[In the following essay, Hume correlates a perspectival rocket subtext—either a view from above or a view from below—to the organization of Gravity's Rainbow in terms of philosophical questions, technical issues, and the relationship between reader and text.]

With “a screaming comes across the sky,” Gravity's Rainbow wrenches us into the world of The Rocket. Just so, the V-2 magnetically draws the novel's characters into that same world, its fields of force generating the major actions and informing the images. Time and again, the rocket imposes its code on elements of the story: Tyrone Slothrop becomes Rocketman; marriage turns into union with a rocket; orgasm corresponds to launching; towers and chimneys are called stationary rockets; a graffito-mandala proves to be a schematic of a rocket seen from below; future urban life is invoked as Rocket-City. …

Out of this nexus of the ballistic missile and everything associated with it, especially the bombs, a rocket subtext crystallizes. Forty times, or every nineteen pages in this mega-novel, Pynchon works another variation on his basic elements, which consist of an aerial force of destruction, the targeted city, and the cowering creature awaiting annihilation. Significantly, the image-complex is not rendered from the sidelines, from the distanced perspective of bystander or artist. Rather, readers experience these views as if from above and below, mostly directed down toward or up from within a city. Not all the elements of the image-complex are present in each manifestation of the subtext, but in the course of the novel, these vertiginous vantages and labyrinthine cityscapes cumulatively cohere into an icon outside of space or time. We ultimately experience the viewpoints of rocket and victim through dual or simultaneous vision.

This subtext is central to the organization of Gravity's Rainbow in at least three fashions. (1) In philosophical terms, it sheds light on the hotly debated values of the novel. Intrinsic to these aerial views of the city are answers to such questions as “what kind of action is open to individuals?” or “why does humanity not change the behavior that imperils its existence?” The individual's relationship to history, as seen by Pynchon, emerges through these perspectival images.

(2) In terms of technique, the subtextual variations articulate Pynchon's chief method of multiplying levels of reality: the code attaching to any one character colors descriptive passages that occur while that character is foregrounded. In the case of the subtext, each successive character who experiences the icon re-codes it, influences its expression in basic ways. Furthermore, the mise en abyme and ekphrastic functions of this vital image cluster, as we shall see, constitute another of Pynchon's means of multiplying the levels of reality in his fictive cosmos.

(3) Because this subtext attaches to so crucial a concern as the rocket, we can explore the implications of Michael Riffaterre's assertion that a subtext must “actualize the same matrix as the whole narrative, or a matrix structurally connected with that of the encircling text.”¹ Exposing the effects (and therefore the existence) of such a matrix is far more difficult for a novel than for a short poem, and the complexity of Gravity's Rainbow makes it an interesting limit-case. A matrix for this novel would be an interesting object for contemplation, and a possible starting point for a new relationship between readers and this text.

RECOGNIZING THE SUBTEXT

We cannot recognize a subtext at first appearance, so let us start with a sensitizing second appearance. Over the space of nine pages Tyrone Slothrop emerges as a man suffering anxiety about destruction from above. He fantasizes about soundless V-2s directed at him. He associates the destructive aerial force with a gigantic beast, a monster, even with God. His dossier notes his “peculiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky,” thus crediting him with an ability also attributed to his Puritan ancestors.² To him, a great fire seen in infancy, the aurora borealis, and the London rockets are all variations on “the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud” (p. 29), a traditional icon for God speaking.

Embedded in Slothrop's obsessive and sometimes fantastic world, we find many references to London (pp. 22-26), a “wintering city,” a “big desolate icebox,” and the “secular city.” In one passage, made vivid by “the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks,” Pynchon characterizes the city's features in terms of smoking chimneys and of streets, “long concrete viaducts” that channel the flows of traffic.

Some readers may recognize the similarities between these pages introducing Slothrop and those earlier introducing Pirate Prentice; Prentice had fantasized (pp. 6-7) about the rocket's falling directly on his skull, and he had looked down over the city, focusing on its power station, gasworks, smokestacks, and towers. Other readers will need more exposures to the image-complex for the parallels to seem significant, but eventually the repetition of destructive force above and smokestacked and towered city below will emerge as versions of a basic relationship.

