get a hardon in the presence of certain fetishes, and then conditioned to feel shame about his new reflexes. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw and read since puberty … how else would They know?” (GR, pp. 71-72).

Katje is equally a servant of the forces of control. She participates in her own degradation and Gottfried's, is a hostess for a Luftwaffe pilots' club, and betrays Dutch Jews to the Nazis in the service of British intelligence. Back in England she is conditioned to entrap Slothrop and on the Riviera she carries out her mission with skill, if not with human warmth, only once allowing Slothrop a glimpse of the plot of which she is a part. And, with the aid of a laxative, she performs perfectly her role of Domina Nocturna in the ritual which keeps Pudding bound to his duty.

But unlike such characters as Teddy Bloat or Pointsman, both Pirate and Katje have doubts about what they are doing and suspicions about the purposes for which they are being used, and there are others who recognize those doubts. Katje is eventually directed to the house in London where Osbie Feel is doing incredible things with hallucinogenic mushrooms, and from there to a meeting with Pirate at a kind of surrealistic indoctrination center for a resistance, where they meet others in the same position. The passage describing their experience is one of the most extraordinary in the book (GR, pp. 537-48) for its integration of contradictory suggestions. As initiates, Katje and Pirate must learn from such earlier arrivals as St.-Just Grossout and Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck that however sincere their desire to escape the Firm and struggle against it, they cannot hope ever to be anything better than double agents. Nor, as people who have caused the deaths of others in the service of the Firm, can they ever hope “for a bit of mercy” (GR, p. 542). They also hear the priestly disciple of Teilhard de Chardin raise the dreadful possibility that “They” have found a way around death, and no longer share even our common mortality. Katje's understanding is femininely intuitive, but Pirate's comes more slowly. Still, it comes: “But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem” (GR, p. 544).

Grim as all this is, it is better than not resisting at all. “Pirate is surprised to find Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck more fit than he ever looked in his life. The man is actively at peace, in the way of a good samurai—each time he engages Them fully expecting to die, without apprehension or remorse” (GR, p. 541). Both Pirate and Katje discover that with the acceptance of the permanence of their own guilt, and especially with the knowledge that they are fully responsible for it (GR, p. 546), there is a measure of something suggestive of happiness: “And they do dance: though Pirate never could before, very well … they feel quite in touch with all the others as they move, and if they are never to be at full ease, still it's not parade rest any longer … so they dissolve now, into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition, and their faces, the dear, comical faces, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind. …” (GR, p. 548).

The more formal manifestation of the resistance is the Counterforce itself, manifested in Roger Mexico's assault on Twelfth House (GR, pp. 632-37); his connection with Pirate, Osbie Feel, Sir Stephen and the others (GR, pp. 637-40); the Gross Suckling Conference involving Ensign Morituri, Carroll Eventyr, Thomas Gwenhidwy and Mexico which determines the probable firing direction of Weissmann's 00000 rocket (GR, pp. 706-8); and the escape of Mexico and Seaman Bodine from the formal dinner through a verbal assault on every convention of “good taste” (GR, pp. 714-17). This last episode is an apparent triumph (the other achievements of the Counterforce seem even more dubious), since it at least saves the lives of Mexico and Bodine and attracts (at least temporarily) such new recruits as the female war-correspondent, the members of the string quartet who have been playing Haydn's suppressed “‘Kazoo’ Quartet in G-Flat Minor” (GR, p. 711), and the black butler. Bodine and Mexico had apparently been invited to the dinner to be served as the main course, so their ability to nauseate the genteel members of the establishment and make their escape preserves them for a while, but the triumph is considerably less than total.

Even as they arrive at the dinner party, the reader is reminded that “They” retain control even over rebels: “Well, if the Counterforce knew better what those categories concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man. But they don't. Actually they do, but they don't admit it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that's the hard fact. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, and each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in the world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we let it go on” (GR, pp. 712-13).

Additionally, it becomes clear in the later stages of the novel that the Counterforce is itself doomed to the bane of 20th-century life, the greatest weapon in “Their” arsenal, bureaucratization. The final betrayal of Slothrop, after so many others, after he has finally been dispersed through the Zone, is by a “spokesman for the Counterforce” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, who acknowledges that “We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop …” (GR, p. 738) and who goes on to acknowledge that the Counterforce has split into schisms, to demonstrate his own rampant paranoia, and to acknowledge that the secret of control is that it is present even in its adversaries (GR, p. 739). Perhaps the cruelest irony is that there is for Slothrop even a “Book of Memorabilia” which seems to correspond to the forbidden book of Pavlov's letters so cherished in the early pages by Pointsman and his fellow behaviorists. It is a way of showing that the world is so dominated by the Firm that even resistance movements cannot help but imitate its methods and patterns: as the Counterforce becomes organized, as it must to have any chance, it loses whatever force it once had.

The systematic undercutting of resistance movements in Gravity's Rainbow shows that they are not the way to salvation, any more than love is the way. But this is by no means to say that the Counterforce and the impulses which lead to resistance are without value; without their verbal resistance, Mexico and Bodine would not have escaped being served for dinner, and Pirate and Katje, however sadly, do manage to dance. It seems clear in one episode after another that survival is possible, at least for some characters, only through resistance. What the undercutting does show is that resistance can have only very limited success, only on a personal level, and that it will not change the nature of the world.

The third quadrant of the mandala is the acceptance of preterition. Again, like love and resistance, acceptance of one's common basic humanity can be redemptive or ameliorative only on the most personal level. We see it most often in Gravity's Rainbow in characters who have striven to become part of the elect or who have served Them, sometimes involuntarily. The acceptance of preterition may be a disappointment, as it is for Pirate, who is reminded by Katje that “the People will never love you …” (GR, p. 547), and for whom the recognition of his status represents a failure.

More often, however, acceptance is seen positively, as in the case of Franz Pökler, who after years of being manipulated by Weissmann finds a kind of contentment in burned-out Zwölfkinder with the pig Frieda, waiting without urgency for the return of his daughter, Ilse (GR, pp. 575-76). Coincidentally (if coincidence is even imaginable in this novel), Ilse herself has found something like Pökler's peace, though hers comes through motion, not rest. Her mother's hope for her is apparently coming true: “… it's of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni's early dream for her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure; but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy …” (GR, p. 610) (1st ellipsis mine, last P's).

The exact nature of preterition is, of course, somewhat difficult to define. Its theological terms are set forth in the passage dealing with Tyrone's ancestor, William Slothrop, the Puritan heretic who argued that Election could have no meaning if there were not a group of souls chosen not to be saved, and that this group had its own essential part in God's plan. Pynchon has a good deal of fun with William Slothrop's love for his pigs, “their nobility and personal freedom,” and the consternation caused in the Boston establishment by his pamphlet, “On Preterition” (GR, p. 555). But he also uses the Slothropite heresy to raise one of those frequent uncomfortable questions: “Could he (William Slothrop) have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropite heresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there have been fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name of Judas Iscariot?” (GR, p. 556). In William Slothrop's view, there is more nobility in those who have no ambition for election than in the strivers.

One of the most controversial questions among critics of Gravity's Rainbow is the meaning of Slothrop's ultimate fate: “So is her son Tyrone, but only because by now—early Virgo—he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell—stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be ‘found’ again, in the conventional sense of ‘positively identified and detained'” (GR, p. 712). It may be that Slothrop's final loss of identity is in fact a sign of his failure and a final loss of significance. But it may also be that what happens to Slothrop, in the aftermath of his vision of the rainbow (not gravity's rainbow) is itself a kind of salvation. This is, I think, one of the most important passages in the entire novel, since it contains Slothrop's scratching of the mandala figure as his own sign and his recognition of its ubiquitousness, his own experience of becoming a crossroad, and his own memory of a time when “he could make it all fit” (GR, p. 626). “Crosses, swastikas, Zone-Mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop?” (GR, p. 625). What he hears from them seems to lead to the most natural experience Tyrone is to have in the novel: “… and now, in the Zone, later in the day he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of the public clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural …” (GR, p. 626).