The next variation on the subtext features Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake (pp. 53-60). The looming presence of Slothrop's beast or God appears to them as monster and angel. Slothrop's channeled flows of city traffic become Roger's mathematical image of the grid, and Roger's personal code amusingly generates the presence of dogs in his version of the vision.

“Something's stalking through the city of Smoke—gathering up slender girls, fair and smooth as dolls, by the handful” (p. 53). This Grendel-like ogre fits the folktale motif associated with Roger and Jessica. Angels enter through Roger's mathematics. “Roger has tried to explain to her the V-bomb statistics: the difference between distribution, in angel's-eye view, over the map of England, and their own chances, as seen from down here” (p. 54). Roger's making angels in the snow (p. 57) and his later response to the “mock-Angel” singing the Advent Service (pp. 127-36) show how Pynchon lets fragments of the vision seep into the interstices of his characters' lives.

Since Roger had helped Pointsman capture dogs for laboratory experiments, they become part of Roger's code, and—the pun would not be beyond Pynchon—they dog him in his other activities. After a near-miss, he and Jessica cower in a cottage near an otherwise gratuitous picture that shows a hunting dog “alerted by the eternal scent, the explosion over his head always just about to come” (p. 58). After the nearby detonation, the lovers “sit still as the painted dogs” (p. 59). An ekphrasis is one art form embedded in another, here a picture in a novel. This ekphrasis—dog awaiting explosion overhead, the painted subworld thus echoing the reality experienced by Roger and Jessica and the subject of the central subtext—illustrates Pynchon's liking for creating correspondences between planes of reality by means of a mise en abyme, a miniaturized replica of a large structure set within the larger version. Also important is the effect of this scene applying closure to this variant, because of the perspective assigned to the lovers. Having enjoyed more than one version of the view from above, they suffer the anxieties of victims down below, thus forcing readers to assimilate both perspectives as part of the subtext.

Pointsman's form of the vision also reflects his association with dogs, and introduces sexuality as a recognizable element in the image complex. Pointsman's recurring nightmare sends him running through a labyrinthine city at whose heart waits the Minotaur. A sinister hound pursues him, their trail preserved on “the map of a sacrificial city, of a cortex human and canine” (p. 142). We can deduce that the dreamscape is under aerial attack because of the “pillars of smoke far away over the spidery city” (p. 143). At the heart of the labyrinth, his dream takes an orgasmic turn: “Each time, each turning, his own blood and heart are stroked, beaten, brought jubilantly high, and triggered to the icy noctiluca, to flare and fusing Thermite as he begins to expand, an uncontainable light, as the walls of the chamber turn a blood glow, orange, then white and begin to slip, to flow like wax, what there is of labyrinth collapsing in rings outward, hero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten inside the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself” (p. 143). Pointsman's role as heartless pavlovian investigator of cortices, canine and human, accounts for his nightmare hound. The orgasmic explosion introduces into the image-complex the reminder that we may desire the violence as well as fear it, whether through death-wish or through sexual engagement with technology.³ This lurid fusion of sex with explosion affects our readings of the sex enjoyed by Roger and Jessica and by Slothrop just after rocketfalls.

We find the strands of this vision coming together in two passages midway through the novel. One is Galina's dream of “some dainty pasteboard model, a city-planner's city, perfectly detailed, so tiny her bootsoles could wipe out neighborhoods at a step—at the same time, she is also a dweller, down inside the little city, coming awake in the very late night, blinking up into painful daylight, waiting for the annihilation, the blows from the sky, drawn terribly tense with the waiting, unable to name whatever it is approaching, knowing—too awful to say—it is herself, her Central Asian giantess self, that is the Nameless Thing she fears …” (p. 341). Galina's important addition to the subtext is the suggestion that destroyer and victim are one and the same. Her giant self is clearly another variant on the monster or angel, and also a poetic equivalent to an air raid. To Kurt Vonnegut down in the subterranean slaughterhouse, the firebombing of Dresden sounded like “giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked.”⁴

The other central passage is Pökler's experience with street riots. He narrowly avoids injury from a descending truncheon. “Crowd hydrodynamics” (metaphorically its channeled flows, and sylleptically the movements resulting from the use of firehoses) force him thankfully into a protective doorway.