It is tempting to see Slothrop's experience in unqualifiedly positive terms; all searching done, all striving over, he can abandon the questions of his own identity which have plagued him as he abandons the fruitless search for the rocket; he can relapse into simple acceptance of the natural world and the other ordinary people in it. Given his conditioning and his past, this is undoubtedly a kind of triumph for Slothrop. But the temptation to see it as an answer must, like all other temptations offered by the book, be rejected. Surely it is no accident that this scene is not the last time we see Slothrop. We encounter him once again, sitting on a curbstone in some German town, failing entirely to understand the significance of what he sees: “In one of those streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white public bush. The letters

                                                            MB DRO
                                                                 ROSHI

appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper. … The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital onset in the sky—it is also, perhaps, a Tree …” (GR, pp. 693-94) (first ellipsis mine, 2nd P's). Slothrop has removed himself from the world so far that he cannot recognize the significance of this second cock driven out of the sky, as destructive as the first was generative. He only sits and stares.

This is, of course, the great failing of preterition. Slothrop sitting on his curbstone, Ilse moving along the rails on an endless freight train, Pökler becalmed at Zwölfkinder, even Ludwig sliding along the interface between armies, are out of it in a quite literal way. But events continue to occur in the world outside, which has lost none of its potential for destructiveness just because a few individuals have learned to ignore it, or have forgotten that it is there. It seems to me unclear whether their ignorance confers a kind of immunity on them, or whether they retain the same potential for victimization that the rest of the characters have, but this is not the essential point. Their withdrawal does not change the nature of the world around them, the fecund earth which the industrial system violates in repudiation of Kekule's vision:

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.

(GR, p. 412)

While the preterite may represent the human component of the innocent group of victims, they cannot be immune, and their preterition seems to remove them from any involvement in attempts to offer a sane corrective to Them.

If love, resistance and acceptance offer no final answers, the novel continually dangles before us the possibility of transcending death and what we have done to the earth. One of the narrator's darkest pronouncements on the human mission (granted, there are plenty to choose among, and comparisons are not easy) appears near the end of the novel, a vision of incredible life and activity:

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 overspeaking 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. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures.

(GR, p. 720)

Not only did we bring with us new ways to kill and to die, we brought with us also the frantic desire to escape death, somehow to transcend what we feared as the final end of our precious consciousnesses; there are few more chilling notions in Gravity's Rainbow, after all, than while we must die, They may not, as Teilhard's disciple suggests.

The desire for transcendence as a way past or through death pervades Gravity's Rainbow. And the novel clearly encourages us to consider the possibility. From the quotation from Wernher von Braun which is the epigraph to the opening section, titled “Beyond the Zero” (the quotation from von Braun indicating belief in “the continuity of our spiritual existence after death” is clearly ironic but just as clearly is something more than ironic at the same time), to the spirit of Walter Rathenau speaking to a sense of IG executives about the proliferation of “structures favoring death” but going on to say that “secular history” is useful to humans “but no longer so to us here” (GR, p. 167), to the success of Geli Tripping's love potion, we are constantly warned against a too-ready acceptance of cause-and-effect reasoning and its attendant assumption that death is final. Tchitcherine may not be capable of seeing the Kirghiz Light, but we are not made to question the Light's existence (GR, p. 359).