He couldn't go out in the street. Later he thought about its texture, the network of grooves between the paving stones. The only safety there was ant-scaled, down and running the streets of Ant City, boot-soles crashing overhead like black thunder, you and your crawling neighbors in traffic all silent, jostling, heading down the gray darkening streets. … Pökler knew how to find safety among the indoor abscissas and ordinates of graphs: finding the points he needed not by running the curve itself, not up on high stone and vulnerability, but instead tracing patiently the xs and ys, P(atü), W(m/sec), T_i(°K), moving always by safe right angles along the faint lines. …

(P. 399)

The grid of graphs, the jargon of rocket engineering: these elements of his code haunt his vision. Insofar as ants represent a lower plane of reality, he looks from above; insofar as he identifies with the ants, he is below, worried about the destructive blow from above, truncheon or bootsole or bomb.

In simplest terms, we find repeated views from above, achieved by humans or by supernatural or technological forces. We also experience views from below, whether as people in target cities or as diminutive projections of humans such as ants, awaiting the blow from above. And we see the city itself, locus for the explosion which, when it occurs, is destructive but at times also orgasmic. The city is characterized primarily by its labyrinthine channeled flows, and secondarily by its towers and chimneys. As the next step, I examine the way Pynchon uses the elements of the image cluster, paying particular attention to the relationship between the elements and Pynchon's levels of reality, for it is partly through his manipulation of the central image that he creates and projects such levels.

THE CITY

Clearly cities intrigue Pynchon. Courtesy of Rilke, he offers us Pain City but also its drug-cheered counterpart, Happyville (p. 644). In addition, we find the secular city (p. 25), Mother City (p. 76), a sacrificial city (p. 142), the City Paranoiac (p. 172), an insect city (pp. 173-74), the City Sacramental (p. 372), Ant City (p. 399), the City Dactylic (p. 566), Hund-Stadt (p. 614), a city whose towers are hairs about to be cut (p. 655), Hexes-Stadt (p. 718), and The City (p. 735), among others, including the shadowy Rocket-Cities or Raketen-Städte and London, Lübeck, and Los Angeles. However, of the many attributes of cities, Pynchon chooses to actualize only two.

Streets full of pedestrians and traffic would be a normal enough association, but Pynchon generalizes traffic to include many kinds of flow—even roof tiles in Lübeck—and multiplies the kinds of channel for such currents. One kind of channel, grooves, characterizes several cityscapes. Leni Pökler talks about slipping into grooves during street riots and during one riot, her husband Franz notes the grooves between paving stones as the streets of Ant City. The grooves in the fingerprint of Tchitcherine's monstrous, hallucinated digit “might well be an aerial view of the City Dactylic, that city of the future where every soul is known, and there is noplace to hide” (p. 566). Tchitcherine's codes as Russian and secret agent dictate the oppression and fingerprint unique to his vision, and the drug producing it helps motivate Pynchon's multiplying the levels of reality. We segue from the world in which Tchitcherine hallucinates to the world of a giant, to that of a city existing within that giant's finger-whorls. The grooves form the correspondences that permit our passage from one world to the next.

With Katje, Pynchon also shows that the city and its flows operate at different levels of existence. Descending into her mind, we find that a symbolic city forms the center of her experience, “something beyond even the center of Pan's grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlippoth [. …] a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends” (p. 661). Here we find something relevant to Pynchon's other uses of cities: the organization necessary to urban life is labelled a distortion of natural forces and a means of controlling flows. One of Pynchon's futuristic vignettes, a city based on extreme verticality and on elevators, dwells indirectly on the control and repression necessary for such a brave new world to exist (p. 735).

A variant on grooves for channeling flows is the grid. When Hiroshima is superimposed on a haircut, the hairs are “modulations on the perfect grid of the streets” (p. 655). Sylleptically, Byron the Bulb is subject to the tyranny of the electric power grid of Europe. We also find “grooves of the Raketen-Stadt's street-grid” (p. 674). The bomb sites are charted onto Roger Mexico's gridded map. In Pökler's dreams the rocket merges with the city, and he quests not for a literal rocket but for “a street in a certain small area of the grid” (p. 400).

Like the city, the grid has a counterpart in our minds. Mondaugen's Electromysticism admonishes us to “think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals—sense-data, feelings, memories relocating—are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow” (p. 404). Within Slothrop's mind, in his fantasies, we find that “the Grid's big function in this System is iceboxery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness” (p. 678)—in other words, the grid controls natural forces and processes and imposes an orderliness that permits them to be used by those who control the grid.

Yet another variation on gridded streets and grooved flows is the image of the maze or labyrinth. In the fantasized city of the Floundering Four we find people likened to ants, and streets to a labyrinth (pp. 679, 681). That Pointsman's nights should have him coursing through labyrinths is only fair; during the day, he imposes this activity on rats. In the behaviorist's laboratory, Pynchon uses the maze image to transpose levels of reality; “from overhead, from a German camera-angle,” the lab itself is a maze in which behaviorists run patterns and are rewarded with successful experiments. “But who watches from above, who notes their responses?” (p. 229). In the subsequent rat fantasia, another change in level in which rats are human sized, the rodents sing of their maze as a city, and the nostalgic Beguine ends, “Nothing's left in Pavlovia, / But the maze, and the game” (p. 230).

In addition to the city attribute of controlling channels Pynchon develops one other associated idea in detail: tall vertical structures. Pirate Prentice's early morning view of the city is rendered as “crystals grown in morning's beaker, stacks, vents, towers, plumbing, gnarled emissions of steam and smoke” (p. 6). Such structures are given prominence by the eerie proleptic comment of Walter Rathenau's spirit, who remarks on the proliferation of chimneys and notes that these structures can survive any explosion, “even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs” (p. 167). In Pynchon's disquisition on the Tarot card called “The Tower” (p. 747), we are given many significations, including ejaculation. He stresses one, however, by asserting that “we” know it: the structure is also the Rocket. The professional interests of Ölsch make him code rockets as architecture (p. 301). When Pynchon refers to Hiroshima through sunsets exotically colored by bomb debris, he equates hairs on a head to towers in a city about to be shortened by the great shears form the sky (p. 655). The final lyric in the book speaks of “the Light that hath brought the Towers low” (p. 760). Naturally, in most variations on the tower, there are phallic overtones, including fantasms of emission and castration. Whereas the grid image permits Pynchon to add levels of reality by linking cityscape to his characters' mindscapes, the tower makes a generalized bodyscape another such superimposable level of reality.

VIEWS FROM ABOVE

Views from above are always appropriate for satiric comments on culture: the height permits both the joining of things normally experienced separately, and their incongruous dwarfing. Pynchon, however, seems less concerned with this traditional use of loftiness than with implicating readers in the perspective of destroyers and rulers.

Some viewers reach the vantage without visible means of support, as, for example, the daguerreotypist who captured the mandala layout of Raketen-Stadt from a height “topographically impossible in Germany” (p. 725). Examples of other such visions from supranatural, hallucinated, imagined, or ballistic heights include Tchitcherine's City Dactylic, the haircut city of towers, Galina's model city, and Pökler's Ant City.

An exchange between Enzian and Katje sheds light on the moral implications for humans who soar to such heights. Enzian, would-be savior of the Hereros, describes Raketen-Stadt seen from above, and she interrupts:

“All this will I give you, if you will but—”

“Negative. Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance …” who looks out over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings, with washed and darkening cloud sheets behind him—“who has lost everything else but this vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like?”

(P. 660)

The temptation of Christ, drawn into the subtext by Enzian's messiah code, may be present only through negation, but the allusion nonetheless reminds us of that famous view from above—and of Satan's offer of control. For humans lesser than Christ, the view leads to estrangement, loss of everything but the distanced vantage, loss of life within the human heart.

This spiritual damage is further explained in Slothrop's rocket's-eye view of Raketen-Stadt: “this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror (from the Preamble to the Articles of Immachination)—” (p. 297). Pynchon's term immachination signifies man wedded or welded to the machine, unable to live independently of it. For Franz and Ilse Pökler, space travel is the subject of happy daydreams, but most reliance on machinery in Gravity's Rainbow promises no such joy: the rocket limericks, soon to be heard by Slothrop, cheerfully recount the disasters of mating with machinery, and Rocket City will designedly “Introduce Terror.” In this scene, Slothrop imagines or hallucinates himself in a futuristic space helmet where implanted mechanisms replace human jaws and nose, and learns that “what you thought was a balanced mind is little help” (p. 297). Loss of humanity, eventual loss of sanity, death—these are the damaging corollaries of humans rising to such heights by means of technology.⁵ Slothrop and Enzian make us aware of this; so does Gottfried. His literal wedding to the rocket offers him a godlike view, but his life as immachinate man will be as short as that of the cowering victims below in the targeted city.