But if various ways of transcending this life and its limitations recur throughout the novel, the possibilities of transcendence remain difficult for many readers of Gravity's Rainbow to grasp. There are several reasons for this difficulty, among them our rationalistic rejection of spiritualism and our skepticism about redemption brought by a babe (skepticism shared by the narrative voice),⁸ but the major difficulty, I think, is that Pynchon has chosen as the major spokesman for and avatar of transcendence a character from whom most readers recoil in disgust, Major Weissmann/Blicero, whose adopted SS code name suggests a choice of death and negation and a rejection of inherited wisdom, and who is presented in a way calculated to arouse apprehension and disgust in the reader.

Certainly Weissmann/Blicero is no attractive figure. His sadistic treatment of Gottfried and Katje, his homosexuality, his association with the rockets which carry such terrifying destruction with them, his cynical manipulation of Pökler—all of these are calculated to make the reader see him as the most villainous of the novel's figures, an agent of destruction and a servant of “Them.” But in the characterization of Blicero, as in so many other things, a funny thing happens on the way to the end of this novel. It is curious but clear that none of the other characters whom he has exploited sexually feels resentment, much less hatred, for him in the novel's later stages. Katje and Enzian, when they eventually meet, speak of him with tenderness, not only Enzian whose first lover Weissmann was, but Katje as well, and after she has joined the Counterforce. For both of them, Weissmann has been a necessity, has somehow made life possible. And the change in our understanding of Weissmann is assisted by our recognition of the accuracy of his comments about Katje.

Most important, of course, is the fact that it is through Weissmann that our attention is so often drawn to Rilke, whose dreams of transcendence permeate the atmosphere of Gravity's Rainbow. It is Weissmann who chooses a name from Rilke (“Enzian”) for his young African lover. And it is Weissmann who single-mindedly, through the relentless destruction of the Third Reich, keeps Pökler and others at work, amasses the technicians and the materials, struggles against his own waning powers to build and launch the numberless rocket 00000, the first rocket to carry a human cargo, the hapless Gottfried, who has been saved specifically for this encounter with destiny. And it is clear that for Weissmann this last is an act of love, that he intends Gottfried's flight to be a transcendence for both of them. In a late passage in which he expatiates upon Europe as purveyor to the world of “Analysis and Death” (GR, p. 722), Weissmann sees that “Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis” (GR, p. 722). But his dream remains one of transcendence, the expression of a desire to go back (“return”) combined with a recognition of the necessity to go forward, beyond, somehow through the death civilization has imposed on the individual: “‘I want to break out—to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become … ”” (GR, p. 724). This is the Rilkean dream, and Weissmann is its avatar.

Because we see so much of the rocket's potential for destruction, we are likely to be cynical about its transformation into a symbol of possible salvation. And the final pages of the novel dealing with the firing give heavy weight to the picture of poor Gottfried, wrapped in his shroud of Imipolex—G, cut off from communication with the ground, being launched toward certain death in the fulfillment of Weissmann's demented vision. But we must balance this picture with the fact that the possibility is never finally erased that the rocket has indeed transcended, for we and the characters never know where (or if) the rocket has ever landed, and we can never be certain that Gottfried has not in some way found his way to another order of existence. It is this lack of knowledge that provides Enzian with the dream that he can use his rocket, 00001, which will not only permit him personal transcendence but will also provide the Zone-Herero with a new myth which will be the basis for a true return. And we never finally know that Enzian's dream, either, is doomed or is a real possibility. Finally, of course, neither the other characters nor the reader ever sees Weissmann himself after the launching of the 00000, so the chance remains that he has succeeded, through Gottfried, in his dream of transcendence. Poor members of the Preterite that we are, we readers can only know that we do not know.

These, then, are the possibilities for the characters in this novel for dealing with the modern world which is controlled by immensely powerful forces whose aim, whether primary or tangential, is to control everything and to annihilate individuality. Love, resistance, preterition, transcendence. Each seems to work, at least briefly, for some of the characters, but all of them are so thoroughly discredited in one way or another that none of them can be looked to for salvation. And so we come back to the Herero mandala, with its four quadrants representing the four parts of the village; each has its own function and symbolic meaning, but each has meaning only as it is joined with the others through (around) the center, the common ground where the cattle are kept, which links the parts of the village and gives the entire society its coherence. That center is at the heart of the mystery of Gravity's Rainbow.

The mandala, with its functions as I have described them, is one among many symbols in the novel; it is not the key to unlock all of its mysteries. The interpretation I have provided is plausible and, I believe, sound, but it is not the only possible way of reading the mandala and its functions.⁹ Recognition of the centrality of the mandala is necessary, however, entirely apart from the accuracy of my reading of its specific meaning: such recognition is a corrective to the popular notion that the basic structure of Gravity's Rainbow is dialectical. Proponents of the dialectic (or its twin, dualism) have called attention to the existence in the book of many pairs of opposites, from white/black and north/south to Beethoven/Rossini and Pointsman/Mexico, and they have argued that this implies that resolutions are to be found when these opposites can somehow be reconciled.¹⁰ But the theory, in my view, has its origins in the limitations imposed on us by our traditional Western view of possibility. Dialectical reasoning is, after all, one manifestation of the kind of logic which leads in the end to Pavlovian behaviorism, a logic which maintains that everything can be reduced to stimulus/response or to thesis/antithesis: it denies the existence of anything between (or beyond) the zero and the one. And dialectics implies the inevitability of synthesis, but the case has not been made for a synthesis of opposing elements in Gravity's Rainbow. To the contrary, it would seem that the reconciliation of opposites through synthesis is entirely absent from the book, one of whose few clear lessons is that Western thought is impotent when confronted with the multiplicity and confusion of existence. Even if individual cases of successful synthesis could be located in the novel, the entire tone of the book would seem to warn us against acceptance of so reductive a system.

In the quadripartite mandala, on the other hand, the various forces exist in a dynamic relationship which cannot be described in formulaic terms. These forces may be in conflict with one another, and indeed they seem to be mutually exclusive, but relationships among them are not easily predictable. Two impulses sometimes arise from similar motives, and are in some ways linked, as in Gottfried's relationship with Weissmann/Blicero, where both earthly love and the impulse to transcend are apparent; in a similar way, acceptance of preterition should rule out the possibility of transcendence, but when Slothrop finally accepts his preterite nature he has a transcendent experience, crying for no reason at all and watching the fertile rainbow thrusting into the earth. This interaction may mean nothing, or it may mean a great deal. In the Herero origins of the mandala it was clearly evidence of vitality, but in our world the parts of the mandala do not exist in harmonious relationships with one another; they can do so only if the center is a vital core, as it was in its African village. The mandala has traditionally been the focus of mystery as it is in Gravity's Rainbow, developing out of the way people lived (it is not, like the dialectic, a product of the dissociated intellect), but how it does so and why it retains its potency remain matters not susceptible of rational explanation. This would suggest that the search of humanity for the unifying middle which can hold together the parts of the mandala cannot be a purely intellectual search but must also call upon our resources of emotion, intuition and spirit. And that seems to me entirely in accord with the ambience of Gravity's Rainbow.

To say this is not to say, however, that the novel tells us that the search will be successful, or even that it is worth undertaking, because the novel leaves open the central mystery, the “O” at the center of the mandala. In one of the visual representations of the mandala (GR, p. 361), the center is the body of the rocket itself, seen from above, possible vehicle of transcendence, more likely carrier of destruction. The other visual representation leaves the middle as open and empty as the head of Slothrop, who draws it (GR, p. 624).¹¹ Whether the rocket is a means of going beyond the zero or a finally destructive force we are never told; on the final page, we leave Gottfried, past Brennschluss, as “the first star hangs between his feet,” and sit in the theater as the rocket reaches its final delta-t above our heads (GR, p. 760). Transcendence or destruction, which will it be? Which do we want it to be?