VIEWS FROM BELOW

Pynchon establishes the view from below as the stance of the victim, and shows it internalized for several characters. The threat of a descending rocket saturates Slothrop's entire mental outlook when we first meet him, well before the correspondence between his sexual encounters and the rocketfalls has been established. Even after ceasefire, he scratches a graffito which he considers emblematic of himself, and “only after he'd left it half a dozen more places did it dawn on him that what he was really drawing was the A4 rocket, seen from below” (p. 624). Roger Mexico also internalizes the descending rocket: Jessica ultimately despairs of their relationship because she “knows she can never protect him as much as she must—from what may come out of the sky” (p. 58).

Franz Pökler has most cause to internalize the descending rocket. He is planted on the intended target at a test site, given a pair of binoculars, and told to try to observe the problem causing so many of the rockets to explode prematurely. As a result, “inside Pökler's life, on no record but his soul, his poor harassed German soul, the time base has lengthened, and slowed: the Perfect Rocket is still up there, still descending. He still waits—even now, alone at Zwölfkinder waiting for ‘Ilse,’ for this summer's return, and with it an explosion that will take him by surprise” (p. 426). Waiting for the rocket, for him as for Mexico and Slothrop, has become a permanent habit of mind. The novel, of course, encourages readers to internalize this fear of downward-plunging death, for it opens with rockets, and ends by addressing us as members of the audience in the theater, whose film is the book we have just read, and we are told that the rocket is descending upon us, now only delta-t away from impact.

Those who look fearfully upward see not only rockets but also monstrous entities, some of whom are not overtly hostile but most of whom enjoy some symbolic equivalence to rockets in their shared potential for destruction. For Roger and Slothrop, the gigantic being is a monster. When a bomb falls near the theater where Roger and Jessica are watching a Hansel and Gretel pantomime, Gretel stops the stage business and sings: “It's big and it's nasty and it's right over there, / It's waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!” (p. 175). The rockets for Roger are like the monster in the sky that Slothrop senses, “this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities … or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening” (p. 241).

For Galina, Tchitcherine, and others, it is angel or giant. Galina's Central Asian giantess self is such a being, and her vision includes a quotation from Rilke's Tenth Elegy that describes an angel trampling the market place: “O, wie spurlos zerträte ein Engel den Trostmarkt.” The bootsoles Pökler fantasizes crashing down on Ant City belong to the feet of another such entity—human in stature, but monstrous-seeming to ants. The angel over Lübeck merely watches, but its eyes and face reflect the fiery violence going on at ground level (p. 151). Though even less belligerent, the angels in the Riviera sunset are nonetheless linked to the Lübeck vision (p. 214). Tchitcherine sees not a whole giant, but a giant finger of a size appropriate to such immense creatures as these angels; Slothrop sees both the “stout rainbow cock” and the newsflash photo of the dangling white cock of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (pp. 626, 693). In most of these guises, giants and angels are poetic variations upon rockets and bombs, in addition to any more celestial roles they play.

Pynchon causes views from above and below to coalesce by rapidly changing the perspective. With Tchitcherine we look up at the finger, but as its whorls become streets of a city, we find ourselves looking down. Through Pavel's hallucinations, we look down on microscopic fungus pygmies, but we then see above him a hallucinated water giant, “a mile-high visitor made all of flowing water who likes to dance, twisting from the waist, arms blowing loosely along the sky” (p. 523). We look down on a city of bugs in the straw of the Bethlehem manger: “they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening red among a golden lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and downward—an edible tenement-world.” However, “the crying of the infant [Jesus] reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored” (pp. 173-74). Like the bugs, Londoners celebrating Christmas (described just after this bug fantasia) can ignore the bursts of energy: “The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater” (p. 174).

Note the “you”—“the crying of the infant reached you”—Pynchon's frequently used invocation of the reader to make the reader accomplice to or participant in some of these perspectives. With that one word, Pynchon causes levels of reality to intersect; “you” equates bugs and humans. Not only do we loom like monstrous angels over such bugs, but we are also the bugs themselves. He also collapses time frames: Bethlehem at the Nativity, and a London Christmas at the end of the war. We are fleetingly present at both events, and we identify ourselves, through perspective, with both those inflicting violence and with its victims.

THE MATRIX

According to Riffaterre, a fundamental subtext such as this one should “actualize the same matrix as the whole narrative, or a matrix structurally connected with that of the encircling text.” But what kind of matrix might a 760-page novel have? Granting that short poems can be shown to have such a generative idea, what do we find behind this novel? What kind of matrix does this subtext indicate and is it plausible to propose it for the novel as a whole?

Matrices tend to be disconcertingly banal, but then the idea behind most poems is much simpler and less interesting than the artistic elaboration. “My poem will immortalize you” dismays us when we compare it to “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments.” Hence, one should not be surprised to find as a first approximation of the matrix something as simple as “we are simultaneously the aerial destroyer and the victim.” Delving further into the image-complex, one might frame it as “we are doing this to ourselves through our lust for technology and control.”

The elements of the matrix generating the subtext are “we,” “doing this to ourselves,” “lust,” and “control/technology.” First, the presence of that “we” in the hypothesized matrix needs to be justified. Pynchon uses the second person “you” far more frequently than “we.”⁶ “You are doing this to yourselves,” however, would imply an author standing outside the arena, and the subtext does not permit such privileged bystanders. We experience views from above and below rather than a distanced coign of vantage.

The perspectives from on high and down beneath derive from the “doing this to ourselves” in the matrix. Pynchon demands that we learn to identify with both, for if we select one, we lose either the warning of responsibility or that of danger. In this, Pynchon parallels his own techniques in other structures of the novel. He encourages an “and/and” response to many oppositions, a cultivated ability to hold both possibilities in mind and not let them obliterate one another. Only through putting oneself at Ground Zero and through realizing one's responsibility for the destructive aerial perspective can there be any hope for changing the situation, however slender that hope may be.

Our involvement with control is reflected in the cityscapes, with their grids, grooves, and labyrinthine channels. Control and the presence of Them are visible in the architecture, the towers and smokestacks and steeples that reek of death. The channels and grids recur emblematically within the human mind, warnings of control's deep roots in our nature. The rocketry and the feared explosions, by contrast, have orgasmic, bodily overtones. Slothrop experiences a sexual spasm as being launched in a rocket, and Gottfried marries one of the last V-2s. The carnal attractions of the explosions are first established clearly by Pointsman, but Slothrop, and Roger and Jessica also respond voluptuously to the detonations. In a prosopopoeia of London (p. 215), even the city craves the sensual violence of an air raid. These subtextual variants all point to a matrix that factors in our lust for technology and control.

To offer point by point support for the argument that this matrix is a sufficient first cause for the whole text would demand a book, and the result might carry little more conviction than the present evidence. The proposed matrix is certainly more powerful in accounting for the text than are suggestions that the novel is about the rocket, or salvation, or the disappearance of the individual, and nothing in the text, at least as I read it, contradicts the possibility. If this matrix is accepted as the impulse behind the text, then, significantly, the text stems from a coherent, analytic statement, not from the deconstructive drive envisioned by many critics. Moreover, if we are willing to entertain the possibility of a matrix and this matrix in particular, then we can draw on its meaning and accusatory element to illuminate the vexed question of values in the novel as a whole. Since those values are elaborately reflected in the subtext, I return to it and look at the implications of the entire image-complex.

IMPLICATIONS OF THE SUBTEXT

The centrality of this subtext emerges in new ways when we see what it implies about Pynchon's mythological cosmos and about his philosophy regarding human action and history. What kind of action is possible? What hope remains? What values can be upheld?

The feature of the subtext that illuminates these questions is the pattern of perspectival exaggeration or diminution. Huge giants, angels with miles-high eyes, monstrous white fingers, and penises on the scale of the Hiroshima mushroom cloud loom at one end of the spectrum. At the other are ants—or people as ants—and inhabitants who dwell in cities whose size implies equivalence between humans and the mites that could live on hair or in digital whorls. The forces of destruction are huge; their victims, minute or even microscopic. Although Pynchon invokes many sentient life forms smaller than humans—Elves, Dwarves, Munchkins, rats, insects, skin-cells—man is not the biblical lord of creation, little lower than the angels. Humans are appallingly diminished compared to the monsters of the aether or angels, and are equated with mites and cells and bacteria.