Even a resolution of this question would still answer only the most elementary of the questions posed by the “O” at the center of the mandala. For that circle reverberates throughout the entire novel, representing as it does the zero beyond which we may or may not go, the emptiness which all the characters try to fill, the “progressive knotting into” which tries “to bring events to Absolute Zero” (GR, p. 3), the silence, the empty Kirghiz plains; it is, in fine, “the nothing that is.” Whether we can penetrate the circle, or accept the existence of the void, the novel does not say. For the novel itself, art may be said to fill the empty space with its profligate variety of styles, with jokes, with a bewildering display of knowledge, with the multiple masks of the narrator. It is art which performs the necessary task of “singing back the silence” (GR, p. 172), that auditory analogue of the zero; art covers the blank pages. But it is an art which refers only to itself, offering no solution to the novel's beleaguered characters.

Or to its beleaguered readers. As critics, as readers, simply as human beings, we demand more. We want to be told that if we persist in the struggle we will find our way home, that true return is possible, or that we need not struggle for nothing is possible; we need an answer, even if only to allow us to reject it. All of our training in reading has taught us that if we persist long enough and apply enough intelligence we can unravel the mystery, identify the author's attitude, and learn the lesson of the text. Confronted with a text which contains a veritable cornucopia of clues, we search diligently and sometimes desperately for ways of arranging those clues in a meaningful pattern. Gravity's Rainbow invites, even demands, such efforts, and steadfastly rebuffs them. It gives nothing away. At the center of the mandala rests that infuriating empty circle, that refusal to impose meaning or to confirm either our fondest wishes or our direst fears. We are left with the silence, the void, the sterile nothingness; we are left also with unlimited possibility. Which is it to be? Which do you want it to be?

Notes

1. See Mark Richard Siegel, Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow (Port Washington and London: 1978); Lawrence C. Wolfley, “Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel,” PMLA, 92, No. 5 (Oct. 1977), 873-89, William M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: 1978).

2. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (New York and London: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 563 (hereafter cited as GR). Except where noted, all ellipses are Pynchon's.

3. Several numbers are given symbolic significance in the novel, and 4 appears more frequently than most; the novel is divided into four sections, four characters participate in the Gross Suckling conference, and in many important scenes four characters are involved. Number-mysticism is undoubtedly a factor in Gravity's Rainbow, but like everything else it is an object of humor as well as susceptible to possible serious belief.

4. See Wolfley, No. 1 above. I also owe a debt to a former student, Jeff Thomas, who in an unpublished paper extended Wolfley's theory in interesting ways.

5. Thanatz's name, of course, relates him to the forces of death, and makes his reasoning even more suspect, but it contains a seed of truth.

6. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 328-44.

7. Katje Borgesius is of special importance here. While she joins the Counterforce and dances with Pirate Prentice, she later goes to the Zone to join Enzian in the search for Weissmann, only to find that, in Enzian's words, “her story is saddest of all” (GR, p. 662), her punishment in her very survival.

8. The desperate nostalgia for belief in a redeeming child and this skepticism are both contained in the superb description of the Advent service attended by Roger and Jessica (GR, pp. 128-36).

9. The four quadrants of the mandala of course correspond to the four sections into which the novel is divided, a division which may parody the Gospels, but I have chosen not to develop that parallel. I also recognize that other readers will not necessarily assent to my divisions of the mandala; for example, there might be objections to the connections I see between Rilkean transcendence and the dream of the redeeming child, but I have tried to deal in probabilities in a novel which offers few certainties.

10. Brown …” (PMLA, p. 885). See also his fn. 16 (PMLA, 888). We are told by the narrator that Thomas Gweahitwy, one of the counter force, “has not fallen to the dialectic curse of Pointsman's Book …” (GR, 639).

11. When Slothrop scratches his mandala in the dust, and it is identified as his sign, he does so unconsciously, seemingly unaware of its significance. This is entirely appropriate, since Slothrop throughout the novel misses the significance of signs and always misses his opportunities for salvation (as with Bianca); it would be entirely out of character for him to recognize the significance of the sign he draws.