Given the dwarfed stature attributed to humans in Pynchon's mythological cosmos, we should not be surprised to see that Pynchon envisages us as individually too small to make much difference to the course of history. Pynchon does suggest outside this subtext that there are nodes or cusps at which cultures have taken wrong turns, thus implying that right turns may have been possible, but such cusps do not emerge as vivid or well marked in his mythological history of Western civilization.⁷

Important, too, is Pynchon's belief in the impossibility of individuals uniting to create a force for “good” powerful enough to be effective. All the actions Pynchon marks as positive in the novel are individual, minor, and personal: be kind; don't try to control others; don't fret about your personal future; be open to the Other Side. He shows no concerted heroic social action.⁸

The lack of positive organized action stems from the nature of control. Pynchon never shows any form of control to be good; even in the narrow slice of the cosmos represented by aerial views, he almost always marks control as negative. He appears to agree with the old saw that power corrupts, and acknowledges that organization demands unequal distribution of power and control. Hence, social groups can work together, but only toward evil ends. Enzian's invocation of Christ's temptation reminds us that dominion is a gift of the devil (in another mythology) and not detachable from its source. The grooves and grids seen in the aerial views are systems of control at work in the cities and in human nature. Individuals may achieve freedom as Slothrop does, outside of society, but freedom within society seems excluded by the organization necessary to society. At best we can hope for Zonal anarchy and the flexible exchanges of the black market.

But if Pynchon gives small hope for man as social animal, he does proffer something which, if not quite hope, is a mystical broadening of our universe, a statement that the possibilities are not as limited as we may assume. He invests the act of looking into perspectival abysses with values that transcend the mere act of seeing. The vertiginous vantage often features an intensified vocabulary suggesting illumination and the sacred. The impossible daguerreotype shows a mandala structure. Lyle Bland's astral journeys permit him to see Earth's eerie Messianic mind-body (p. 590). Tchitcherine is held on the edge of revelation when he sees the City Dactylic, but the existence of revelation is suggested.⁹ Prentice in a plane looks down at a gigantic, fantasized windmill-mandala (pp. 620-21). Slothrop on the Brocken and in the balloon is close to revelation, as is signalled by the god-shadows, haloed shells, and colors accompanying these experiences. Views from below reveal angels, the rainbow vision, and the mandala-shape of a descending rocket.

In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon gives us another aerial cityscape.¹⁰ Oedipa Maas looks from a hilltop down onto San Narciso and sees what looks like a transistor circuit-board (variant on the grid or maze), in which she intuits “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning … an intent to communicate.” She views the city from within an “odd, religious instant” in which she detects the voice in the whirlwind but cannot tune her limited senses to its frequencies. Viewing the city, she feels, would tell her something, were she only able to understand. The cities of Gravity's Rainbow similarly point toward meaning.

The glimpse of the sacred in some of these visions is partly explained when Pynchon describes the City Sacramental (pp. 372-73) as an “outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual illness or health.” Using the cancellations and substitutions of the ruin topos, Pynchon gives us corpses and death as foundation for the eviscerated buildings of Berlin, and suggests that the inside-out nature of these structures reflects what our civilization has become spiritually and will become physically. Part of his assessment of spiritual illness rests on Norman O. Brown's argument that fear of death has warped Western civilization into death-seeking patterns of activity.¹¹ Showing us our spiritual devastation mirrored in the city permits Pynchon to present his message on more than one level of reality. His visions of cities are not just aerial pictures; they are revelations.

I have examined this perspectival subtext at such length because it functions as nerve center for the entire novel, creating as well as merely expressing values and meaning. We can better understand the mechanics of how Pynchon generates his charged and interactive world when we see how he alters this subtext in each of its manifestations. Character codes provide some of the richness. So do his variations on components of the vision. The grid, for instance, develops analogues in multiple planes of reality: World War II cities have street grids, but grids also emerge in human psychology and the cortex, in human sexuality and the body, in daydream worlds, hallucinated worlds, the world of ethics and spiritual health, future worlds, subhuman cities of ants or bugs or fungi, and super- or supranatural levels peopled by gigantic entities. Pynchon transports us from one to another level through the mise en abyme correspondences and ekphrastic windows set up by such elements in this image-complex.

This subtext is also crucial to the mental world of the story. More than any other aspect of the novel, it actually generates the suprahuman mythological beings who people Pynchon's cosmos, and obtrudes them upon our notice. Insofar as the subtext is an analytic statement with negative implications, even an accusation, it counters the radical skepticism of Pynchon's many deconstructive techniques, and implies that he does support some values. If everything is as unknowable as the fragmentations and contradictions sometimes suggest, there would be little reason for Pynchon to have wrought so mighty an edifice; the matrix gives us an underlying justification for his art. The subtext also establishes the diminution of human status within this cosmos, an important point if one is trying to establish any intrinsic values for interpreting actions in the story. The universal relevance of the rocket to all threads of the story makes it an appropriate locus for the matrix that generates the entire work of art.

Some readers may be willing to accept my analysis as a New Critical scrutiny of an image-cluster, but may balk at the semiotics of subtexts and matrices; they doubtless feel that my looking for the novel's matrix is as misguided as Faust's quest for the Mothers, matrices of cosmic form. However, Goethe's Faust is very much present in Gravity's Rainbow,¹² and Pynchon's parodic comment on that scene is curiously apropos. Slothrop meets Marvy's Mothers, the bigoted avatars of the aggressive, technological country whose policies will serve as matrix for post-war history. What he hears from them are the rocket limericks, insanely cheerful celebrations of immachination. Although these Mothers do not understand their own message, their message is the matrix. Their words make plain that we risk destroying ourselves through our lust for technology and control.¹³

Notes

1. Riffaterre defines subtexts as “fragments of the larger text, immersed in it and mirroring the whole,” derived from metonymies. See “Trollope's Metonymies,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1982), 278. He analyzes several subtexts in “The Intertextual Unconscious,” Critical Inquiry, 13 (1987), 371-85. A matrix is the hypothetical structure that generates a text, a sentence or idea whose impress can only be deduced from its variant actualizations. See Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry (London: Methuen, 1978), esp. pp. 6, 13, 19.

2. Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 26. Ellipses points within square brackets indicate a shortening of the quotation; those not bracketed are present in Pynchon's text.

3. Another author who depicts our addiction to technology as quasi-sexual is Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker; Kurt Vonnegut describes the literally sexual effect of a rocket launch in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (New York: Delta, 1975), p. 270.

4. Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Delta, 1969), p. 152.

5. Pynchon's V. concerns a cognate concept—the transformation of the animate into the inanimate. Pynchon's continued concern with hybrids of man and machine shows in the following m/antic prediction: “If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come—you heard it here first—when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge” (“Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?” New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, p. 41).

6. For a discussion of Pynchon's many uses of the second-person pronoun, see Brian McHale, “‘You used to know what these words mean’: Misreading Gravity's Rainbow,” Language and Style, 18 (1985), 93-118, and Linda A. Westervelt, “‘A Place Dependent on Ourselves’: The Reader as System-Builder in Gravity's Rainbow,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22 (1980), 69-90, esp. pp. 82-85.

7. Marcus Smith and Khachig Tölölyan call attention to such cusps in “The New Jeremiad: Gravity's Rainbow,” in Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. Richard Pearce (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 169-86. Man's potential for free will is discussed by James W. Earl in “Freedom and Knowledge in the Zone” in Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, ed. Charles Clerc (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 229-50.

8. For the rules limiting the counterforce, see Raymond M. Olderman, “The New Consciousness and the Old System,” in Approaches to Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 199-228.

9. The many failed attempts to break through to revelation are discussed as the dominant trope of Gravity's Rainbow by Molly Hite in Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 21-32. Pynchon's mysticism has received attention from Dwight Eddins, “Orphic contra Gnostic: Religious Conflict in Gravity's Rainbow,” Modern Language Quarterly, 45 (1984), 163-190; Thomas Moore, The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1987); and Kathryn Hume, Pynchon's Mythography: An Approach to Gravity's Rainbow (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1987).

10. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1967), p. 13.

11. See Lawrence C. Wolfley, “Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel,” PMLA, 92 (1977), 873-89.

12. For Pynchon's uses of the Faust story, see Pynchon's Mythography, pp. 143-53, esp. p. 150.

13. In the New York Times Book Review of 10 April 1988, Pynchon reviews Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. He singles out for special appreciation a passage describing a balloon trip and the view from above it affords of a ruined Indian city. Evidently views from above intrigue him even in the fictive worlds of others.